Mark Oppenheimer: Okay, Jay Michaelson, do you believe in God? And if so, what does that mean?

Jay Michaelson: Yeah, that’s the quick question. I was literally thinking, like, what’s your favorite kind of sushi? That’s what I thought you were going to ask. Tuna or salmon?

MO: Greetings and welcome to Arc: The Podcast. I am Mark Oppenheimer, and I promise that I’m going to do my best not to refer to this podcast as “Arc With Mark.” If, however, we become a massive hit and our enormous fan base just can’t help but call us “Arc with Mark,” I will have no choice but to go along.

But for now, we’re Arc: The Podcast, a companion podcast to the web magazine that I edit. The magazine is Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera. And it’s online at arcmag.org. We’re a project of the John Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, and we cover the intersection of religion and politics and culture and everything else besides.

This week, my guest on our debut podcast is Jay Michelson. Right now, he’s a visiting professor at Harvard Law. But that doesn’t really do justice to what Jay Michaelson is. He’s like one of those Hollywood multi hyphenates. You know, the producer, director, actor, screenplay writer for the religious studies, legal, spiritual, and activist worlds.

What I mean is that he’s a Jewish Buddhist race rabbi, lawyer, meditation teacher, and psychedelic drug enthusiast. He’s also queer and has been active in gay Jewish activist circles for a couple decades now. He’s sort of like an AI generated idea of a white dude version of DEI. He’s got the Jewish and the Buddhist, the Jew-Bu. He’s got the rabbi, he’s got the lawyer, he’s got the meditation teacher, he’s got the sexual orientation diversity. And he has written really interestingly on mushrooms and ketamine and psychedelics and all that stuff.

But the really interesting thing about Jay is that he’s kind of a genius, or I don’t know if he’s a genius, but he’s a polymath. He’s someone who’s wicked knowledgeable about a lot of things. And before we get into our interview, I want to tell you a story about Jay that I think sort of encapsulates who he is in my life.

I was a junior in college and I had just gotten turned on to religious studies as a discipline. I was taking all the religious studies classes that I could, which was a little bit of a challenge because I needed to fulfill the requirements of my major, and I was already committed to being a history major and I didn’t have time to switch. So in between taking my required history class from before 1600 and my required history class on sub Saharan Africa and all the things that I, as an American history guy, didn’t necessarily want to do, but had to do as requirements, I was also trying to squeeze in all of this religious studies stuff because I had this feeling that if I had known what was good for me, I would have started college as a religious studies major, so I was making up for lost time.

And one of the classes that I wandered into was Philosophy of Religion with Nicholas Woltersdorf. Now, Nick Woltersdorf is one of the great Christian philosophers. He’s one of the great philosophers of religion. He’s really one of the great philosophers, but more than that, he’s one of the great teachers. And the class was pretty big. It was not only maybe 30 or 40 students from Yale Divinity School, but also 30 or 40 undergraduates like me, so there were teaching assistants who lead discussion sections. The TA whose section I was assigned to was this law student named Jay Michelson.

What I remember about that first class is we were talking about possible paper topics in a class that dealt with everything from Plato to Anselm to Aquinas to 20th century analytic theologian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga. Jay was saying that really we could write our final papers at the end of the term on anything that had to do with philosophy of religion.

That is to say, it didn’t just have to be the stuff that Nick Woltersdorf was covering in the lectures. It could be beyond that. He had covered the blackboard in chalk, writing out all of these terms, some of which I knew and some of which I didn’t. And it was terms like polytheism, pantheism and monotheism, which were terms that I sort of knew.

But then there were these other theisms. There was panentheism, there was henotheism, there was kathanotheism, there was monolatry. All these terms that I did not understand. By the way, henotheism is the belief in a primary God while not denying the existence of other gods; cathonotheism is the worship of one God at a time; monolatry is the belief in multiple gods, but the consistent worship of only one.

Anyway, Jay had covered the board with these and many other terms. And what he said to us was, you can write a paper on any of these relationships to God or to theism, or on many other things besides this.

His point was this is a huge, huge world of ideas and where you enter into it is up to you. But what I remember thinking was, who’s this guy who’s maybe only five years older than I am, but who knows about henotheism and cathonotheism and panentheism and monolatry? Like I was in college and he had done super college in some way.

I’ve since learned about Jay over three decades of friendship, and that that was not a misunderstanding of him. That was in fact exactly what he’s like. It’s as if he’s always super learning. He’s also multi-talented. He’s a fiction writer with a great book of short stories out. He’s a musician. I once bumped into him on the streets of New York City and he was on his way to a Lady Gaga concert for which his husband had bought him tickets. I think it was maybe his birthday.

And what I will say about Jay is that while we have many, many points of disagreement, he is far to the left of me politically and his religious practice is more eccentric than mine. The only area where I really think he has nothing to teach me is in his love of Lady Gaga. I just think that’s our principal point of disagreement. I think she’s fine, but I would not spend money to see her in concert. All of which is to say there’s probably no person who I find more interesting to talk to about religion and all of its other areas of expertise than Rabbi Dr. Jay Michelson.

I’ll be back later in this podcast to give you some headlines ripped from the internet pages of Arc magazine. But for now, enjoy the first part of my interview with Jay Michaelson. I will give you the caution that it was recorded a couple months ago, so please don’t have any expectation that it will relate to current events. Enjoy.

Jay Michelson, thanks for joining me today.

JM: My pleasure. Great to be here.

MO: You are the ultimate multi hyphenate. But nobody grows up thinking you’re gonna be a multi hyphenate. I don’t think, or certainly not in Tampa in the eighties.

JM: No, I wanted to be an architect.

MO: Okay, so you’ve anticipated the question. I was gonna say: what did you think you were gonna be growing up? And when did that diverge? When did plans change?

JM: That’s interesting. Until I was around 15, 16, I still had my childhood dream of being an architect. And then, you know, probably I would. I would bet a disproportionate number of listeners are familiar with the book The Drama of the Gifted Child. There’s probably a lot of formerly gifted diagnosed people in your audience space.

