Jewish American Heritage Month and Marijuana

President Biden has proclaimed May 2023 as Jewish American Heritage Month, calling upon all  Americans to "learn more about the heritage and contributions of Jewish Americans."

So being a patriotic (actually, more matriartic) American, I looked at my list of cannabis connoisseurs at VeryImportantPotheads.com, as well as this blog, and came up with an impressive list of Jewish Americans who have contributed to society while taking the THC molecule that was discovered by Israeli scientist Raphael Mechoulam.  

Maybe it's true that the Burning Bush that spoke to Moses was cannabis or his anointing oil contained it, because President Richard Nixon (strangely) observed to his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman on May 26, 1971, "You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists."

As revealed by Boston Globe writer Dan Abrams, Nixon had been briefed that morning on the book Marihuana Reconsidered by Jewish psychiatrist Dr. Lester Grinspoon, a Harvard professor. The landmark book "helped launch the contemporary movement to legalize the drug, lending Ivy League credibility to a cause more associated with hippie counterculture than serious medical research," wrote Abrams. 

But psychiatrists are not the only Jewish Americans associated with marijuana. 

Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein) authored The Day of the Locust with its marijuana references in 1937. Playwright Lillian Hellman (pictured) used marijuana medicinally and recreationally in the 1970s. Norman Mailer spoke freely about his pot use, and Beat Generation author Allen Ginsberg famously wrote  "The Great Marijuana Hoax: First Manifesto to End the Bringdown" in 1966. 

In music, Jewish clarinetist and author Mezz Mezzrow was the infamous pot dealer to stars like Louis Armstrong. The "King of Swing" Benny Goodman, the 9th child of 12 born to a Jewish tailor in Chicago, recorded Mary Lou Williams's "Roll 'Em" in 1937 and stood by his drummer Gene Krupa when he was busted for pot. 

Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman) famously turned the Beatles onto marijuana in 1964. Paul Simon used marijuana and wrote songs like "Late in the Evening" about it. Art Garfunkel, who was busted for pot in in 2004, said of the attempt to deport John Lennon, ostensibly over an old marijuana bust in England, "If John Lennon is deported, I'm leaving too... with my musicians... and my marijuana." Dr. Grinspoon testified at Lennon's trial. 

Bette Midler, who grew up in the only Jewish family in her Hawaiian neighborhood, planned to tape a joint underneath every seat of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles for her New Year's Eve show in 1975/76, to celebrate California's pending decriminalization law. Midler plays a pot-puffing psychiatrist What Women Want and turns Meg Ryan onto pot in The Women.  

Jewish comedians abound, and The Marx Brothers carried marijuana in their "Grouch bags" during their vaudeville days (according to Chico in this clip). Fearless comedian Lenny Bruce got turned onto pot as a merchant marine in the 1940s and joked about it long before it was cool. Lewis Black wrote of his first pot experience: "I felt at one with the universe. I had never felt this before. Delusional or not, it was something I never found at the temple and it has been a comfort to me ever since." Jack Black too is Jewish and a weed fan.  

Joan Rivers, a Hadassah Woman of the Year, was a Jewish comedienne who indulged. Roseanne Barr and Sarah Silverman are two other funny Jewish women who enjoy weed, and Chelsea Handler is half Jewish. Because he dated Silverman, many think that Jimmy Kimmel is Jewish; he joked on 4/20 "the High Holy Day" that it's also known as "Hashashana, Bong Kippur, Happy Chronica….where parents leave milk and cookies out for themselves."

Adam Sandler's Hanukkah Song #4 has the lyric "Smoke your medical Chronikka" and mentions Adam Levine and Ben & Jerry, who have been putting out pro-legalization campaigns; Ben Cohen has now launched a low-THC brand aimed at addressing equity. 

Bill Maher, a longtime proponent of legalization, is half Jewish, and of course there is Seth Rogen, who makes no bones about smoking his bones, moving from making successful films like Pineapple Express into starting a cannabis company that also sells smoking accoutrements designed around his pot-tery. Rogen said he didn't smoke with Barbra Streisand when they made a movie together; she says she's rarely she smoked pot, although she did with Peter Sellers. 

