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Satire on ‘Saturday Night Live’ used to be a deadly weapon; is it still enough in the Trump era?
A funny thing happened when I went to Austin last week. My youngest child, Basil, a junior at the University of Texas, and I paid a visit to the university’s Harry Ransom Center.The crown jewel of UT, the Center is named after its founder, Harry Huntt Ransom, who began as a professor of English at the university and ultimately became its visionary president. In a speech he gave to the Philosophical Society of Texas in 1956, he declared “that there be established somewhere in Texas — let’s say in the capital city — a center of cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation.”
Nearly 75 years later, the massive stone and glass building in the heart of the campus stands as the realization of Ransom’s dream. The Center’s holdings include nearly one million books along with some 42 million manuscripts, five million photographs, and 100,000 works of art; the manuscripts of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Doris Lessing, Jack Kerouac and Ezra Pound are here; so are the papers of Albert Einstein and Robert de Niro; even original works by Frida Kahlo and Pablo Picasso.
Three of those last four iconic figures also appear in the Ransom Center’s most recent acquisition: the papers of Lorne Michaels.
Born Lorne Lipowitz in Toronto in 1944 — and not, as some folks still believe, on a kibbutz in Israel — Michaels is, of course, the creator of Saturday Night Live, the weekly NBC television comedy show that has been running, and often stumbling, since 1975. (Now 80 and with no plans to retire, Michaels has said he would like “Uneven” inscribed on his tombstone.)
The collection begins with Michaels’ years in theater productions at the University of Toronto and his early work in television — including his stints with The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show in 1968 and, that same year, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In — before moving on to the half-century of SNL as well as the dozens of films on which Michaels served as producer.
As my Longhorn and I visited the just-opened and eye-popping SNL exhibit, I noticed, with a surge of verklempt, the index cards that Michaels tacks to a bulletin board every Friday, outlining the segments of the following night’s show. The show, after all, has to go on — a huge weight for a handful of cards to carry. According to his recent biographer Susan Morrison, Michaels often shakes his head slowly as he gazes at the index cards, concluding “We have nothing.”
But as anyone with a good memory or, lacking that, a good pair of walking shoes knows — the exhibit covers figuratively and literally a good deal of ground — there is much ado, and much to do, with that nothing. It is impossible to exaggerate the show’s impact on American culture and politics. There are, of course, the gag lines that have bled into everyday usage where the user usually has no idea of the line’s origin, such as Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella, who ends every misunderstanding with “Nevermind” and Stuart Smalley aka Al Franken’s mantra: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.” And, of course, the motivational blast of Matt Foley, played by Chris Farley, “I live in a van down by the river” as well as, yes, Mike Myers’ Linda Richman, who punctuates her monologues with “I’m getting a little verklempt.”
Yet, while this sort of humor zeroes in on cultural fads and ethnic tics, SNL has also specialized in satire with political bite, such as Will Ferrell’s coinage “stratergery” in his brilliant impersonation of George W. Bush — which, hilariously, Dubya proudly assumed he had himself coined — or the 2016 debates between Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump and Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton. In a small theater at the exhibit, this very sketch was repeatedly replayed. As I watched and listened — not for one, but two replays — I noticed that the knots of visitors, while mesmerized, did not often laugh. The silence was especially loud when Baldwin, playing Trump, suddenly given two more minutes to talk, lurches into this hallucinatory riff:
“The thing about the Blacks is that they’re killing each other. All the Blacks live on one street in Chicago, all on one street. I just read that this morning. It’s called ‘Hell Street’. And they run Hell Street and they’re all just killing each other. Just like I am killing this debate.”
In 2016, silence from the audience in Studio 8H would have been unimaginable; a decade later, laughter seems equally unimaginable. With the events now unfolding in Chicago and other “Democrat” cities under Trump 2.0, Baldwin’s rant is more a matter for laments than laughs. Perhaps some of the visitors wondered, as I did, what the Republican state leaders, housed just a short walk away in the capitol, would have thought of their state’s premier university showcasing this sketch. (One need not wonder very long,though, given that Jay Hartzell, the university’s former president, decided to resign rather than resist pressures from crusading Republicans to enforce the state’s ban on the use of DEI.)
