About Misha

Misha is a frum transsexual anarchist and writer currently based in Brooklyn.

Since October 7, 2023, he has been active in organizing anti-war protests with Jewish antizionist groups on the American East Coast. He's spent the last year volunteering, doing pastoral work for incarcerated people on Rikers Island, teaching English as a second language (ESL), grassroots fundraising for families in Gaza, and conducting oral history interviews in Yiddish.

Misha has written and lectured on transness, queerness, Jewishness, sex work, gender, violence, trauma, and politics. He has given lectures at universities in the US and UK, healthcare settings, and sex parties, and appeared in films shown at BAFTA and BFI festivals. His first book—The A–Z of Gender and Sexuality, the first long-form queer glossary—came out in 2019.

In 2019, Misha co-founded and co-directed the pink peacock, a queer Yiddish pay-what-you-can café and infoshop in Glasgow, Scotland. The café served tens of thousands of free meals, ran hundreds of events, gave away hundreds of free books, and provided a safe and inviting bilingual (Yiddish and English) meeting space for mutual aid groups and countless individuals—generally vulnerable people with complex needs. As Executive Director, he managed staff & volunteers, comms, procurement, events, and aesthetics. Ultimately, the café closed in 2023 due to persistent antisemitism. The pink peacock is reopening in brooklyn in 2025.

In 2017 he founded Not Your Fault, a peer-led support service for men and non-binary survivors of sexual violence in London, and served as the Executive Director for four years. Not Your Fault continues to have regular meetings in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and online.

From 2018–2020, he oversaw LGBTQ+ Diversity & Equality for NHS Scotland across all 24 health boards in the country, improving policy for both patients and staff. In 2023, he did the same for NHS England & Wales. He also gave many lectures on LGBTQ+ healthcare and inclusion—and, by extension, addressed issues of race, class, and disability—across the UK.

Misha has also worked as an educational speaker for corporate and Government clients with Gendered Intelligence (a UK trans non-profit); research analyst for UK think tanks, liaising with Government; an editor with several academic and non-academic journals; a Jewish lay-leader; a bartender; a sailing instructor; and a comms director. He graduated with an MSc (Hons) in International Relations Theory from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2014, with a focus on gender theory.

Misha plays the cello, guitar, keyboard, and sings, in genres spanning classical to neo-klezmer to noise music. He sometimes works as a session musician and has performed hundreds of gigs across Europe and North America, and organized many of them himself.