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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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Israelis are experiencing a new kind of international boycott
Israelis are not facing formal sanctions from Western corporations. No international business coalition has announced a boycott. No major bank or airline has openly declared that Israeli customers are unwelcome.
Yet many Israelis are increasingly encountering something quieter and more difficult to define: a new norm of friction and the sense that when systems fail for Israelis, nobody feels much urgency to fix them.
Consider a recent experience I had with the United Kingdom’s NatWest bank.
When NatWest stopped sending authentication texts to Israeli phone numbers in the spring, I assumed it was just a technical error. Banks malfunction. Security systems fail. But then the bank’s mobile app stopped properly recognizing my Israeli number — despite that number having functioned perfectly well beforehand. Customer service representatives offered contradictory explanations. The fallback solution was supposed to be a physical card reader for secure logins. I requested one repeatedly. Nothing arrived for months. Then, in early May, a representative informed me that NatWest apparently was not mailing card readers to Israel, either.
On a visit to London, I went to a branch, where they offered no explanations; they put me on the phone with customer service, where the agent repeated that they were no longer engaging in contact with Israeli phone numbers or addresses, due to “war tensions.” So I emailed every executive I could find to ask, directly, if the bank was boycotting Israel.
After lengthy exchanges, I was told that Israeli access was removed earlier in the year. The bank insisted the restrictions were not political and not specific to Israel, but rather part of broader fraud prevention measures. So I asked which other countries were affected. This, the bank refused to answer.
On its own, this could still be dismissed as another case of corporate opacity mixed with bureaucratic risk aversion. (Eventually, a physical card reader did make its way to me, still with no clear explanation for the delay.) But it was not the first strange interaction I had experienced.
In early 2024, I ordered a novel from Amazon. The book arrived at my home in Tel Aviv damaged and obviously used, despite being sold as new. Customer service initially handled the issue professionally, immediately agreeing to replace the order. Then I provided my address. There was silence.
“I see this address is not on the map,” the representative finally said. “I only see Palestine.” Then the line disconnected.
An alarming interaction, but the representative was expressing a personal political view, not enforcing corporate policy. What proved more revealing was Amazon’s institutional indifference afterward. Despite repeated inquiries to the company’s press office, I never received a clear decrial of the customer service representative’s actions. The issue simply disappeared into a bureaucratic void.
That sorry episode was felicitous in a way: It inspired my first op-ed for the Forward.
Then came British Airways.
After BA canceled flights between Tel Aviv and London in 2025 following a Houthi missile strike near Ben-Gurion Airport, my wife and I scrambled to reconstruct an itinerary at enormous personal expense. Wars disrupt aviation. That part was understandable.
What followed afterward was not. Months passed in a maze of contradictory responses, partial refunds, bureaucratic evasions and compensation offers so absurd that they bordered on parody. Only after I contacted the airline’s press office identifying myself as a journalist did the company suddenly rediscover the ability to communicate. Even then, the process remained exhausting and opaque. We were compensated perhaps a third the value of the ticket lost, with no apology whatsoever.
None of these incidents independently prove anti-Israel discrimination. Banks mistreat customers. Airlines fail passengers. Customer service departments malfunction. Yet together they illustrate a kind of new atmosphere for Israelis.
The most profound sign of that atmosphere has come in academia. As a new report by the Technion documents, what was once an academic boycott of Israel evolved from highly visible protests toward a more diffuse climate of exclusion.
Jewish students in Sweden reported hiding their identities in academic environments. British surveys found that roughly one in five students said they would not want to live with a Jewish roommate. Canadian campus activism increasingly moved from symbolic rhetoric toward operational demands for universities to sever ties with Israeli institutions and withdraw investments.
My friend Bar Harel experienced this personally at Portugal’s University of Coimbra. After complaining about antisemitic graffiti, pro-Hamas and Hezbollah imagery, and slogans such as “No Jews wanted” around campus, Harel became a target. He was threatened online, publicly vilified, physically assaulted near campus and told his family “should burn in a second Holocaust.”