Perhaps more important, the sketch raises a question worthy of “Coffee Talk” as well as for our collective and growing vibe of verklempt: Is comedy, even the middle of the road satiric fare at which SNL excels, the proper response to the tragic situation our country now faces? The answers to this question, long debated by political thinkers and actors, generally fall into two camps. In the first camp are those who believe that laughter is subversive, a weapon of the weak that reveals, through mockery and, as Dubya might say, snarkery, the incoherence of their justifications for taking power and the corruption that inevitably follows.
In short, comics show us an emperor with no clothes. This is a notion that Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park, unlike Michael’s middle-of-the-road SNL, have taken quite literally this year.
But as those in the other camp point out, even the sight of a butt-naked Donald Trump in bed with Satan has hardly dented the standing of a man who would be emperor. This camp’s slogan, to paraphrase W.H. Auden’s famous line about poetry, is that comedy makes nothing happen. Or, even more discouraging, it makes matters even worse. Comedy distracts us from grave matters at hand and, by diluting every event through entertainment, deadens our sense of outrage at the sheer cruelty and stupidity of this administration. Amusement, the sociologist Neil Postman observed 40 years ago, is “the supra-ideology of all discourse on television.”
Even, it seems, when the entertainment might qualify as Jewish humor. The efforts that have been made to explain Michaels’ humor, and that of SNL, through the prism of Michaels’ Judaism have mostly fallen flat for a simple reason: When Lorne Lipowitz opted to become Lorne Michaels, the biographer Morrison suggests, he also opted out of his Jewish upbringing. Morrison quotes one colleague who said that Michaels’ “yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah” verbal tic “is the one bit of Jewishness still left in him.” And yet, a way of being and seeing is not so easily uprooted. In Morrison’s book, Conan O’Brien marvels at his old boss’s achievement: “A Jewish kid who started out with a furrier for a father, and he somehow makes it to this place? Our insecurities, our defense mechanisms, are what we use to survive, and they build up, like plaque.”
Those insecurities and defense mechanisms, so fundamental to Jewish humor, are no longer unique to Jews in the Age of Trump. When we left the Ransom Center, Basil and I chatted about this subject. They thought there was something Jewish, or at least Jewishy, about the show. When I asked what made for Jewish humor, they paused before replying that it was self-deprecating yet also irreverent. This observation struck me as right, but also worrying. When the target of our humor is a president whose utter lack of reverence for our nation’s laws and norms endangers us all, irreverence makes for a dubious weapon, even for the weak.
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Jewish man attacked in Montana by self-proclaimed Nazi on Oct. 7
A Jewish man in Missoula, Montana, was assaulted on Oct. 7 by a self-proclaimed “Nazi,” according to the Missoula Police Department.
On Tuesday, the suspect, Michael Cain, 29, got into an argument with the victim who had a visible tattoo of the Star of David on his forearm. Cain asked the victim about his tattoo and allegedly identified himself as a believer in the teachings of the Nazi party.
When the victim, who told Cain he was Jewish, then asked Cain to show him any Nazi-related tattoos on his body, Cain allegedly kicked and punched the victim, who was seated on the ground.
Missoula police then responded to the Poverello Center, a local homeless shelter where the assault took place, and later apprehended Cain who had fled the scene.
While en route to the local detention center, Cain disclosed to the arresting officer that he was a member of the “4th Reich” and said that while he did not attack the victim because of his Jewish identity, he would have if he had been more adamant about his beliefs, according to court documents obtained by local news outlet KGVO.
Cain was charged with felony malicious intimidation or harassment relating to civil or human rights and his bond was set at $50,000. Missoula police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Montana is home to just under 1,500 Jews out of a general population of over 1.1 million. In 2023, the Anti-Defamation League recorded just 21 antisemitic incidents in the state.