I only discovered that book in the last couple years, but I definitely experienced it in the 1980s when I was growing up. And so for a moment, what I realized, it took me 15, 20 years to grow out of this, was that I wasn’t going to be both Bill Clinton and Walt Whitman at the same time.

And there was definitely a pull, especially after seeing Dead Poets Society when it came out, to make my life extraordinary and I understood that in terms of writing, primarily because that’s what I was always good at and probably still what I think I’m good at.

I remember being on a canoe trip with my half brother in the nineties, and he’s like, “Maybe you could be a senator one day.” It’s taken a long, long time to grow out of that. Hopefully doing too many things with the public record that disqualify me from ever attaining elected office.

MO: Yeah, there aren’t many places where you could get elected, and I say that as a compliment. So how did that stop? When did you say, “Wait, I’m not going to be an architect?”

JM: I have no idea how that even started, actually. I think it was just my childhood play, building cities and spaceships and things like that. I would always draw, even as a young teenager, cities and buildings and things like that just in my abundant spare time. This, listeners, was before the internet, so we had a thing where you would just be in your room with nothing to do. I still have an advocation for design, but, no, certainly not.

MO: I was gonna say, are you good at this stuff? Can you draw well? Are you somebody who walks into buildings and understands?

JM: I’m more of a student than a student of design and art and architecture than a producer. There was a time, even in my twenties, when I was in law school, where I had a studio room in my apartment where I would do painting and visual arts. But I still have some of those paintings up in my house now. But I’m not so great at focusing, as you may have noticed from my resume. But I did realize that it would behoove me to focus my creative work in just a couple of areas.

MO: It’s funny you mentioned The Drama of the Gifted Child. I was just listening to my brother Daniel’s podcast, Eminent Americans, and he was interviewing William Deresiewicz, the essayist, and Deresiewicz brought up that book, and my brother said, “I should read it, or I’ve skimmed it.”

And I’m not sure that I’d ever heard of it. And now in the past 48 hours, two really smart people, two of my favorite writers, you and Deresiewicz, have both said there was the Drama of the Gifted Child. So what is this book?
JM: Yeah, my therapist recommended it to me a few years ago and he was right. And there’s the gay version of it, which is something like gay shame or something where overachieving gay people are constantly acquiring goods and status in order to make up for this unresolved shame that we went through as adolescents.

The Drama Thing of the Gifted Child is analogous. It’s another reason why you’re so fucked up about stuff. There was a sense of those of us who were tracked into gifted classes that, you know, you should be something. And it was well meaning, it wasn’t malicious, but there was certainly an unrealistic puffing up of expectations of what that should be. So along with that, this will sound a little bit touchy feely maybe, but comes the core idea of if you don’t do that, you’re not enough. There was a raising of the bar of enoughness: it wasn’t enough to have a good living and have a nice family and live your life with joy and purpose. The expectations were higher and some of us did internalize that. I’d say most of my friends are ex-gifted. I’ve never used that term before—

MO: They went to a gifted reparative therapy camp or something and came out mediocre.

JM: No, on the contrary, it’s like the gifted stuff was the reparative therapy trying to turn us into ubermenschen that we were not. Some of us did become Peter Thiel ubermenschen, and some of us did become senators. Now, I’m currently a visiting law professor, so some of us did become Harvard law professors.

My friend Dan Harris’s father used to say that the price of security is insecurity, which is to say that to be the kind of person who succeeds is to be the kind of person who yearns, and compares, and is a little bit envious, and is a little bit anxious constantly about losing that financial security, or status, or whatever it is.

I think The Drama of the Gifted Child as a book and as a therapeutic artifact kind of stakes out some turf. It’s not really left, right. But on one edge of the spectrum of like, “Hey, you know, maybe it would be better to feel okay just as you are without feeling like you need to acquire the next trophy.” And at the other end of that spectrum is, I don’t know, Palantir.

MO: It’s so funny because you can flip them, and something like The Drama of the Gifted Child can have a left wing valence or a right wing valence. Anti-elitism can have a right wing populist expression, or it can have a kind of therapeutic liberal expression of anti-bourgeois. It can be either. I wouldn’t know which way you’re going with it.

JM: Yeah, I agree it’s politically flexible or polysemous. It was part of my meditation practice, part of my therapeutic work. It’s definitely part of that. It’s just every day. I also uniquely chose a rather difficult path for someone with that. What you want to do is be assured of your status with conventional markers so that you don’t have these thoughts all the time.

MO: You should be making partner at the law firm.

JM: Partner at the law firm, or a tenure at the university, or whatever it is that assures that, or lots and lots of money. The antidote to that, I think, is what psychologists call hedonic adaptation, which is just you get used to anything.

Hedonic adaptation is our friend when we’re in trouble. If we suddenly have a chronic illness or if we’re, God forbid, in a concentration camp, or a refugee camp. You know, those inspiring images of kids drawing drawings in refugee camps. We get used to that baseline.

But the flip side of that is Jeff Bezos also gets used to that baseline. Elon Musk has people cheat on video games for him, which I think is like the great story of the last six months. He’s achieved enough, but he has obviously not achieved enough. We get used to our baseline.

MO: It’s funny, my Elon story is that I’m obsessed with his hair plugs. There are these wonderful images you can find online of him when he, not so long ago, had not just a little bit of a receding hairline, but his hair was thinning. Really thinning. Now, he has the Ronald Reagan hairline right up to his forehead. It’s thick and lustrous. And he clearly spends a lot of money on the upkeep of that.

JM: I thought it was just a one and done. Or does he have to keep going in? Like when you get haircuts?

MO: He’s still going in all the time. Like Donald Trump, the unseen vanity maintenance is a lot of visits to some weird hair doctor.

JM: My favorite New York Magazine article in that publication’s history was a deep investigative dive into Donald Trump’s hair. And they found the guy who has—

MO: The guy who has the patent on Donald Trump’s system.