University authorities largely deflected responsibility. Only after he fled Portugal at the advice of Israeli and American diplomats did the state ombudsman finally issue a report that said the university had adopted a “posture of fundamental passivity” in response to his harassment, failing to investigate despite clear evidence.
In business and academia alike, organizations don’t need to announce formal sanctions to change Israeli experience. They simply begin treating Israel operationally troublesome.
Does all this come from antisemitism — or is it a form of quiet protest against Israel’s brutality during the past years’ wars, or the indefensible situation in the West Bank? Does it relate to the current right-wing government — and if so, is it fixable should the moderate opposition return to power?
I do not have definitive answers, and there’s probably a mix of reasons. But it is clear that Israelis are losing the global narrative with astounding speed, and unless this is countered, more formal boycotts are on the way.
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Graham Platner drops out of Maine Senate race, citing push to ‘end the genocide’ in parting message
(JTA) — Maine Democrat Graham Platner announced Wednesday evening that he will drop out of the U.S. Senate race following new allegations that he had committed sexual assault.
“We believe that for the movement to continue, it can’t be me, and for that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” he said.
Platner’s withdrawal came two days after Politico reported that a former girlfriend had accused him of entering her home uninvited about five years ago and forcing her to have sex with him.
“All we were asking for was healthcare, was to end the genocide, to use our taxpayer dollars at home to uplift our communities instead of waging war overseas,” Platner said in a Facebook address announcing his exit. He denied the allegations against him in the address, adding that a “corporate media system and the political establishment got to act as judge, jury and executioner.”
The allegations were the latest in a series of controversies that have hit Platner’s campaign, including his since-covered-up Nazi tattoo, unearthed Reddit posts and other reports about his behavior toward women.
Platner, who won his Democratic primary in June on an anti-Israel progressive platform, denied the fresh allegations, telling Politico that “any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically untrue.”
But the report prompted a rapid collapse in support for Platner among Democratic leaders, progressive allies and organizations that had backed his bid to beat GOP Sen. Susan Collins. It also sparked a scramble among Maine Democrats to find a different nominee ahead of the July 27 deadline for a replacement to appear on the ballot.
On Wednesday, the Maine Democratic Party announced that they had voted to hold a nominating convention to fill Platner’s vacancy.
“There is an unprecedented amount of energy and enthusiasm among Maine Democrats, driven in part by many of the dedicated volunteers and supporters who were inspired by Graham Platner’s campaign,” the party said in a statement. “We look forward to coming together and harnessing that energy around our new nominee as we work to defeat Susan Collins in November.”
The state Democratic Party leadership called on Platner to withdraw as the Democratic nominee on Monday, adding that the party needed to “refocus this campaign” on the fight against GOP Sen. Susan Collins. The seat is key to Democratic hopes of taking back the Senate.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of Platner’s most high-profile supporters, as well as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani also called for Platner to step aside on Tuesday.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who initially backed Platner’s opponent before she dropped out, had said in a joint statement with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee “will not invest in the Maine Senate race if Platner remains on the ballot.”
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Rahm Emanuel: Democrats who support Israel can still lead the party to the White House
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Pausing as he looked out at the packed hall at Tel Aviv University, Rahm Emanuel offered his audience a warning about what he was about to say.
“Hold your applause, because you may not like this,” he said, before laying out his proposal for U.S. sanctions targeting Israelis who attack Palestinian civilians and property, Israeli officials who voice support for that violence, and companies and banks that support “illegal settlements.”
The crowd applauded anyway — three separate times.