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US Jews who revile Trump’s domestic policies say he must be praised for Gaza deal
Walking and chewing gum. Nixon and China. Fighting against the British in Palestine while fighting with the British in Europe.
All are cliches signifying two seemingly contradictory actions that are possible — and potentially preferable — to do at the same time. And all were cited this week by Jewish critics of Donald Trump as apt metaphors for what they are doing this week in the wake of Trump’s successful brokering of a ceasefire in the Gaza war.
Jewish Americans are reeling as a president many blame for undermining democracy brokered a deal that appears poised to return the Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Unlike many jubilant Israelis, some reliably liberal Jews here are having a hard time praising Trump and his team for the kind of diplomatic breakthrough that his Democratic predecessor couldn’t bring about. But they are largely figuring out how to do it.
“It’s important to recognize that the vast majority of American Jews, just as Israelis, want a return of the hostages, and they want this war to end, and if Donald Trump and his team can help to bring that about, they deserve credit for doing so,” said Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, the leading Democratic group in the community.
Trump in his second term is deeply unpopular with American Jews. Prior to the announcement of a long-awaited ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, his backing for Israel did not dent the disapproval he draws from a demographic that votes overwhelmingly Democratic.
A poll in April found 72% of Jewish voters disapproved of Trump. A robust majority opposed his signature policies, including deportations and retaliating against political enemies. A majority even opposed his efforts to combat antisemitism.
At the same time, Trump also has not hidden his disdain for legacy Jewish groups: The FBI earlier this month cut off all ties with the Anti-Defamation League, and its director, Kash Patel, likened the group’s tracking of right-wing extremists to terrorism.
Abe Foxman, the former ADL CEO, was appalled by Patel’s actions against his former colleagues and campaigned in 2020 for Joe Biden, the Democrat who ousted Trump after his first term. But he said the community should praise Trump for the peace deal, and he was surprised the praise was not more robust.
“The American Jewish community needs to walk and chew gum at the same time. We should be able to differentiate and say, ‘Thank you, Mr. President’ and ‘No thank you, Mr. President,’” Foxman said in an interview. “He did something so many of us yearned for in the last two years, and he made it happen, and Biden didn’t make it happen.”
Rabbi Jonah Pesner, who leads the Reform movement’s advocacy arm, the Religious Action Center, said there was a Jewish ethical obligation to thank Trump, based on the Jewish imperative to publicly “recognize the good,” hakarat hatov, even if the administration does not reciprocate.
“We would look at it through the lens of Jewish learning and Jewish wisdom,” Pesner said. “We have a president who has done exactly what we asked, bring the hostages home, end the war and the suffering in Gaza, both for the sake of the innocent in Gaza, but also for [Israelis], and get back on a path to a sustainable, lasting peace so that both sides can live in peace.”
That does not mean opposition to Trump’s domestic policies should flag, Pesner said, noting the Reform movement’s activism in opposing the deportations and Trump policies targeting transgender people.
“Our people are in the streets in Los Angeles and Chicago, trying to be a human buffer between troops that are being deployed [to arrest undocumented migrants] and the people who will be impacted,” he said.
Pesner’s predecessor at the RAC, Rabbi David Saperstein, said Trump “deserves to be commended for an extraordinary achievement” – but the Trump administration’s strident hostility to groups that might disagree on some issues made it hard to express. (Earlier this month, Trump shared on social media a meme calling Democrats “THE PARTY OF HATE, EVIL, AND SATAN.”)
Saperstein lamented the passing of an era when Jewish organizations would be comfortable working with a president whose policies they mostly opposed. He recalled being present at the White House, as RAC CEO, when President George W. Bush signed RAC-backed bills on human trafficking, on Sudan and on prison rape.
“While we staunchly supported a number of the efforts of the [Bush] administration, both domestically and in terms of Iraq, one always knew that the White House would accept that dichotomy as a norm of how American politics functions, and wouldn’t stop that from working collegially in places we could find common ground,” Saperstein recalled. “This administration is woefully different.”