JM: Donald Trump just bought him. He had an office in Trump Tower. His hair guy had his office in Trump Tower. They tried to research this business. It looks like he has one client, which is also true, incidentally, of Mick Jagger. He has a hair person who he travels with all the time and is sort of a 24/7 hair guy.
The left wing version of that Elon Musk hair transplant story is this meme that goes around that his jaw reconstruction and hairline is basically gender confirmation surgery.

MO: It’s him being the man he wants to be.

JM: It’s him being the man he wants to be. While railing against medical intervention for trans people, he himself has had numerous medical interventions to be the kind of man that he wants to be.

MO: Let’s go back a second to The Drama the Gifted Child. I’m interested in your childhood and what you have to say about it. I think of the eighties, you’re a little bit older than I. I was born in 1974. Were you in 1970?

JM: Yes. Listeners, Mark was my student once.

MO: Right, we’ll get to that. Am I right? 1970?

JM: I was born in ’71.

MO: ’71. Okay, so you had a slightly more of an early eighties new wave childhood. I had more of a mid-eighties heavy metal childhood.

JM: But I did have the hair.

MO: And the skinny tie.

JM: I did.

MO: You had the Miami Vice unstructured jacket.

JM: That came back in fashion a few years ago and now it’s back out of fashion. I fished out one of my skinny ties from the eighties and wore it to a social occasion.

MO: Well, I envy that. I’ve tried to write about this, and I feel like it always fails: I thought of that whole eighties moment, or one of the moments that was going on, was a gifted moment.

You remember. There were Jason Bateman’s early roles. First Silver Spoons and then It’s Your Move. Then there was a kind of synergy with the Alex P. Keaton moment. And of course, War Games, early Matthew Broderick movies, Ferris Bueller. There was always this sharp, clever, shrewd, gifted male who was using his wiles to be cool. This is also Real Genius with Val Kilmer. There’s a whole lot of this.

JM: You could even say, you know, Revenge of the Nerds and Weird Science.

MO: That’s exactly right. You know what I’m talking about.

JM: This is a good book. You should write it.

MO: I look back on that as a kind of fun time to be nerdy. And we were at the forefront. I was never good at computers. This was my downfall. In some ways, I’m talking about who my people were, except I couldn’t keep up with them when I did a computer class at the Center for Gifted Children on Saturday mornings. I couldn’t do Fortran.

JM: I feel like that center should be on the cover of The Drama of the Gifted Child.

MO: Totally. It was fun. We had war games class. We had chess class. I’m actually not quantitatively very good. I was hopeless at coding and things like that, or what they used to call programming. But the culture was really pro-gifted. There was a lot of gifted classes, an obsession with the sort of MIT, Caltech…It was at the forefront of video games, aerospace, nuclear stuff. What became to be known as AI.

I didn’t see it as a kind of pressure. I saw it as almost a kind of validation that now has completely gone away. Everyone is supposed to be mainstream and God help you if you’re bored in school. They’re not gonna give you a gifted class.

JM: Working through that with my daughter’s school here in Liberal Montclair. You gotta jump through a lot of hoops.

I did not experience it that way. I was really happy when the nineties happened because that’s when the Revenge of the Nerds really took place for me. Growing up in the eighties has been a source of a little bit of comfort in 2025. It does feel like we’ve been here before. We have had a reactionary moment in American culture and American politics before.

Arguably, just to diverge from this for one second, some of the changes that the Reagan administration put into place, we’re still feeling the effects now: the vast wealth inequality in the country. That all started under Reagan. The whole notion of slippery slope economics, which I think has been thoroughly debunked, but is still Republican Party gospel in terms of some of the tax cuts that are being debated as we record this episode. That all started at that time, but there was also early Donald Trump.

I remember when Donald Trump came back in 2015 and I was like, “Oh no, we’re not gonna go back to that with the bright red tie and the slick backed hair.” Now that Pete Hegseth look is everywhere, right? You see it in nightclubs and stuff.

I was aware of the sixties and actually I had a New Wave childhood, but I was really more into the Beatles. And that seemed to be the time where stuff was cool. Where people were questioning the system, and it was this very kind of adolescent, Catcher in the Rye kind of rebellion that I felt at that time. That all this was bullshit.

But the mainstream was the bullshit. I grew up mostly in Tampa and Florida and it was very patriotic, very overtly racist, obviously homophobic, and sexist. That wasn’t even on the table. It felt like the bullies, like Biff Tanner…

MO: And the principal in The Breakfast Club and the principal in Ferris Bueller…

JM: My speculative take on it is that this was Hollywood liberals reacting against the dominant culture. The dominant culture was Biff Tanner and cheerleaders and football games, at least that’s how I experienced it. All of that stuff. Ferris was kind of an anomaly because he wasn’t a nerd, he was a cool kid. I was Cameron. That was reality. I wished that I was like Judd Hirsch, but really I was Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club. I think all that you mentioned was sort of a wish fulfillment by Hollywood white Jewish male elites shaping the culture.

MO: So at some point, the goal of being an architect disappeared. You went to Columbia College of Columbia University, which I’ve heard is in the news lately. At some point you got religious and other stuff?

JM: Yeah, I think gay people experience the closet in many different ways. My experience was pretty typical, except that it would also spread to the rest of my life. I didn’t come out till very late. I came out to myself in my early 20s. I started coming out to the rest of the world at age 27, 28. That period in my 20s, there were two lives: there was what I really wanted, and then there was what I was doing. What I really wanted, obviously, was to be out and to be able to have romantic and sexual relationships. I wasn’t doing that.

What I also really wanted was to be the poet. I didn’t understand spirituality the way I do today, but I’d always been drawn to it. I can’’ quite remember the name of the podcast, but there’s a podcast about a kind of magic and weirdos where the host always starts out the way you’ve just started out. Tell me about your childhood. Were you that weird kid who used to go wandering in the woods? And I was that kid. There were those pieces, the kind of the spiritual piece, the romantic piece, the artistic piece, but all of those were secret.