Under a 2017 law, Israel bars foreign nationals who publicly call for boycotts of Israel or its settlements from entering the country. Emanuel issued his call for sanctions from a stage in Tel Aviv, a measure of how far Democratic politics on Israel have shifted since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
Widely viewed as a possible contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, Emanuel, a former congressman, White House chief of staff, Chicago mayor and U.S. ambassador to Japan, and one of the most prominent Jewish figures in American politics, arrived in Israel on Sunday. His speech Wednesday afternoon, billed as “An Honest Conversation: The U.S.-Israel Relationship, Where It Stands Today and The Road Ahead,” was the keynote of the visit, and was meant to signal the need for a “fundamentally new and different approach” to the U.S.-Israel alliance, as he put it.
Whether Emanuel’s critique will land with the Israeli establishment, or with the ruling coalition, remains to be seen. Emanuel made a point of avoiding Israel’s elected officials during his visit, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he did not want to interfere with elections set for the fall. He did meet with President Isaac Herzog, who is appointed by the government, as well as visit hospitals in Tel Aviv and Nablus that partner with each other.
But it was clear that it was resonating with attendees. Moti Porath told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he believed Emanuel correctly diagnosed the ailment at the heart of the Israeli government, a leader who has become an outcast abroad but remains too skilled a politician to easily dislodge.
Porath, who splits his time between Newton, Massachusetts, and Tel Aviv, and who attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the same time as Netanyahu, said he recognizes the prime minister as a singularly talented political operator. “He’s a fantastic politician,” Porath said. “Maybe he’s a manipulator.”
To the attendees who spoke with JTA, Emanuel’s message was not anti-Israel but pro-Israel, in Porath’s telling, what a good friend is obligated to do when the other is acting out of line. Emanuel put it similarly from the stage, “True friends tell each other the truth.”
Porath said he hopes the United States and Israel can once again find “a common political vision,” but that doing so will require tough love from America’s next president.
The event was hosted by Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of the United States and moderated by its founding director, Yoav Fromer, alongside Yael Sternhell, the professor who heads the university’s American studies program. Organizers solicited questions from students in advance and said more than 100 were submitted.
But with a university audience likely to skew liberal, attendee Yoam Barash said the program would have benefited from a right-wing voice to push back on Emanuel’s comments, since most Israeli voters lean right. A February poll by the Midgam Institute for Israel’s Channel 12 news found 68% of veteran voters and 75% of those voting for the first time identify as right-wing. “Why didn’t they bring somebody from the right?” Barash asked.
Barash is the uncle of Daniel Barash, a managing director at the public affairs firm SKDK who helped organize the event He attended with Hannah Winkler, a friend from his army days and now a doctor in the Tel Aviv area. She said she pins her hope not on the U.S.-Israel alliance but on a left-wing victory in the upcoming elections. “Without that, I have no hope,” she said.
Told that some attendees had wanted a more politically diverse lineup, Fromer defended the format. “This is academia,” he said. “The goals here are very different than they would be on a political panel.”
At the same time, Fromer echoed the attendees’ view that Emanuel’s message was that of a friend rather than an adversary. “To say to someone, look, I’m trying to save you, if you don’t change your behavior, you’re going to self-destruct — that’s someone who cares,” he said.
The stakes, in his telling, are high for Israel and for the university. “Israelis have become pariahs. We used to be admired, the most admired,” he said, echoing Emanuel’s own warning from the stage that Israel’s leadership has turned it into a “territorial pariah.”
The damage is not merely reputational, he argued. “It’s not just feeling bad. It has practical implications,” he said, speculating about investment and capital that will stop flowing, students and tourists who will stop coming, Israelis who will lose their jobs.
During the anti-Israel protests that swept U.S. campuses in 2023 and 2024, ties with Israeli universities, including Tel Aviv University, were frequent targets of divestment demands. Emanuel himself warned in his speech that Israel’s scientists face exclusion from international research networks and that its artists and academics are being shut out of exhibits and conferences.
Inside the hall, at least, the message was received. “Most of the people in this room are quite sympathetic to what you have to say,” Barash told Emanuel on stage. “That is not the case across Israel.”
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