40 Under 40: Madison Margolin Is Verklempt

Considering that we only comprise roughly two percent of the planet’s population, Jewish people have made an outsized impact on the American entertainment industry. That said, even in Hollywood—maybe even especially in Hollywood—there’s an unseen balancing act between two timeless, if somewhat ironic, questions: “Is it good for the Jews” and “Is it too Jewish?”  

So, when the opportunity arose to speak with author and journalist Madison Margolin, whose prolific writing illuminates the intersection between Jewish spirituality and psychedelic experiences, I naturally wondered if my article might put us dangerously deep into the second column.  

Then I started thinking about the overwhelming number of other Jewish people I’ve met, worked with and interviewed through the world of weed, and it dawned on me: We’ve made a pretty outsized impact here as well. There’s a clip contained within the infamous “Nixon White House tapes” that captures President Nixon saying, “There’s a funny thing; every one of the bastards who’s out there to legalize marijuana is Jewish.”  

His remark wasn’t made in a charitable spirit—his immediate follow up was “What the Christ is the matter with the Jews?”—but it wasn’t exactly a lie either.  

Still, for this story to make sense, you must understand a few things about the Jewish experience, which is rather multifaceted. Thankfully, there’s a Jewish joke for every aspect of Jewish life, and Margolin’s seemingly idiosyncratic upbringing is no exception. Raised as a “HinJew” in the philosophical (and sometimes physical) orbit of Ram Dass, Margolin grew up with the spiritual teacher’s seminal New Age tome Be Here Now as a constant presence in her family’s home.  

Here’s the joke:   

An old Jewish woman flies from Brooklyn to Kathmandu and treks up the Himalayas until she reaches an ashram on a cliff, where a famous guru is sitting in silent meditation. Thousands of people have gathered there, seeking counsel from the great spiritual teacher, so the old woman waits in line for hours.  

As she nears the end of the line, an attendant lays out the rules: The woman may speak whatever words she wishes to the guru, but she may only speak three of them. 

The woman waits another hour or so, until finally she’s led to the very edge of the cliff, where the guru sits shirtless, legs folded, facing the great chasm below, eyes closed in wordless reflection. The old Jewish woman turns to the guru and—keeping to the three-word maximum outlined by the attendant—says, “Sheldon, come home.”  

See, despite comprising only two percent or so of the global population, the Jewish people have made an outsized impact on…Eastern religions? Oddly enough, yes.  

Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert, was a Jewish psychedelics researcher who experienced a spiritual metamorphosis that culminated in his pilgrimage across India and the Himalayas, ultimately transforming him into a pioneering voice of the religious counterculture. His gravitation towards Eastern systems of belief was emblematic of a spiritual longing felt by many post-Holocaust Jews—he often spoke of the “essential hollowness” of the cold, rote Jewish practice he was raised with—a feeling that led many erstwhile young Jews to seek answers elsewhere.  

Among them was Margolin’s father, Bruce Margolin, a criminal defense attorney who earned his place in the pantheon of California cannabis rights crusaders by defending thousands of people facing drug charges for weed, passionately advocating for legalization, and generally being one of those Jews Nixon was talking about.  

But he and Margolin’s mother both found themselves “spiritually unkindled” by their traditional Jewish upbringings, and like so many young Americans— Jewish or otherwise—they traveled to India. Incidentally, when Bruce (the New York Jew) got to India, he met Ram Dass (the Jew from Boston), sparking a lifelong friendship and spiritual connection to Hinduism filtered through Jewish practice and culture.  

While Margolin says Dass’ Be Here Now was always around growing up, the book’s core lessons didn’t fully click for her until she started experimenting with entheogens such as LSD and psilocybin as a teenager. 

“When I started using psychedelics, I discovered that Be Here Now is a perfect preparation and reintegration manual for the psychedelic experience,” Margolin says. “That experience really puts us into the here and now—if we take enough, I guess.”  