And so I went to Columbia with the thought of maybe going into politics. I was already very environmentally left at that time and concerned. Eventually, in my junior year of college, which I spent in England, there felt like there was a fork in the road for me because I was starting to think about what to do after college. The way I understood the fork in the road then was graduate school to do English literature or law school to save the planet. I chose law school. And it didn’t have a messianic view. I didn’t think that I personally would save the planet. I was just on the team that was working to make things better.

The third option was that I was a writer. I wanted to write and experience all kinds of religious and spiritual things. But it didn’t seem like that was an available option. I didn’t think we were going to talk about my therapy so much on this episode, but I do trace that to just the wider impact of repression and self hatred on how I lived at that time. And so it found an outlet.

I also had a very typical kind of Jewish spirituality narrative in a certain way, which was I became what some people call a nightstand Buddhist, which means I would read Buddhist books that would sit on the nightstand. I didn’t do any practice. I took a class called Introduction to Eastern Religions as an undergraduate and really resonated with some of what was in there. And then I discovered that a lot of these same spiritual contemplative practices were in Judaism as well.

Ten years later I would come to understand that they were in Judaism itself because people influenced by those other traditions, Art Green, et cetera themselves had kind of found the Jewish, or created the Jewish version of it. I didn’t know that at the time. And so it seemed like a lot of what I wanted from that contemplative, spiritual, mystical stuff I’d been reading also was in my root tradition.

I remember when I was in England that year at Oxford, Cambridge that they have long vacations. I went to Egypt for a while and then went to Israel. In Israel, I just felt—and this is going to sound really Zionist—at home in Israel in a way that I never had before.

The way I understand a lot of American right wing Zionism I think is colored by that experience. I’ve had that kind of experience of this is where it all fits together. In my senior year, after I was a finalist for the Rhodes but didn’t get it, I got a fellowship to go to Israel. I spent a year in Israel and the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem, which is kind of a liberal Orthodox quasi yeshiva, but it’s also co-ed yeshiva which gave me permission to lead a Jewish halachic lifestyle without suspending my disbelief in things like the Torah had been written by God and given to the children of Israel on Mount Sinai, which I knew just couldn’t possibly be true for a variety of reasons. I had that permission slip.

And then people ask me sometimes, “Did you stay in the closet because you were Orthodox or Orthodox practicing?” Actually it’s the opposite: I became Orthodox practicing because I was in the closet. I know many people in that world, even now, and certainly when people are younger, this intense spiritual, emotional community that was really holistic. It really encompassed everything. It was the community and Shabbat dinners and learning halacha, Jewish law in yeshiva, living in Israel, and living that whole life gave me… There’s a few years before you really need to settle down and get married and have children in that world. And in that, I would call it a liminal period, there was this really rich sublimated eroticism. It wasn’t eroticism, but the emotional and spiritual and sublimated erotic life of that kind of religion is something that I experienced for several years and I still resonate with, even though I don’t even want that today.

MO: When you look at people who identify as queer and orthoprax, Orthodox orthoprax, people who are living that lifestyle and are saying they’re gay or same sex attracted, and that’s a community, a growing community, what do you make of them? Because that could have been you. There are people who say, “I’m queer and I’m doing Orthodoxy in communities as best I can.” And there are Orthodox communities, as you know, that go to all the lengths they can within certain communal parameters of saying, “We’re welcoming to these people. Maybe we won’t officiate at their wedding, but we’ll do this and that, and we’ll let them do this and that.” What do you make of that compromise? If it’s a compromise?

JM: There are a lot of versions of that compromise. I know people who are my age, in their 50s, and who have been in a glass closet their whole lives. One person I’m thinking of is male and he has a very kind of effeminate manner. You spend 30 seconds, you’re like, this person is obviously homosexual. Open secrets are pretty well tolerated in parts of the Orthodox community as long as it doesn’t disturb the overall community and its overall values. There’s not an ask, a request to change any of the values. It’s between him and Hashem, it’s between him and God.

There’s a certain kind of tolerance that exists that’s at one end. But then I also have friends who are at the other end of the openness spectrum who are in committed relationships with children, same sex partners, and push and pull with their Orthodox community. They’re much more demanding of their communities for some kind of recognition, and they’ve achieved it.

I co-founded an Orthodox LGBTQ organization called Eshel, named after the big welcoming tree that Abraham welcomed, strangers underneath the tree. And that’s going well under new leadership. I haven’t been involved in many years, and it’s thriving. There is a range of options within the situation you’ve described.

When I was involved in that work, which for me was around 2003 to 2013, that’s when I worked as an LGBTQ activist. That was my job. I would counsel people and it would really be very varied. There was one kid who was the first of 10 children, and he was very gay. His father had sent him to sex workers, female sex workers, to try to get him to become straight. That had the effect you might expect, he was under enormous pressure. Were he to come out, it would ruin the shiduchim, it would ruin the matches for his siblings. It would ruin all of those other people’s lives. I found myself in this insane position of counseling him to remain in the closet for a few more years, even though it was kind of a glass closet.

And that is what he did. He did eventually come out, but he did wait. And that it’s hard to have a clear answer to how to conduct oneself in that kind of a situation. Then there were other people who I also would counsel in a kind of pastoral or rabbinic way for whom coming out was clearly the thing that I felt was going to be beneficial for them, so I would advise them in that direction.

I also became alienated from the Orthodox Jewish community for other reasons. It didn’t seem to work ethically. I was finding other ways to access the same kind of spirituality that didn’t require the kind of tightness of the Jewish legal method. Also politics. I was in Israel for the disengagement from Gaza, and everybody who was religious was extremely against that.

Of course, it’s interesting to look back on that now from where we sit this year. There were a number of other things that kind of gently nudged me out of that lifestyle. I was pretty done with it by the time I was 30. And then I did come out.

MO: I listened to you talk about your gayness, which is not something we’ve talked a lot about, even though we’ve known each other since I was 20 when I was in the class you TA’d and you were in law school and I was an undergrad and you were working as a TA for a philosophy of religion class.