Joel Rubin, a deputy assistant secretary of state during the Obama administration, drew two historical analogies to explain why Democrats and Jews should more robustly praise Trump on his Mideast diplomacy: Richard Nixon, who brokered peaceful relations with China while under even as he faced investigation for spying on Democrats, and David Ben-Gurion, who in 1939 said Jews in Palestine should resist British oppression with the same dedication they showed in joining the British in fighting Nazis.
“I think it’s been a very, very difficult thing for Democrats to admit that, you know, Nixon went to China on this one,” said Rubin, who in 2020 was the Jewish community liaison for the presidential campaign of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the de facto leader of progressives.
Trump, Rubin said, was able to do what Biden was not: pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to defy his far-right coalition partners and make a deal by enticing him with unfettered military and diplomatic support.
“Biden didn’t have the leverage to pressure Bibi [Netanyahu], the way that Trump has the leverage to pressure Bibi.” Biden, he said, “failed to capitalize on the window that he had opened after Oct. 7,” when the Democratic president expressed unalloyed support for Israel. “He kind of sat passive, and he just didn’t know how to do it. And Trump didn’t take any of the recommendations from the ‘pressure Israel’ crowd. He didn’t cut off military aid. In fact, he accelerated it. And that built up huge equity inside the Israeli body politic.”
Jewish political conservatives have been beyond effusive in their praise. The Republican Jewish Coalition has not only called for Trump to win the Nobel Peace Prize, it said the prize should be renamed for Trump.
Jo-Ann Mort, a public relations consultant who has worked with liberal Jewish and non-Jewish groups, said Trump deserved thanks, but the deal was not the game changer that Trump and his acolytes were claiming. Its terms have been on the table since the Biden administration, she said, and keeping the peace in the Middle East has been part of the presidential brief since at least Israel’s inception.
“It was an agreement that was on the table a year ago that Bibi didn’t take,” she said. “This is what the president of the United States is supposed to do in a place where the U.S. has so many interests and is so deeply involved – it would have been contrary to his role as president if he hadn’t tried to solve it.”
Soifer, the Jewish Democrats’ CEO, said that even as the deal deserves praise, its elements needed further scrutiny, particularly the ensuing enhancements in security cooperation between the United States and Qatar, a country that has backed Hamas. She noted for instance a deal he brokered with Yemen’s Houthi militia earlier this year that stopped attacks on U.S.-flagged ships – but allowed them to continue on Israeli flagged ships. On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Qatar would establish a military installation within the United States, which has also offered Qatar security assurances designed to prevent Israel from striking Hamas leaders living there.
“Israel’s security has not been a part of every calculation in terms of foreign policy of this administration and the Houthis are one example,” Soifer said. “This deal with the Qataris may be another, and we do need to consider Israel’s security. His tunnel vision may serve his short-term interests” of securing a Nobel Peace Prize, “but it doesn’t necessarily serve our long term national security interests as well as that of Israel.”
Betsy Sheer, a leading Florida-based fundraiser for Jewish causes and for Democrats, said praise for Trump’s deal should be unstinting — as should be resistance to his domestic policies.
“Trump has figured out a way, unlike his predecessor, who I thought was extremely supportive of Israel – he’s figured out a way through knocking heads and embarrassing people and promising God knows what that got us to this moment, and I don’t think we can overlook that,” she said.
“His domestic policies are abhorrent, and you know, I’m not going to let up on that at all,” Sheer said. “You still have to look at the shutting down of civil liberties and voting rights and the authoritarian stance and the punitive way of suing everybody that’s ever been an enemy.”
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Opinion: Why Canada must keep pushing for peace in the Middle East
Oct. 7, 2023, was a day that changed Israel—and Jewish communities across the world—forever. The murder of more than 1,200 people and the kidnapping of hundreds more by Hamas terrorists marked not only the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, but the beginning of a tragedy that has since displaced over 1.5 million Palestinians, forced nearly 100,000 Israelis from their homes, and left tens of thousands grieving on both sides.
