In 2012, he released his first documentary film about the thriving Israeli LGBT community.
In recent years Lucas has also begun work as a documentarian. New York's LGBT Center stopped allowing groups associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to meet in their building after Lucas led a protest over their allowance of an anti-occupation group.
Lucas followed the film with a gay tour of Israel.
Journalists from The Atlantic, Out Magazine and Yediot Aharonot noted it as a landmark film as the first pornographic movie shot on location with an all- Israeli cast while Tablet Magazine and the Los Angeles Times remarked on it being the first to feature an all- Jewish cast. In 2009, Lucas released the film Men of Israel, which he called his most important. In 2010 he debated Peter Tatchell and Sue Sanders at England's Oxford University on whether the gay rights movement has undermined family values. His New York Blade columns on Ultra-Orthodox Judaism and Islam sparked a campus debate at Stanford University in February 2008 when Lucas was invited to give a speech to students. His criticism of drug use and his sponsorship of public service ad campaigns about the dangers of unprotected sex in the gay community led Harvey Fierstein to interview him for The Advocate. Lucas is particularly well known for his activism and outspokenness. He was included in a 2009 New York magazine feature about people who made it to the top, despite arriving in the city with very little.
In 2009, Lucas was inducted into the GayVN Hall of Fame, noted for "his stature as an A-list director and performer". He contends that his film Michael Lucas' La Dolce Vita is the most expensive gay porn film ever made, with a budget of $250,000 and multiple celebrity cameos. The New Republic dubbed Lucas "Gay Porn's Neocon Kingpin". Michael Lucas (born Andrei Lvovich Treivas (Russian: Андрей Львович Трейвас), March 10, 1972) is a Russian– Israeli-American businessman and the founder and CEO of Lucas Entertainment, Manhattan's largest gay-adult-film company.