It occurs to me like it’s inflected everything, it’s inflected the Judaism, what you did with your law degree, the activism and so forth. The fact that I don’t think about my straightness—and this is probably some form of what Jess Rao calls something like “The White Dream Time” with regard to race. Like, of course, if you’re white, you don’t think about being white. I don’t think much about being straight. To hear you talk about your career sounds like queerness is omnipresent. Is it a gift? Are you glad for it now? It was something you tried to wish away for a long time, it sounds like.
JM: Yeah, I did. For 10 years, Yom Kippur was only about one subject for me for many years. I literally prayed to God to make me straight. I wanted to live that life in that Jewish community.

I wrote all this up in a book called God vs. Gay?, which to this day remains my best selling book and was written after I’d come out. I talk about that experience of seeing this polarity and seeing also how it’s replicated in political culture, where at the time, and even today I would say, the loudest voices on the anti gay-side were religious and the loudest voices on the pro-gay side were secular. Where do you go if you’re a religious queer person?

I think I’ve definitely come to appreciate it as a gift. Certainly not what I asked for. I agree with the take that it just informed everything. I definitely wonder how it might have been different had there not been that sense of otherness.

The other generational divide is that I was working during the period around marriage battles. I think national same sex marriage will be overturned. I don’t think there will be same sex marriage in red states within two, three years. However, with a lot of the social status and the lack of stigma that there is today I think it has changed for good in blue states. But I was on the other side of that for 20 years, certainly as a kid, and then in my 20s and even in my 30s as it changed.

I do think it colored everything. I don’t work on queer issues now professionally, and I’ve moved a little away—though not as much as you have, my friend—but I have moved a little away from the harder left, where queerness is understood in a particular way. So it’s past and present.

It’s interesting around trans stuff too. I felt a lot of pull to kind of get back into that fight. But I can’t speak from a first person perspective on it, so it’s what I can do to be an ally. And I have done that at times. But it also is so challenging, to put it mildly. The blowback and the hate that I get whenever I step into that arena is so intense that I haven’t done that.

Last thing I’ll say, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head in the seeing one’s own—the woke word is privilege, right? When we’re in the privileged group, we don’t see it. I never thought about being white, and I see it show up. I think obviously there was maybe an excess of this discourse in the last five years, but it did help me see what I wasn’t seeing and just having black friends tell me how they see things.

I remember one of the biggest moments for me was when I was in law school during the O.J. Simpson trial. Me and all my white friends knew that he was obviously guilty. But several of my black classmates really saw it the other way. I remember that was the first time where I was like, “Wow, we’re really living in different realities. For them it wasn’t that they necessarily saw him as innocent, but that they saw Mark Fuhrman, the racist cop, and the whole problem process as completely compromised. That even if O.J. did it factually that he should surely be found not guilty because of—we didn’t use the term systemic racism at the time—the way that racism infected that entire process made it impossible for him, they felt, to be found guilty.

MO: Jay Michaelson what a dude. We’ll be back with a little more Jay Michelson in just a minute, but first, some other business.

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In upcoming episodes of Arc: The Podcast, I will be interviewing my old friend Molly Worthen, who is the author of a new book on political charisma. And I’ve already recorded an interview with journalist Nicholas Carr, who is the author of The Shallows, one of the great books of internet skepticism, and of the new book Superbloom, which is about the ways that social media drives us apart. I think it’s not an overstatement to say that Nicholas Carr is a prophet. I can’t wait to share that podcast with you.

Meanwhile, go over to arcmag.org where we have posted some terrific stuff lately. For example, we have an article up called “The Disappearance of the Closeted Clergyman,” in which we report on a study that predicts that the proportion of gay men in the American Catholic priesthood, which was once arguably a majority, will decline to something like 2 or 3% by the middle of this century. What happens when the priesthood gets straighter and more conservative than ever?

When you’re done with that piece, navigate over to Maggie Phillips’s article “I Pledge Allegiance,” in which she examines the evolving role of the Pledge of Allegiance in American schools. Maggie discusses how the tradition of saying the pledge has become less prominent, especially after the COVID 19 pandemic, which pushed so many students out of school. And it’s not like they were saying the Pledge of Allegiance on Zoom.

We’ve also posted a review of The White Lotus. Now, I know that if you’re a big White Lotus fan, you’ve already watched the whole thing and probably read 20 recaps and already processed it. But here’s the thing: have you read a review of The White Lotus by somebody who actually studied Thai Buddhism, the kind that we encounter in the show? Well, Matthew Gindon is a serious student of Thai Buddhism, and in his piece for arcmag.org, he discusses what Mike White’s TV show gets right and what it gets wrong about the Thai Buddhist tradition.

All of that and more at arcmag.org. Check us out.

And now back to my interview with Jay Michaelson.

It’s interesting that you say that you’ve moved a little bit away from the left, but not as far as me. This is a kind of ongoing joke between us where you think that I’ve crossed over to some, I don’t know, right wing place, a “reactionary, centrist place” to use the term you used earlier. We all see ourselves as not having changed, it’s always the world that has changed around us. I’ve been sane. I’ve been sane since birth and held consistent positions. But the world has changed. That’s what we all flatter ourselves to think.

But I do have a lifelong annoyance with people who, I think, are putting politics ahead of truth. Of course, most people would say that about themselves, but I do think it’s kind of my central romance. This comes out of my own background of having relatives who had been communist to the point of being kind of Stalin apologists and seeing what I took to be—

JM: You have tankie relatives.

MO: What’s a ‘tankie’?

JM: Tankie refers to the socialists or communists who are always right, regardless of whatever. So it’s like the tankies are supportive of the current American policy on Ukraine because the Russians were right all along.

MO: Oh, interesting. Yeah, I mean, I had my grandpa, whom I adoreds. Of the three grandparents I knew, he was the one I was closest to, and I adore him and in some ways got me into the middling religious observance that I have because after he died, I started going to synagogue to say Kaddish for him in the year afterwards, I thought, “Well, no one else is. I should go.” And I adored my grandpa.

