In the last few years, Jewish Currents has been the intellectual storm-centre of a multi-sided, inter-generational debate within the Jewish community about breaking with Israel over its occupation strategy—and the war on Gaza in particular. The Currents project—print journal, online articles, weekly newsletters, podcasts, live events—has helped to develop a far-reaching left critique of the American-Jewish establishment strategy as essentially ‘Americanist assimilationism plus Zionism’. Publishing Palestinian voices from Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora, it has broken a series of American taboos, not least in advancing a concrete plan for the realization of Palestinian refugees’ right to return, a start on what one writer has called the hard work of ‘decolonization, reparation, reconciliation’.footnote1 Your own writing and thinking as editor-in-chief has played a central role in all this. May we start by asking you about your personal formation—your family background, education, radicalization?

Iwas born in Washington dc, in 1984, but from the age of three I grew up in Miami. My father’s family was from Thessaloniki, Greece. They were Holocaust survivors—and Ladino speakers; my grandparents spoke mostly Ladino until the day they died. They eschewed anything religious; they really retreated from the world and suffered from lasting trauma and mental illness. My mother’s family exemplified the American-Jewish experience in a way that my father’s family didn’t. On my mother’s side, my grandmother’s family came from Lithuania and my grandfather’s from Palestine—they were Arabic-speaking Jews from Haifa; my ancestors on that side are all buried there. They emigrated to Columbus, Ohio, in the 1920s or 30s. They were destitute when they arrived and they hit the Depression head on. My maternal grandfather trained as a doctor; he moved to Miami to do his medical residency, so my mother grew up there. And Miami, as you can read in the latest issue of Currents, has the most conservative Jewish community in the country, by leaps and bounds. So I grew up very Zionist. I really drank the Kool-Aid on that.

Yours was probably the first American-Jewish generation to grow up under the training scheme that Peter Novick describes in The Holocaust in American Life as being set in place in the 1970s, after the shock of the Yom Kippur War: a systematic inculcation in the ever-present threat of another Judeocide and of Israel as the only protection against it—Jewish School, summer camps, trips to Auschwitz and Israel.

Absolutely. I did all that. I went on the March of the Living, a trip to the camps for young adults that culminates on Independence Day in Israel. I did a summer in Israel. I went to a summer camp that wasn’t initially Jewish, but then was bought out by the Union for Reform Judaism, which is very Zionist. And I did my own synagogue youth-group stuff.

How was that for a girl—was sexism an issue?

This was not an Orthodox religious community. The misogyny I encountered came from American culture; I don’t think it came from the religious element. Many Jewish communities have more of a feminist bent because the female personalities are, at least stereotypically, more assertive. My mom started the first abortion fund in Florida and was very involved in reproductive-rights activism; she still is. So all that was present when I was growing up. The messaging that I absorbed on sexuality and gender issues just from being in Miami—with all its machismo and toxic hypersexuality—was pretty bad, though; it took a long time to unlearn that.

I came to New York a year after 9/11, to study visual art at nyu. I was against the Iraq War, but I wasn’t interested in organizing, both because I wasn’t an activist—I didn’t know what that meant—but also because when I went to rallies, there were signs like ‘Down with the Zionist state’. I didn’t understand what they were doing there, and I felt threatened by having to confront the Israel issue in the context of Iraq. So I went on the big marches, but otherwise that moment passed me by. After college, I worked in arts non-profits; I worked for the Pierre Matisse estate for a couple of years. I did an artist residency for a year in South Carolina. I bounced around a lot, but I was basically earning my living at these non-profit organizations while trying to write a novel.