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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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Who is Gadi Eisenkot, the Israeli politician who could dethrone Netanyahu?
Until recently, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett appeared to be the opposition figure best positioned to challenge Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s election this fall. But a new contender has emerged: Gadi Eisenkot, a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, whose newly formed Yashar! (“Straight!”) party is rapidly gaining popularity.
According to Israel’s public broadcaster KAN, Eisenkot’s party currently projects to win 21 Knesset seats, trailing Netanyahu’s Likud at 23. Bennett and Yair Lapid’s joint slate, Together, the duo that managed to win the 2021 elections, is polling at 17 seats. Several other major Israeli polls reflect a similar or even stronger position for Eisenkot. As of this writing, Eisenkot and Netanyahu are neck and neck on Polymarket as the most likely politician to become the next prime minister.
Amid Trump’s Iran deal, which left Netanyahu in the lurch and has been widely unpopular among Israelis, Netanyahu’s appeal as a prime minister who can ensure Israel’s security is beginning to slip. Only 11% of Israelis feel Israel won the war, and 52% feel Netanyahu’s conduct harmed Israel’s interests in the U.S.-Iran deal. A recent Channel 12 survey found that 58% of Israelis believe the country’s next prime minister should not be Netanyahu.
After Bennett and Lapid joined forces to run together this April, their popularity has been steadily decreasing. Since they announced their joint run, Eisenkot has been gaining roughly one seat per week in Israeli polling.
This reflects an important theme in Israeli politics: combining politicians does not necessarily combine their voters. Bennett, a right-wing Orthodox nationalist who has long opposed a Palestinian state, appeals to a different constituency than Lapid, a secular centrist who has expressed support for a two-state solution.
Some right-wing voters who have supported Bennett now may view him as too left-leaning for their tastes because of his alliance with Lapid. For Bennett, who was seen as someone who could take right-wing voters from Netanyahu, this is a real problem.
Enter Eisenkot: a security-focused centrist with an untraditional background. He grew up in Eilat as the son of Moroccan immigrants. If elected, he would be the first ever Mizrahi Prime Minister in Israeli history.
He did not serve in Sayeret Matkal, the elite special reconnaissance unit in the IDF that cultivated many future Israeli politicians, including Bennett and Netanyahu. Rather, he got his start in Golani, the IDF’s oldest unit. He slowly climbed through the ranks, spending his career within the security establishment before eventually becoming the chief of staff of the IDF in 2015.
His political career is relatively new. Eisenkot entered politics in 2022 as part of Benny Gantz’s National Unity party before breaking away to launch Yashar! in 2025. His time in politics, though short, has been free of scandal or feuds — beyond, of course, his frequent disagreements with Netanyahu.
Service for all
For many Israelis, Eisenkot’s public image is inseparable from personal loss. His son, Gal, was killed fighting in Gaza in 2023, and two of his nephews also died during the war. Their deaths have given Eisenkot a unique standing in a country where military service has profoundly affected many Israeli families in the last few years, especially following the Oct. 7 attacks.
This experience also resonates amid one of the most contentious debates in Israeli politics: whether ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students should continue receiving exemptions from military service. As reservists have been called up repeatedly since Oct. 7 and the IDF has faced manpower shortages, many Israelis have argued that the burden of military service is being shared unequally. Roughly 80,000 men aged 18 to 24 who are currently exempt are eligible to serve in the IDF.
According to the Israel Democracy Institute, only 9% of the Israeli public supports exempting the ultra-Orthodox from mandatory military service. Netanyahu’s coalition, which depends on ultra-Orthodox parties, has sought to preserve some form of exemption system.
Eisenkot not only faced profound personal sacrifice for his family’s military service, but he also runs on the platform “service for all,” which hopes to reform broad military exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox.
In May 2025, he shared his thoughts for the first time on a two-state solution, telling Channel 12, “I always speak in favor of a Jewish, democratic, strong, and powerful state, and from that, we should derive our decisions. I think a Palestinian state is not relevant after October 7.” He added, “We need to be very measured, build it from the bottom up, and certainly not talk about a state and a prize after this murderous event,” he said, referring to the Oct. 7 attacks. “Instead, we should make our considerations from a position of strength, take our time, and not decide from one moment to the next, certainly not talk about it now.”
One of the most visible criticisms of Eisenkot has been his lack of command of the English language. Eisenkot speaks English, though certainly not to the level of fluent proficiency of MIT-educated Benjamin Netanyahu or Naftali Bennett. Last week, a top Netanyahu aide, Jonatan Urich, posted a viral video on X splicing clips of Einsenkot speaking heavily accented English with Nethayahu’s major speeches at the UN and Congress.
Eisenkot responded to the video on a popular Israeli podcast, stating, “Where was Netanyahu’s excellent English on October 7?” he asked. “Where is his excellent English in strengthening the relationship between Israel and the United States, which this morning is at rock bottom?”