In the two years since, grief and anger have filled every corner of Jewish life. Yet out of this devastation, one truth has become painfully clear: there is no alternative to peace. The cost of abandoning a two-state solution is too high, and the moral and human consequences are intolerable.
Canada, for decades, has stood firm in its support for two states for two peoples—a policy rooted in diplomacy, compassion, and justice. Successive governments, of every political stripe, have recognized that Israel’s long-term security is inseparable from Palestinian self-determination. While the region and its politics have shifted, the vision must remain constant: a sovereign Israel living in security alongside a sovereign Palestine built on dignity and equality.
Disarming Hamas is not enough. The terror organization that launched the barbaric attack of October 7 can have no place in whatever comes next. Israelis must know they are safe and secure. Palestinians must have the agency to demand leadership that is committed to a collaborative path—one that builds governance for the people they serve, not vengeance or victory, but safety, stability, and normalized relations.
As fragile as it is, the most recent agreement between Israel and Hamas has once again placed both peoples in a tense waiting game. Hostages may soon come home. Violence may slow. Humanitarian aid may finally reach Gazans who have endured unimaginable suffering. Israelis and Palestinians alike are waiting to exhale—to imagine, perhaps for the first time in years, what “normal” might look like.
But peace requires courage. It demands leadership willing to risk political consequence for moral clarity. I know this from experience.
During the height of the war, I travelled to Ramallah—not because it was politically convenient, and certainly not because it was easy as a Canadian-Israeli and a cabinet minister—but because it was necessary. That meeting was one of the few quiet steps that helped build a foundation for the difficult conversation that continues today: what conditions must the Palestinian Authority meet to open a genuine path forward?
Those conditions are not new. They include transparent elections, an end to corruption, the dismantling of the welfare system that rewards terror, and the rebuilding of a generation through education for reconciliation and mutual recognition—not violence. These are the steps that make peace possible.
Hope, I have learned, is not naïve. It is strategic. It is an act of defiance in the face of adversity. Hope is how we persevere through despair, how we shape policy that serves people rather than politics. It is how we remind ourselves that courage does not come from certainty, but from conviction.
Leadership and agency must also come from within. Hamas has led the Palestinian people into ruin. Their unrelenting pursuit of violent resistance—at the cost of their own citizens’ lives—has turned Gaza into a place of devastation and despair. For Palestinians to have a future, their national movement must reject Hamas’s ideology of annihilation. The Palestinian people deserve leaders who understand that a viable, independent state can only exist alongside a safe and secure Israel.
This truth lies at the heart of the matter. If we are to rebuild trust and establish a lasting peace, Israelis and Palestinians alike must confront a simple, uncomfortable reality: our lives are intertwined. Our safety depends on one another.
For Jewish communities here in Canada, this truth carries a parallel responsibility. We have lived through two years of fear, mourning, and rising antisemitism. Many of us have felt isolated in our grief and anxious about our safety. But even in those moments, we cannot lose sight of our values—the belief that peace, security, and justice are not mutually exclusive but mutually dependent.
We are tired, yes—but we are not broken.
This moment, fragile as it is, offers an opening. It calls for moral courage—not only from leaders in the region but from allies like Canada who can help nurture reconciliation, rebuild institutions, and ensure accountability. Canada must be part of that work.
It is not enough to stand with Israel in solidarity; we must also stand with Israelis and Palestinians who are willing to build a different future. Peace is not inevitable, but it is possible—if we insist on it.
As our sages taught: “Lo alecha hamelacha ligmor, v’lo atah ben chorin l’hibatel mimena”—“It is not upon you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
That teaching has guided the Jewish people through millennia of hardship, and it must guide us now.
We cannot complete the work of peace—but we must never stop trying.
Ya’ara Saks is the former Member of Parliament for York Centre and the former Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, and Associate Minister of Health.
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