But he was hopelessly unwilling to admit that maybe Russian Communism hadn’t worked out for the best. It was like trying to pull teeth and he kind of ironized it and rolled his eyes. It’s like on some level he knew, but he had been so deeply trained not to say it that he couldn’t say it.

Even just talking about this, I wonder if this was a central thing for me. Maybe it was. The specifics of him being so wonderful a human and such a mensch, and yet being willing to just look at me and lie, or wink at me in some way, but couldn’t speak truth was very kind of arresting and discombobulating for me.

So I look at the left and I think of that woman, I think she was from the ACLU, when she was testifying in front of Congress. Some Republican senator, this was maybe two years ago, was trying to get her to admit that on average men are stronger. They were debating trans women in sports. She simply wouldn’t say it. She’s like, “Well, what about Serena Williams?” And he’s like, “Okay, there are some very fine female athletes, but on average?” Look, he was taking the line of questioning to nefarious places probably, and he was not acting in good faith. All those qualifications are baked in. But she couldn’t say what was obviously true to any human.

I guess I would just say that my frustration with the left is more just that I see a lot of lying and that makes me think less of a lot of people who are doing the lying. And I feel the same way about the right.

I’m trying to understand why you’re less frustrated. Do you see less prevarication? Do you just see it as so much worse on the other side? Where is the daylight between me and you on our attitude toward that?

JM: First of all, I love that story. I think I actually have the—I was going to say opposite, but it’s like a complimentary distaste for some of what’s on the left now. So your grandfather was really nice, but untruthful. I find a lot of the left discourse today really somewhat truthful and really mean spirited and angry.

I have a pretty strong view against what’s happened in Gaza for the last 18 months, but there’s lots of ways in which that can be demonstrated against, discussed, described. And there is a radical chic impulse on the left, like go to the most possible, awful, incendiary, dehumanizing, “I refuse to see multiple sides.”

And that’s true on the right also. I mean there’s a dehumanization of the people in Gaza that’s widespread. I was just talking to an orthodox friend of mine and it was really hard. He doesn’t really have these views, but he was just sharing that people are just like, kill them all. Pave over Gaza.

The loss of empathy is on both sides, but let’s focus on the left because that’s what we’re talking about. But there’s no space for any humanity. And it kind of comes from this cancel culture vibe of like the horrible thing must be taken away, must be pushed away.

I think it’s funny, you know, Jonathan Haidt, another of your fellow reactionary centrists, I think one of his real insights, which he stole from other researchers, was that the right is more obsessed with people purity than the left. But the left one shows up in weird places.

I think he was right and wrong about that. I think the leftist obsession with purity shows up in cancel culture, in safe space. I believe in safe space as a real thing, but there’s also safe space as a “Take the leper out of the camp.” Get this thing out of here, it’s a moral disgust. Not “I am actually unsafe because there’s something happening,” which I’m actually kind of on board with. It is “Get the leper away from me” and the leper is the person with the slightly less left view that maybe we could see the humanity on both sides or something like that.

It’s like the complementary version of your view. Maybe you know the term, I keep trying to look at this term up and if we don’t know, we need to invent it. It’s the phenomenon where the right says something about how the left behaves, which is not really true, and then behaves that way. It has happened on Israel-Palestine. I just was in a very difficult exchange about something where there was a claim from a center right Jew that this wasn’t a safe space for Jews. It was aping the reality and the caricature of the left, but now on the right side. That’s also happened in a very serious way. You mentioned Columbia, losing $4 million in funding. That’s also a claim of there’s a legal version of that. This is violating civil rights law because they’re not making a safe space for Jews, they’re allowing discrimination against Jews. It’s no longer just a petty irritation on the free press, it’s like government policy has now taken this imitation of the left.

MO: It’s hard to place blame. It shouldn’t be collective. Of course, we can’t name the individuals properly, but isn’t there a kind of blanket of blame that hangs over the left for just having refused to be grown ups?

The left did create this specific version of being kind of juvenile ninnies where certain words we have to run screaming and we report professors. This is real. There aren’t thousands of cases, but there are hundreds. I’ve come close to being in the crosshairs of this. I’ve thought a student would be mad about something, that they would go to the student newspaper or to the dean and say, “He used this academic scholarly word, but it made me uncomfortable.” Three or four years ago, it felt like that could end your career, and it’s not like there were lots of voices saying, “Well, this is not how grownups behave.” Instead there was a lot of trying to understand and have both sides. Isn’t there some way in which this is coming to bite Columbia in the butt for a culture that really was the culture on the ground for five years or so?

JM: I think the biggest disagreement that I’ve had with you over the last 10 years has been the magnitude of that. There are always young people who go to the extreme.

I saw that as an undergraduate at Columbia. I remember one of the fights we had at Columbia was that the black students organization was bringing Professor Griff, who was an overt anti-semite and had been a member of Public Enemy, to the campus. There were a lot of fights over platforming people who were bad.
Then were students who behaved abominably with right leaning academic speakers. That happened at Yale, it happened at law school, it’s happened all over the place. I think a lot of it was a reaction to Trump. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out over the next few years. There was just this sense of trying to grab power back. You know, like that Maxine Waters thing. These people had no power to really affect things, but they had these little fiefdoms where they could exercise tyrannical power. And so they did.

MO: Let me interrupt you. I actually don’t think we disagree on the magnitude. I think we disagree on the role of adults when 20 year olds behave stupidly. What I saw at the institutions I was affiliated with for that period was adults saying, “Obviously they’re being stupid, but they have Twitter accounts. They can make things really difficult for us.” It can be as picky and as trivial as “If our grad students are upset, they’ll persuade all the grad students we’ve just admitted not to come next year. It could affect our yield.”

JM: Someone actually said that?

MO: Oh, absolutely. I had this conversation with department chairs saying, “Shouldn’t you issue a statement about this, about free speech, or shouldn’t you just tell that grad student they’re being ridiculous, and no, we’re not going to convene a committee.” What they said was basically, “They have the power right now. They know how to manipulate social media, they know how to call the press. We’re not going to say that.” I just saw people running for cover. I guess I always feel like maybe you’re in denial about the extent of that.

