Jay received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Union College in 1965. In 1971, he completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in history at Harvard University under the tutelage of H. Stuart Hughes. His dissertation was later revised into the book The Dialectical Imagination, which covers the history of the Frankfurt School from 1923 to 1950. While he was conducting research for his dissertation, he established a correspondence and friendship with many Frankfurt School members. Leo Löwenthal provided him access to personal letters and documents for his research. Jay's work since then has explored Marxism, socialism, historiography, cultural criticism, visual culture, and the place of post-structuralism and post-modernism in European intellectual history. His current research is focused on nominalism and photography. He is a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.^{[citation needed]} In 2023, he published a sequel to The Dialectical Imagination on the contemporary turns in Critical Theory, entitled Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure.^[2]

He also has a regular column in the quarterly journal Salmagundi.

Jay was born on May 4, 1944, in New York City.^[3] He is Jewish.^[4] He married English professor and literary critic Catherine Gallagher circa 1973; they met in 1970 at Berkeley when she was an English graduate student and he was an assistant professor of history.^[5]

• 1973 The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-50
• 1984 Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas
• 1984 Adorno. Fontana Modern Masters.
• 1985 Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America
• 1988 Fin-de-Siècle Socialism and Other Essays
• 1993 Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Criticism
• 1993 Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
• 1998 Cultural Semantics: Keywords of the Age
• 2003 Refractions of Violence
• 2004 Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme
• 2010 The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics
• 2011 Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena
• 2016 Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory
• 2020 Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations
• 2021 Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History
• 2023 Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School under Pressure

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

• Martin Jay's Faculty Page
• An Interview with Martin Jay on the topic of Consumption
• History, Experience, and Politics: An Interview with Martin Jay-
• The Modernist Imagination:Intellectual History and Critical Theory: Essays in Honor of Martin Jay, eds. Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn and Elliot Neaman (New York, Berghahn Books, 2009).
• "Pants on Fire: The Straight Goods on Lying - A Conversation with Martin Jay", Ideas Roadshow, 2015
• An Interview with Martin Jay about his 2020 work Splinters in Your Eye with the New Books Network