Jonathan Kay

Jonathan Kay
Jonathan Hillel Kay (born 1968) is a Canadian journalist. He was the editor-in-chief of The Walrus (2014–2017), and is a senior editor of Quillette. He was previously comment pages editor, columnist, and blogger for the Toronto-based Canadian daily newspaper National Post, and continues to contribute to the newspaper on a freelance basis. He is also a book author and editor, a public speaker, and a regular contributor to Commentary and the New York Post.
Early life
Jonathan Kay was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, to an anglophone Jewish family. His mother is the socially conservative newspaper columnist Barbara Kay. His father worked in finance and was the breadwinner of the family. He attended Selwyn House School, and Marianopolis College before obtaining a BEng and an MEng in metallurgical engineering from McGill University and a law degree from Yale Law School. He is a member of the New York bar. After practicing as a tax lawyer in New York City, Kay moved to Toronto, where, in 1998, he became a founding member of the National Post editorial board. Kay describes himself as an avid tennis and board game enthusiast, and sometimes has incorporated his passion for both pursuits into his journalism.
Career
Kay joined the National Post at its inception, in 1998, as a member of its editorial board, subsequently becoming the newspaper's Comment editor as well as a columnist. He left the newspaper's staff in 2014 but continues appearing in its pages as a freelance columnist.
Apart from his editorial work, Kay has also written two non-fiction books. In 2007, Kay co-authored The Volunteer, a biography of Mossad officer Michael Ross. In May 2011, HarperCollins published Kay's second book, Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground. The book reflects Kay's interest in the psychology of conspiracy theorists.
Kay was a freelance editorial assistant on Liberal Party of Canada leader Justin Trudeau's memoir Common Ground published by HarperCollins with duties that included conducting some of the interviews with Trudeau that were used for the book. After the resignation of Trudeau's principal secretary Gerald Butts due to his role in the SNC-Lavalin affair, Kay revealed that Butts worked with him for the book. His participation in the project was criticized by conservatives in social media as well as by Sun News Network personality Ezra Levant, on whose 2009 book Shakedown Kay also worked on as an editorial assistant.
His freelance articles have been published in a variety of US publications including Newsweek, The New Yorker, Salon.com, The New Republic, Harper's Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The Weekly Standard, the Literary Review of Canada, The National Interest and The New York Times.
Since May 2018, Kay also hosted Quillettes Wrongspeak podcast, along with Debra W. Soh until she quit at the end of first series of episodes (2018). From February 2019, Jonathan continued to present the podcast throughout the year. Wrongspeak has been announced as "on hiatus" ever since December 30, 2019 as the last podcast featured Jonathan Kay's mother, Barbara Kay.
The Walrus
Kay was named editor-in-chief of The Walrus, a Canadian general interest magazine, on October 29, 2014. Kay left the Post on November 21, 2014, but continued to contribute opinion pieces on a freelance basis.
He resigned as editor-in-chief of The Walrus on May 13, 2017, following a controversy around cultural appropriation in which Kay argued that concerns by Indigenous writers about the practice should be balanced against the right to free artistic representation. Kay said the reason he left was because of conflicts between his role as a manager at a respected media brand and as a columnist and media panelist in which he would state controversial opinions and that he had felt the need to self-censor his byline pieces and commentary outside of The Walrus. "In recent months especially, I have been censoring myself more and more, and my colleagues have sometimes been rightly upset by disruptions caused by my media appearances. Something had to give, and I decided to make the first move. I took no severance," he said in an email written to The Globe and Mail. Kay added that there had been no conflict between himself and the publisher of The Walrus and that he had been given a free hand to edit the magazine and its website and that the pressure he had felt to self-censor was in relation to his non-Walrus work.
Published books
The Volunteer: A Canadian's Secret Life in the Mossad, with Michael Ross, McClelland & Stewart, 2007
Among the Truthers, HarperCollins, 2011
Legacy: How French Canadians shaped North America, edited with André Pratte, 2016, repr. 2019
(in French) Batisseurs d'Amerique. Des Canadiens français qui ont fait l'histoire. La Presse, Montréal 2016 The Gazette, 2016
Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life, with Joan Moriarity, Sutherland House, 2019
Awards and recognition
In 2002, he was awarded Canada's National Newspaper Award for Critical Writing. In 2004, he was awarded a National Newspaper Award for Editorial Writing. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
References
External links
Jonathan Kay's page at the National Post.
1968 births
Living people
Canadian columnists
Canadian newspaper journalists
Canadian male journalists
National Post people
Canadian magazine editors
Canadian book editors
Journalists from Montreal
Writers from Montreal
McGill University Faculty of Engineering alumni
Yale Law School alumni
New York (state) lawyers
Tax lawyers
Anglophone Quebec people
21st-century Canadian non-fiction writers
Jewish Canadian journalists
Selwyn House School alumni