While Eisenkot’s party continues to soar in the polls, he has a long way to go before he will be able to dethrone Netanyahu, who has won six Israeli elections since 1996.
Israel’s next prime minister will not simply be the person who secures the most votes for their party. To govern, a coalition must command at least 61 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. To do this, political parties – though often ideologically different – must come together in the hopes of securing a majority number of seats in the Knesset.
Eisenkot’s principal rival for leadership of the anti-Netanyahu camp is Bennett. Still, both Bennett and Eisenkot have emphasized that their primary goal is to take down Netanyahu. When asked whether he would step aside for Eisenkot if that were necessary to form a government, Bennett replied: “I will do anything in the world to replace this very bad government. I will not let ego be a factor.”
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Trump nominee defends college cartoon of Jewish student with devil horns at Senate hearing
(JTA) — President Donald Trump’s pick for general counsel of the agency that oversees federal workers’ labor rights testified in Congress on Wednesday that he does not believe a cartoon he published in college that depicted a Jewish student with devil horns was antisemitic.
Charlton Allen appeared at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for his confirmation hearing Wednesday afternoon. There, Sen. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona Democrat, pressed him about the cartoon.
“If you look behind me, you’ll see the front cover of an edition of the Carolina Review depicting Aaron Nelson, a Jewish candidate for student body president. Your magazine altered Nelson’s photo depicting him with the horns and a pitchfork. Inside the article says, ‘The difference between Aaron Nelson is simple. He’s Jewish.’” Gallego said. “Yes or no, Mr. Nelson. Do you stand by this depiction?”
The cartoon ignited a firestorm when it was published in the Carolina Review, a campus conservative magazine that Allen founded as an undergraduate at UNC. The magazine’s faculty advisor said he resigned after it went to print against his advice, and nearly two dozen Jewish faculty members pressed UNC’s chancellor to denounce the cartoon and censure the magazine, which he did.
Allen fended off allegations of antisemitism at the time and again during a 2014 hearing to confirm him for a position in North Carolina. He did so again on Tuesday.
“I would not say that it’s antisemitic,” he said. “We were the group that was calling for the equal treatment of all student religions.”
“If I were 30 years ago advocating for The Review, I would say, ‘don’t run that cover,’” he testified. “I think it was a mistake.”
According to reports from the time, Nelson had been accused by the Carolina Review of discriminating against a Christian campus group by voting not to fund it. He had voted in favor of funding a “majority” of other campus Christian groups while he was a representative in the student congress.
Facing backlash, Allen denied at the time that the depiction of Nelson with horns was meant to channel longstanding antisemitic stereotypes.
“Our cartoonist lampooned [Nelson] as such because her perception was that Aaron was evil,” Allen told the Duke Chronicle in April 1996. “Newspapers in the past few weeks have run cartoons lampooning public figures such as Gingrich, Pat Buchanan and even myself as ‘devils’ with horns and pitchforks. Where’s the public outcry over these cartoons?”
On Wednesday, Allen offered a slightly different explanation. He said the picture was meant to channel UNC’s historic and enduring rivalry with nearby Duke University, whose mascot is the “Blue Devil.”
“The cartoonist’s intention was to make an analogy to that,” he said.
In 2014, during his confirmation hearing ahead of his appointment for commissioner of the state Industrial Commission of North Carolina, Allen addressed criticisms of the cartoon by saying his grandfather had helped to liberate Jews in Europe from concentration camps during World War II, the Indy Week reported at the time.
Trump nominated Allen to the Office of the Special Council — the agency that protects whistleblowers from unlawful conduct — in May 2025 but withdrew the nomination less than a week later. In September, he nominated Allen to the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
Nelson, meanwhile, won the election handily to become UNC’s student body president. Now president of The Chamber, Chapel Hill’s chamber of commerce, Nelson did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment.
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Former antisemitic activist Lucas Gage explains to Jewish podcast why he left the movement
(JTA) — In July 2024, X suspended antisemitic influencer Lucas Gage for six months for making “repeated and clear calls for violence.”
This month, Gage was in Lakewood, New Jersey, explaining to two Jewish interviewers why he no longer considers himself an antisemite.
“It’s like a disease. I’m serious. It was like this compulsion and look, it comes from a justified place in some, but then it’s like what have I become honestly and it’s like I was sick of myself,” Gage told Yaakov Langer and Jake Turx on the podcast “Inspiration for the Nation.” “Looking back at the videos that got me knocked off of Twitter … I was out of my mind.”
Gage, a longtime white nationalist activist from New Jersey formerly known as Angelo John Gage, spent more than a decade promoting conspiracy theories and hate towards Jews online before publicly renouncing antisemitism earlier this year.
He told Langer and Turx that a pivotal moment for him was seeing antisemitic theories proliferate about the September murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. From there, his conversations changed.
“The more I sit down and talk to Jewish people, the more I realize how maligned they are,” Gage wrote in a post on X announcing the interview. “The lies the JQ crowd now tell about me are similar to those they tell about Jews. I was part of that crowd, but now I’m glad to say I’m no longer an antisemite.”