Actor Tony Curtis (né Bernard Schwartz) was caught with pot in the 1970s, saying it was common among his crowd at the time. Carrie Fisher wrote that her father Eddie Fisher was a "puff daddy." She is said to have smoked too-strong (hallucinogenic?) pot with quarter-Jewish Harrison Ford, who's never admitted that he smokes, despite Maher and others calling for him to do so. Paul Michael Glaser (Fiddler on the Roof, Starsky and Hutch) was caught smoking weed in Kentucky in 2012; Mila Kunis, Kate Hudson and Natalie Portman are actresses of Jewish descent who've admitted to puffing pot.  

Noted architect Frank Gehry is a marijuana fan, and a Jew. In the field of science, physicist and author Richard Feynman wrote of taking marijuana and ketamine at John Lilly's sensory deprivation tanks, as a means of studying consciousness. Oliver Sacks (Awakenings), explored the neurology of drugs, including cannabis, in both his life and work. And Carl Sagan, who popularized science in his books and TV shows like Cosmos, also wrote about using marijuana, beginning with an essay his friend Dr. Grinspoon published in Marihuana Reconsidered. 

 

Grinspoon's son Peter has carried on his father's work, publishing Seeing Through Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles the Truth About Marijuana on 4/20 this year and posting on his Twitter feed this week a 1981 article in which his father, who also wrote a book titled Psychedelics Reconsidered, called for psychiatrists to conduct research into the use of LSD. 

Marijuana activists of Jewish descent include Jack Herer, author of The Emperor Wears No Clothes: Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy, "Ask Ed" Rosenthal, Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, Mara Gordon of Aunt Zelda's, author Julie Holland MD, musician/performer/activist Jeffrey Stonehill, Amanda Reiman of Personal Plants, Cannabis Action Network co-founder and entrepreneur Debby Goldsberry, and Steve Bloom of CelebStoner, who also organizes NYC's Annual Cannabis Parade & Rally. 

I learned from cannabis activist Mikki Norris (pictured) of Tikkun olam, a concept in Judaism referring to various forms of action intended to repair and improve the world. Responding to Nixon's question, Norris writes, "The matter with the Jews is that our religious tenets, culture and shared history give us a special sensitivity and an understanding that working against social injustice and for human and civil rights is the right thing to do. Through centuries of being scapegoated and persecuted, we have learned that it is wrong to identify groups of people for unequal treatment, demonization and incarceration because they are a minority or not part of the mainstream. So, it’s not surprising that Jews are overrepresented in social justice causes." Norris points out that many Jewish lawyers have advanced the cannabis cause, as have Jewish politicians like Chuck Schumer and Jared Polis. The same is true of doctors, like Bonni Goldstein, MD, author of Cannabis is Medicine. 

Watching Jerry Seinfeld remark on "Spirit in the Sky" being written by a guy named Norman Greenberg made be wonder if that song is a gentle, rockin'/psychedelic jab at the Christian idea of an afterlife, something that's not part of the Jewish religion. Thus, the ideal is to work for a heaven on earth, something that could lead one to activism. 

Jewish-American historian Gerda Lerner wrote in The Creation of the Patriarchy (1986) that, following the dethroning of the powerful goddesses and their replacement by a dominant male god in most Near Eastern societies, "The emergence of Hebrew monotheism takes the form of an attack of the widespread cults of the various fertility goddesses. In the writing of the Book of Genesis, creativity and procreativity are ascribed to an all-powerful God, whose epitaphs of 'Lord' and 'King' establish him as a male god, and female sexuality other than for procreative purposes becomes associated with sin and evil." 

It's a concept that laid the foundation for Christianity. too. Just look at how Jezebel has been treated, or Elizabeth Taylor's Jewish character in Ivanhoe.  Let's hope that the service of the Creator will in future include opening up to the idea that women and the healing and illuminating herbs they used throughout herstory are also godlike and sacred. A recent study found that a Judahite shrine dating to the 8th century B.C. was used to burn cannabis for ecstatic effect, and I hypothesize it was to worship an ancient goddess.