This unique perspective has led her on a journey of entheogenic exploration rooted in orthodox Jewish ritual and practice. She believes getting high isn’t just normal and natural, but a potentially holy experience.  

“There’s nothing wrong with getting high—humans have been altering their consciousness since the beginning of time,” Margolin says. “When you see a little kid spinning around in circles and laughing they’re getting high.” 

Margolin believes this innate human desire to shift our perception is the ideal foundation for creating sacred space in our daily lives—not by projecting ourselves into some cosmic void, but by deeply tapping into the connection between our body and spirit and being radically present in the moment.  

“It helps us identify with the soul, which exists well beyond the Ego, but that soul is also currently inhabiting a body on this planet,” she says, adding that a psychedelic trip “is the experience of the soul embodied.”  

She says when Swiss chemist (and father of LSD) Albert Hoffman referred to his famous “problem child” as “medicine for the soul,” he was expressing a broader truth about the deep spiritual healing potential of the psychedelic experience. And when it comes to the Jewish experience, that medicinal power is uniquely suited for “healing inherited trauma.” 

When it comes to cannabis, Margolin’s personal practice doesn’t utilize it extensively—she’s in the “CBD and an occasional spliff” camp—but she sees cannabis as a powerful tool for establishing and expanding a connection to the divine. She says she’s seen it work in her own family as a “nice, subtle tool for reinforcing sacred experiences.”  

“If you want to really internalize and sacralize a connection to God, cannabis is a great way to do it,” Margolin says. “My dad always does a little berakah [blessing] before he smokes. You stop and say thank you and appreciate where it’s coming from when you light and smoke your joint, and you take some space for yourself.” 

While Margolin’s an outspoken proponent of sacralizing the psychedelic experience, she’s adamant that all forms of entheogenic exploration have merit, and that it’s all about setting intentions.  

“Every time I’m asking myself, ‘Why am I doing this? Am I going to feel better? Have fun? Connect with the people I’m with?”  

Margolin says anything that intensifies the connection between the mind and body and amplifies your awareness of your placement within your body has the potential to reinforce your connection to the eternal. This has led her to enfold entheogens that aren’t strictly psychedelic into her spiritual practice, chief among them MDMA, which she says has enhanced her feeling connected during prayer—a feeling she’s now able to access with or without the chemical.  

One experience in particular stands out: She was at a campsite in the forests of Humboldt, CA, rolling on MDMA, when she received a phone call that her mother was in the hospital. 

“I was kind of freaking out at first, and all you can do is pray,” she says. “I was rocking back and forth and my friend said, ‘You’ve been shokeling this whole time’.” Shokeling is a rocking motion often performed by Orthodox Jews during prayer, and that intuitive motion made Margolin “feel connected to God.”  

“It’s become part of my practice,” she says.  

Margolin writes about the cultural and biblical connections between Judaism and psychedelics with an easy, organic fluidity that makes fairly esoteric concepts accessible to anyone with the desire to learn. An illustrative sample of this comes from an article she wrote for Double Blind, the biannual magazine she co-founded, in which she casually draws a link between ancient DMT tinctures and key events in the book of Exodus: 

Egyptian mythology is closely tied to acacia, a native Middle Eastern tree containing DMT, known to occasion prophetic states…When Moses led the ancient Hebrews out of Egypt, they brought with them knowledge of Egyptian methodology around making acacia extract. Then Moses saw the burning bush and spoke to God: You can fill in the blanks. 

Margolin’s 2023 book Exile & Ecstasy is a “gonzo journalist memoir” of her childhood in the Hin-Jew Ram Dass community and her later adventures into the psychedelic underbelly of Orthodox Jewish mysticism, a journey that’s taken her from Brooklyn to Tel Aviv, from Los Angeles to India, and which spans thousands of years of tradition and collective memory.  

If it’s anything like the rest of her work, it can be relied upon to be a deeply informative, thoughtful and—with the requisite intention setting—sacred experience.