Jennifer Michael Hecht

Her first book, The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France, 1876-1936, grew out of her dissertation on some late 19th-century anthropologists who formed the Society of Mutual Autopsy.

The members would dissect each other's brains after death, and Hecht, having noticed their atheism, came to understand that this was being done not only for the sake of scientific finds, but perhaps to prove to the Catholic Church that the soul does not exist.

While researching her first book, she came to realize that there was no sufficient history of atheism, and that led to her second book, Doubt: A History.

While writing Doubt, she found that many atheists went beyond simply stating that there are no gods and also made profound suggestions about how people should think of life and how we should live.

That led to her third book, The Happiness Myth, which starts there and goes on to look at present-day attitudes about how to be happy.

She calls it "a work of Skepticism in the modern sense of debunking."

In 2023, Hecht published The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and Poetry of Our Lives, combining her interests of poetry and atheism, in which she explores finding meaning to life through poetry, rather than religion.

Hecht believes that, "the basic modern assumptions about how to be happy are nonsense."

In a review of her book, The Happiness Myth for The New York Times, Alison McCulloch summed it up, "What you think you should do to be happy, like getting fitter and thinner, is part of a 'cultural code' — 'an unscientific web of symbolic cultural fantasies' — and once you realize this, you will perhaps feel a little more free to be a lot more happy."

Jennifer Michael Hecht (born November 23, 1965) is a teacher, author, poet, historian, and philosopher.

She was an associate professor of history at Nassau Community College (1994–2007) and most recently taught at The New School in New York City.

Hecht has seven published books, her scholarly articles have been published in many journals and magazines, and her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Ms. Magazine, and Poetry Magazine, among others.

She has also written essays and book reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The American Scholar, The Boston Globe and other publications.

She has written several columns for The New York Times online "Times Select."

She earned her PhD in the history of science from Columbia University in 1995 and taught at Nassau Community College from 1994 to 2007, finally as a tenured associate professor of history.

Hecht has taught in the MFA programs at The New School and Columbia University, and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

Hecht is married and has two children.

She has appeared on television on the Discovery Channel, The Morning Show with Marcus Smith, Road to Reason and MSNBC's Hardball, and on radio on The Brian Lehrer Show, The Leonard Lopate Show, On Being (formerly known as Speaking of Faith), All Things Considered, The Joy Cardin Show, and others.

Of her three major intellectual interests, she ranks them, "Poetry came first, then historical scholarship, then public atheism, and they probably remain in that order in my dedication to them."

Originally intending to be a poet, she was drawn to the history of science.

Similarly, in an interview on the Point of Inquiry podcast in 2007, she said "I'm not trying really to get somebody out of depression, but I sure am trying to get people to not be so worried, so anxious over things that really don't matter."

She has written against agnosticism, calling "philosophically silly" the argument that because you can't prove a negative we have to allow for the possibility of God.

"Either you doubt everything to the point where you can't speak, or you make reasoned decisions."

Hecht is an anti-suicide advocate, writing an entire book (Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It) arguing against it.

She believes not only that "Suicide is delayed homicide", but also "that you owe it to your future self to live".

She does not believe in life after death, urging that we should remember death and remember that it's the end.

"I think this world is extraordinary and I also think it's a pain in the ass. And I'm happy to be here and I'm ok with not being here forever."

She believes that morality is not magical, it is the attempt to do right.

And rather than either being handed to us by God or just made up by each person, is inherent in human groups.

"There are deep rules of morality that we as human beings, in human groups, 'invented' on biological and social and intellectual lines."

Her poetry and philosophy often intersect, and she has taught a course called "Poets and Philosophy" at the New School for many years.

Her own taste is for poets who are concerned with philosophical or religious questions.

"Leopardi's misery makes me as happy as Schopenhauer's does, though I am ever aware of the equal cacophony of birth and pleasure that shadow their admittedly much more deafening symphony of death and suffering. Dickinson I treasure beyond measure and think she's mostly on my side of the nonbeliever line; anyway, she's my number-one poet. Hopkins has a few rhyming hunks of pure passion, frustrated but wild, which I love with a love that is more than a love, but which only go so far. Donne is deep and great company, but he leans too much into comforting delusions for me, often when he is at his best in poetic chops and pyrotechnics. Rilke is a lifesaving self-help writer and a bit of a brilliant con artist."

Hecht was raised Jewish and believed in God until she was twelve when she had what she describes as a "Talking Heads headshift", standing in her parents' house saying, "This is not my beautiful couch, I am not your beautiful daughter."

In the days that followed she came to see that "we are one species among great nature, and as the trees very slowly rot, so do our pampered haunches."

Eventually, she replaced faith in God with faith in humanity.

In 2010 Hecht was one of the five nonfiction judges for the National Book Award.

Hecht is a longtime blogger for The Best American Poetry series web site and maintains a personal blog on her website.

She resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Born in Glen Cove, New York on Long Island, Hecht attended Adelphi University, where she earned a BA in history, for a time studying at the Université de Caen, and the Université d'Angers.