Book Launch: Gil Hochberg in Conversation with Jack Halberstam

Join us at Hive Mind Books in Bushwick for the launch of My Father, the Messiah, the new memoir by author Gil Hochberg about her father's descent into psychosis and his belief that he was the Messiah. Gil will appear in conversation with writer Jack Halberstam.

After their conversation, Hochberg will sign copies of her book. The coffee and tea counter at Hive Mind Books will be open for the duration of the event.

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Books will be available to purchase at Hive Mind Books. We ask that books signed at our events be purchased at our bookstore. Book sales ensure that our independent queer bookstore can continue to keep the lights on and bring great events like this to our neighborhood.

Thank you for your support! If you would like a signed copy, but cannot attend the event, you can order a signed book from us. We ship most places!

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ABOUT THE BOOK

In her memoir My Father, the Messiah, Gil Hochberg traces a father-daughter relationship as it transforms across decades—from intense closeness in childhood to a fraught distance as Hochberg’s father Yossi becomes increasingly convinced that he is the Messiah. After building a career as a statistician in the US, Yossi returns to Israel and becomes an avid Zionist, while having several psychotic episodes. Hochberg reconstructs her relationship with her father through an archive of letters between the two, as well as her father’s personal writings, painting a tender portrait of the non-normative family life within which Hochberg’s queer identity unfolds and a heart-rending account of her father’s mental decline. Hochberg crafts a powerful story of intimacy and loss that dovetails with sea changes in Israel’s religious and political environment since the 1990s.

ABOUT GIL HOCHBERG

Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. She is author of Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future, and In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination.

ABOUT JACK HALBERSTAM

Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Female Masculinity, In A Queer Time and Place, The Queer Art of Failure, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance. Halberstam’s latest book, out in 2020, from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: The Wild Beyond: Music, Architecture and Anarchy.

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Hive Mind Books is a queer and trans bookstore and coffee shop in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Our coffee and tea bar will be open for the duration of this event.

Subways:

(L) Dekalb
(M/L) Myrtle-Wyckoff
(M) Knickerbocker

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