Gage announced in a March post on Substack that he was “abandoning” antisemitism, explaining that while his declaration was “not an apology,” his “focus on Jewish supremacy alone has become a self-destructive and futile endeavor, which does not even solve the problem.”
“The problem, however, is that I got sucked into the mob—the very mob I identified as ‘my people,’ who are just as problematic as the Jewish mob,” Gage wrote. “With that being said, I do not denounce my beliefs about Jewish supremacy and criminality in certain areas of society nor Jewish overrepresentation, which are all well substantiated.”
When asked by Langer, the founder of Living Lchaim and host of the podcast, why he had the “strength” to publicly renounce antisemitism and meet with Jews, Gage said he felt an obligation to engage with the Jewish community after spending years attacking it online.
Gage told the Jewish hosts that he thought it would be wrong for him “to walk away and not speak to a community I’ve been at war with for 14 years, and to see why I was at war with you guys in the first place.”
Turx, the senior White House correspondent for Mishpacha Magazine, an Orthodox publication, said the meeting took place after he reached out to Langer multiple times.
Langer did not respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment, and efforts to reach Gage were unsuccessful.
During the nearly two-hour interview, Gage recounted his journey from an Iraq war veteran to antisemitic activist and, more recently, to a public critic of the online movement he once helped build.
Gage, who is Roman Catholic, said his descent into antisemitic conspiracy theories began after serving in Kuwait and Iraq, when he became obsessed with identifying who was responsible for sending him to a war he described as “a lie.”
“I went through all the conspiracy theories until I ran into the Jews and that was in 2012 when I read ‘Mein Kampf’ and I was like ‘whoa,’” Gage said.
That year, Gage began posting on the racist Web forum Stormfront that he had recently found out about “the real Jewish question” and that “EVERYTHING connects and leads back to the jews — the evil jews,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Stormfront played a role in one of the best-known recent conversion-from-white supremacy stories, in which the child of the site’s founder renounced extremism and antisemitism after being invited to Shabbat dinners in college.
For Gage, Stormfront was a site of his radicalization. After beginning to post there, he became a regular fixture in white nationalist circles, appearing on far-right podcasts, organizing activists and eventually taking a shot at elected office.
In 2014, Gage ran unsuccessfully for the House in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District under the far-right white supremacist American Freedom Party but was disqualified before the campaign season began because of incorrectly filed paperwork. Following that bid, he served as the chairman of the National Youth Front, the youth wing of the party.
Gage’s online presence and influence within white nationalist circles grew rapidly, appearing alongside former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke and Stormfront founder Andrew Anglin on their platforms. He also frequently promoted the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which is widely considered antisemitic and claims that Jews are orchestrating the replacement of white people in Western countries with nonwhite immigrants.
Following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Gage said that he shifted the focus of his online accounts to railing against Israel, posting on X over the ensuing months that “every supporter of Israel is a terrorist” and that “Zionists are worse than pedophiles,” according to screenshots of his account posted by the Anti-Defamation League.
Gage said his departure from the movement was driven in part by frustration with what he called “low-IQ antisemitism,” or conspiracy theories that reflexively blame Jews for unrelated events.
“What was the final straw? Charlie Kirk. Okay. Why? Because I keep talking about low IQ antisemitism. What is that? It’s when you blame Jews for things they haven’t even done,” Gage said, explaining that he couldn’t agree with conspiratorial claims swirling on the far-right that Israel had been behind the Turning Point USA leader’s murder.
Gage said that he believed even if it was proven that the man accused of Kirk’s killing, Tyler Robinson, had committed the crime, the far-right crowd he had surrounded himself with would have still blamed the Jews.
“There’s no hope for these people, and then they’re turning on me just for disagreeing,” Gage said.
Gage’s shift quickly earned him the ire of antisemitic influencers he had once aligned himself with, including far-right antisemitic media personalities Jake Shields and Stew Peters.
“Imagine if Lucas Gage had never existed. What a beautiful world it would be. The world would be a much better place if Lucas Gage did not exist in it,” Peters said during a podcast appearance with Shields last month. “I mean, that guy singlehandedly destroyed the most cohesive movement in modern history.”
Looking ahead, Gage stressed the importance of engaging with figures who hold antisemitic views, citing the deadly terror attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia in December.
“I want to talk to different groups of people and say, look, yeah, we have to sit down and have these conversations, because if we don’t, if we isolate the antisemites, ‘oh, they’re just maniacs, they’re jealous, we don’t care,’ they’re going to go crazy,” Gage said. “I didn’t, but someone else did. Remember the guy who shot up the beach in Australia?”
Since announcing the interview, Langer said that his inbox had been “flooded” with messages asking him if he believed Gage was sincere, to which he responded “100%.”
“I wish more people were as authentic and honest as he is,” Langer said. “While it wasn’t easy to make change in his life, he did it.”
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