JM: I don’t disagree with these anecdotes. You were there. At the same time as those things were happening, it just didn’t seem as big of a deal as you made of it. I’m not saying it wasn’t a big deal. You’re not complaining about the 20 year olds, you’re complaining about the grown ups not censuring the 20 year olds. I don’t know that that nuance is shared among your—I’ll stop calling you a reactionary centrist even though you sort of are one.

MO: I know people who are in that world for whom, whether they would put it this way or not, if more people on the self identified left, or the NPR left, were just able to do what my grandpa wouldn’t, which is to be willing to be quoted for, and not be delicate about, and not pay fealty to the activists and say, “They’re being stupid.” That these people would feel more comfortable still on the left.

Let me put it this way. There should be a term for the difference between what people will tell you when the mic is turned off, when they’re off the record, and what they’re willing to say. The gap there, say three years ago, with a lot of my lefty kind of college professor friends was enormous.
JM: I’m in that space right now on the right. I have views about how antisemitism is being weaponized and distorted, but I won’t say them on the mic because of the threats against my institution, Harvard University. So that is already the case. I don’t see this as left-right. I just see this as power. And I don’t see fire coming to my destination.

MO: I think they would. I could be wrong, but I think they would.

JM: No, I’m low on the totem pole. My inclination is to ask you not to use these two minutes. That’s where it’s at. The chilling effect is very real. I don’t see Bari Weiss coming to my defense. On the contrary, they’re saying that Khalil should be deported.

A friend of mine who’s more left than I am commented on a social media post that what troubles him the most is that he gets called a supporter of Hamas all the time. He’s Jewish guy, he’s not a supporter of Hamas, but he’s further left and I think he uses the word genocide to describe the Gaza operation. That’s where he is on the ideological thing. I mean he is called that. And if being called a Hamas supporter is grounds under the McCarthyist act, that’s being used to deport Khalil, maybe he’s right. And you know, there are plenty of people who call me a supporter of Hamas.

To go back to something you said that really does resonate with me: I’m overly attached to truth, and it really pisses me off and it upsets me. Since the Trump inauguration, if we did a scale from the merely annoying, to the good, there’s a couple of good things, and then things from the good to the merely annoying, like replacing the Kennedy Center and turning it into like the Tet Nugent fan club. That’s on the annoying level, but nobody’s dying. Culture is dying, but nobody’s dying. Then there’s the really grievous bad stuff, like destroying all the climate change stuff, to the people are dying level, like putting people who are here legally in some kind of a weird camp in the jungles of Panama.

If we did that spectrum, what I’m most upset about doesn’t correlate with the spectrum of harm because I so overweigh the attacks on truth. There was a letter that Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and those kinds of guys sent to the American Bar Association saying why they were not going to even look at American Bar Association statements about the qualifications of judicial nominees.

It was just filled with so many lies, one of which was about the “genital mutilation of children,” by which they were trying to talk about trans people. I hasten to add, bottom surgery is illegal for people under 18 and is never performed. The lies in that one letter…Is the world that much worse, that far right senators will not look at the ABA recommendations? No. But that does keep me up at night.

It just kills me the way that Elon Musk magnifies lies, the way that DOGE is lying about the things that they’ve uncovered. It’s just subjectively that’s as enraging as the actual human rights abuses.

MO: My general take on this is that the left was super McCarthyite for about five years, and there was a month or so where it looked as if some version of Trumpism was going to lift that pall, but be too incompetent to put in a New McCarthyism. And that was wrong. And then it turned out that actually there’s no actual principle on the Trump right at this point.

There’s no libertarian principle, or small government, or states rights, or federalism principle that in fact they want to go in and micromanage and destroy lives in some ways more pernicious than the way the left was doing it, but that feel to me entirely analogous. What I want back is 1996, where Saturday Night Live could make any joke it wanted and there was no huge social cost to pay. I just think that was a better world. I just think it would be better in some ways.

JM: But I was on the receiving end of that joke. You know, they made faggot jokes all the time.

I don’t know if that was entirely a better world. I agree that MeToo went a little far. We can pick our celebrities who we think were wrongly pilloried by the MeToo movement, but I wouldn’t want to go back to Harvey Weinstein feeling that he had carte blanche to do what he did.

And I remember feeling that after Black Lives Matter, too. I was like, “Alright, this is the reaction. It’s a little out of hand.” I remember when defund the police was happening, and I thought this is not going to stay because black communities don’t want to defund the police either. This is a segment, this is a voice that is speaking some truth to abuses, but that does not have a program for the future.

MO: But let me just throw this thought experiment at you. I went to college. I graduated in 1996. A year ahead of me, maybe two, was Naomi Rao, now a federal judge. She was often talked about as a Trump appointee to the Supreme Court. You know, Indian American, quite right wing. She was the campus right winger at the time. Maybe we had a dozen campus sort of activist right wingers who would write the conservative op-eds for the Yale Daily News and take those positions at political union debates. There were a lot more people who voted for Bush, but there were a few who were the real activists.

You know, she probably had anti gay marriage positions. She had all sorts of positions that would be seen as reactionary today. We teased her about it, we joked with her about it, we drank with her. There was a lot of amity. There was no sense that she was othered or couldn’t find a date or couldn’t find a roommate or whatever.

Again, I’m a few years younger than you, so the ability for people to come out of the closet was a little bit more advanced than it had been when you were in college. I had plenty of friends who came out like freshman year. That was a big thing. My roommate sophomore year was a gay guy who had come out at the end of freshman year and then by sophomore year was fully out. It just felt like on a lot of registers in terms of the way we could talk about race, the way we could talk about sexuality, the way we could talk about just left versus right.

It just felt super free. It didn’t feel like there was a huge amount at stake, but it just felt like people could joke and talk and argue. There was no kind of fog hanging over at all. Does that strike you as an incredibly naive or biased reading of that time?

