Exile & Ecstasy Growing Up with Ram Dass and Coming of Age in the Jewish Psychedelic Underground

Through the perspective of having grown up among "HinJews" in the Ram Dass community and cannabis legalization movement, journalist Madison Margolin takes the reader on a journey inside New York's Jewish counterculture and the Hasidic underground, reconciling her roots, tackling ancestral Jewish trauma, and finding intersectionality between the Jewish and psychedelic experience.

Exile and Ecstasy sets out to explore the psychedelic path that occupies the crossroads between the Ram Dass movement and Hasidism. It's a path of seeking and escape, rebellion and return, medicine and magic.

Bridging the polar ends of the Jewish and psychedelic worlds, while buttressing the experience with expert reportage, Madison Margolin prods at Be Here Now to find its relevance and utility in a new generation, facing different issues than those Ram Dass faced as a generally well-to-do boomer. In doing so, she looks at solutions to our lack of presence and offers practices that help us integrate our psychedelic experiences in mundane life, as well as in the context of our roots and religious identities.

This book is for anyone looking to feel spiritually kindled, to make peace with where they come from, and to reconcile seemingly disparate experiences of spirituality and psychedelics, with traditional religion.

Madison Margolin is a journalist covering psychedelics, cannabis, spirituality, and Jewish life. As a memoirist, she also documents growing up in both the Ram Dass community and the cannabis legalization movement. Co-founder of DoubleBlind magazine, she has written for publications like Rolling Stone, Playboy, VICE, and Ayin Press, where, as contributing editor, she curates a column—"Speaking from Experience"—featuring in-depth conversations with artists, scientists, mystics, healers, activists, and fringe thought leaders engaging with a range of paradigm-shifting encounters, from somatics to psychedelics to cybernetics, going beyond the edges of Jewish life and culture. Also a co-founder of the Jewish Psychedelic Summit and host of the Be Here Now Network's Set & Setting podcast, Madison has traveled from cannabis farms in Northern California to underground ceremonies in Brooklyn to the shores of the Ganges River and all over Israel/Palestine, reporting on the role of entheogens in religion, culture, and healing.