Marilyn Garson – About

I lost and found my religion, a quarter century apart.  In Israel in 1988, I saw the First Intefada. I could not reconcile my Israel-centered understanding of Judaism with my bedrock belief in the indivisible value of our lives.  I became an absentee Jew.  In 2012, I saw that I had defined Judaism too narrowly.  I began to study then, and I have not stopped.

For some years, it has been my habit to wake up early and spend the last of each night and the beginning of each morning reading the Torah in Biblical Hebrew.  That is the raw content from which my Jewish practice grows:  study, philosophy, prayer, and (to my surprise) theology.  My Judaism is a mix of introspective study, social prayer, and public activism. 

I am not a Zionist because Zionism is an ethnic nationalism, not a religion.  Religion is spiritual; occupation is an act of violence. 

I grew up in Halifax, Canada, the youngest of four sisters. I have degrees in political science, philosophy and international development. A few weeks before I was due in law school, I discovered the backpack and absconded. Immigrating to Aotearoa in the mid-1980s, I owned a weaving design label and taught other small business owners.

From 1998 I worked with marginalised communities affected by war, launching locally owned social enterprises. I worked with Cambodian former child combatants and people with disabilities (1998-2001), established an import channel for global handmade goods as the founding director of Worldstock.com (2001 – 2003), worked with Afghan family businesses and led an enterprise that employed at women at home in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2005 – 2010).

In 2011, I received an unsolicited offer to work and live in the Gaza Strip—an extraordinary invitation to live among people I had been told were my enemies. My first book, Still Lives – a Memoir of Gaza tells the story of four years, two wars, and the most unlikely social enterprise.

I returned to Aotearoa in late 2015 to live as a member of the Jewish community, settle down, and speak about the human rights of Palestinians. As I recount in Jewish, not Zionist, it didn’t turn out that way.

I am the co-founder of Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa, and a member of Global Jews for Palestine. I co-lead the independent minyan Ranu!