JM: You know, neither of us are undergrads right now, I’m not sure that that is absent. There was some good data coming out of one of the centrist substacks looking at some data about what college students actually thought about the Palestine protests. And most of them just did not give a shit.

First of all, there weren’t even protests at the vast majority of universities. Only 10-20% of university students even saw them because they weren’t at the large state universities. Then even of those who saw them, most were just like, “These people are very annoying.” They were anti protest when they interfered with life. It was a much more realistic and, I found, consoling view than this.

It is bizarre. My nephew’s about to graduate from Columbia and he actually wrote an article that I advised him not to publish, which was the right move about how people kept asking him if he’s okay. He’s Jewish, he’s like, “I’m fine. Things are fine. If you walk right next to a protest, you might hear things that upset you.” He was like, “You know who’s not fine are my Palestinian friends, they are not fine. Their families are being bombed.” I just think there was this weird moment.

There’s something about the college campus that leads to this bizarre distortion. And we’ve now seen it from the left and the right. And so I don’t know that it’s as bad as the ones you were saying earlier make it out to be. I don’t think students really don’t feel that free.

There are ways that normal, free conversations happen, that tell people that set the boundaries for
what’s good and what’s not good, what’s okay, what’s not okay. If you imagine, I hope this won’t sound too personal, turning this around, but if you imagine a conversation of 10 people and they’re like, “I don’t know, I think Jews really do have too much power. All the Jews I know are really pretty fucking greedy and they’re really obnoxious and they. They talk really loud. I see why people, like, hate them all the time.” You might feel a little weird about stepping about, standing up for your minority status in that group if you were the only person there, whether it was students of color, queer students.

You could very well be the only person with that identity who’s in that thing. Again, I hasten to say, does that mean microaggression is the worst thing in the world? No. Does it mean everyone has to be progressive, or called out? No. For me, it’s still 50-50. But whatever the ratio, and even if it’s 70-30, whatever that 30% of truthfulness is, I think it was in the air in 1996. I think it would be great if people like you and me could be defining what the middle is here between Trumpism and Wokeism.

MO: Okay, Jay Michaelson, do you believe in God? And if so, what does that mean?

JM: I hate to not give a yes or no answer to your yes or no question. I think God is a way of describing the universe and the way of relating to the universe that perceives personality, that perceives, in the Hindu formulation sat chit ananda, being consciousness bliss, in something about the nature of the transpersonal. That is to say, not something just that I’m imagining or experiencing. I do have that experience. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 30 years finding different ways to access that perception and experience in the experience. It definitely feels absolutely correct that this consciousness is real and not merely me. That’s one way of defining the word God.

I would also say, like my teacher, Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi said, I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in.

MO: How do you make a living? Where does your money come from?

JM: I am a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and my husband works in fundraising research for a large healthcare institution.

MO: If you could have any other career, realistically, not like being Aquaman or an Olympic sprinter, but something that would have been doable at some point, what would it be?

JM: Working in a White House office doing policy, probably actually environmental policy. My friend Matt Nocanchuk was just working in the Biden White House and was one of the point people on stopping censorship of school libraries. Obviously the momentum is in the other direction right now and that felt like a great job.

MO: What’s a big regret you have?
JM: There’s so many.

MO: Pick one. And by big it can be actually a trivial matter, but it looms large in your consciousness.

JM: Not coming out 10 years earlier.

MO: Two more what is your most general piece of advice that you would give even strangers on how to live? Let’s say you can grab them for one minute and they say, “Jay, you seem saner and better adjusted than me or happier. What should I do?”

Like for me, I would say get off social media. It’s quick, it’s actionable, people understand it. It’ll make sense to most people. What would your one piece of advice be?

JM: Mine might not make as much sense, but it’s recognizing that a lot of what we take for granted in our minds and our hearts is not an unchangeable factory setting. Happiness is a skill. Finding groundedness is a skill. And skills can be learned. So the advice is to find what tools or technologies or practices help you do that.

From playing golf to meditation to psychedelics to religion to cooking, it’s ensuring that, as Audre Lorde said, self care is part of our work in the world, it’s not indulgence. It can be indulgence, but in balance, finding ways to be resilient in the world in which we live is really worth the effort.

MO: Finally, name a song that invokes for you an intense feeling of nostalgia.

JM: “Buckets of Rain” by Bob Dylan.

MO: What does it bring up? Any particular time of life or scene or perhaps.

JM: Blood on the Tracks is one of the all time great albums and we talked about my past a lot in this episode. There was a time when I was making music and it’s not the best song on Blood on the Tracks, but there’s something in the poetry of it that does bring me back.

There are a lot of songs which bring me a lot of nostalgia, but that one does bring me back to a period in my 20s and 30s where I was unfolding and awakening to emotional sensitivity that I had not experienced previously. And there’s just something about the beautiful sadness of that song that makes that feel new, makes me feel young in that way.

MO: Right on. Okay, Jay Michelson, thanks so much.

JM: It’s been fun.

MO: What a treat. What a pleasure. If you have thoughts on my interview with Jay Michaelson, please write to me at mark.o@wustl.edu. Jay Michelson is the author of many books and of the Substack newsletter, Both/And.

In religion news, in the upcoming week we are in the midst of Ridvan, a festival in the Baha’I faith. Catholics will begin thinking about who their new Pope is going to be. On April 24, Jews and others will celebrate Holocaust Remembrance Day and on April 26, Catholics will take note of the Saints day of both Saint Cletus and Saint Marcellinus. Saint Marcellinus, you surely know, is reputed to have offered incense to the Roman gods and then repented for which the Romans killed him. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. But at least he got his martyrdom and now has his Saints Day.

Thanks for listening. Arc: The Podcast is hosted by me, Mark Oppenheimer. The show is produced and edited by David “Big Dave” Sugarman, audio consulting by Robert Scaramuccia, intern help by Caroline Coffey and Aaryan Kumar.

Our head of communications at the Danforth center is Deborah Kennard, and the leadership of the Danforth Center includes Mark Valeri and Abram Van Engen. Our music is by Love Canon and web designed by Cause + Effect.

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