“My Starting Point Was Wrong”: Talking with Gil Hochberg about Writing, Mental Illness and Queer Survival

Being reviewed: Advertisement A writer and scholar, Gil Z. Hochberg is the Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies, and Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies South Asian Studies and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University New York. Her research focuses on the relationship between politics and art. Her main interest centers on questions of representation and power, particularly in the context of colonialism, orientalism, and nationalism, with a concentration on Palestine, Israel, and Zionism, as well as a broader interest in (post)colonial South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She is the writer of several authored books including In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2007), Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Duke University Press, 2015), Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future (Duke University Press, 2021), and most recently, a creative nonfiction work My Father the Messiah: a Memoir (Duke University Press, 2026). The book, called “genre breaking,” traces a father-daughter relationship as it transforms across decades—from intense closeness in childhood to a fraught distance as Hochberg’s father becomes increasingly convinced that he is the Messiah. 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 nonnormative family life within which Hochberg’s queer identity unfolds and a heartrending account of her father’s mental decline. A personal, political, and theological commentary that dovetails with sea changes in Israel’s religious and political environment since the 1990s, My Father the Messiah is a moving account of mental illness and parental love, and a meditation on Zionism, messianism, queer intimacy, mourning, loss, and the redemptive power of writing. Professor Jack Halberstam and Professor Gil Hochberg met to discuss messianism, psychoanalysis, queerness, Zionism, and the choice to write a nonacademic book. Jack Halberstam (JH): One of the nice things about reading the memoir is you detail your process of living with this partly bequeathed, partly stolen archive. How did the papers come to you? How different was it for you to write this as opposed to your academic writing? Gil Hochberg (GH): My father died in 2013. It was a sudden and unexpected death, although he was a very ill man, both psychically and physically. For many, many years, he was almost always dying, but somehow always surviving. So, when he did die—it is only retrospectively that I now understand this—it was a complete emotional shock. We were very, very close when I was a child, but became more and more estranged as I grew up. That had to do with his mental illness, and with the fact that he remarried a woman that, well, “she and I didn’t get along,” let’s just put it that way. I also had to deal with his sudden sharp change in political views: from leftwing to an extreme right-wing Zionist messianism. In a way, I lost him before I lost him. Then, I found myself in the Shiva, surrounded by people: his wife, their neighbors, her relatives, and his colleagues. I was “a guest of honor” as the mourning daughter and his only child. But the performance of mourning became exhausting, because inside I was feeling nothing. After a couple of days, I had this drive to find refuge in his study, which was the only place in this apartment that I knew was totally “his.” It’s this tiny little study. I felt that I had to find something of his to hold on to. And indeed, after searching everywhere I eventually found a very large folder—deep, deep hidden behind many other things, bills and medical bills—and it contained his writings. I grabbed it as fast as I could and shoved it under my shirt. I managed to escape with it. For the next few years, I lived with this stolen folder. But I didn’t look at it. I just put it behind the winter clothes in LA, which is the area in the closet you never visit when you live in sunny California. It was beyond my capacity to deal with it back then. I was too afraid of the amounts of feelings that would overwhelm me, so I buried them and his writings. It took a very long time, years, for me to be able to approach the material. Then, slowly, I began the process of reading him, archiving him, and finally writing. JH: Your dad, who was a very famous professor of statistics, was basically bipolar. He had periods of intense mania, within which he believed himself to be the Messiah. And he then spent large amounts of time and energy trying to convince everyone around him that this was the case. GH: Yes. But he managed to convince only his wife. JH: He did convince the wife then? GH: He convinced her and so he had a follower. And all one needs is one follower. JH: Right, and in a way, he had two followers. Because even though you didn’t believe he was the Messiah, at the same time, what’s poignant about your recollection of your child self is that he really was a God to you when you were young. And I presume that this then is why you could not deal with his death. GH: Yes, very true. I adored and admired him. JH: But for a book with a lot of dark material in it, it’s also very funny. And, for example, one of the reasons that your dad gives for not needing to be on lithium is that he’s the Messiah. And then, you write, “once a scientist, now the Messiah and truly, who would expect the Messiah to be taking lithium?” You punctuate some of his most outrageous psychosis with humor. How deliberate was that? GH: In some ways, it captures my authentic response. Because when you read texts that are written from a state of psychosis—a complete detachment from a sense of collective reality—you have two choices, especially if it’s somebody that is very close to you. One is to be mortified, even judgmental; the other is “to join,” even for a brief time, to let go, speak in their own terms. And so yes, of course the Messiah would not take lithium. 100%. But there’s another scene in the book I want to mention. I’m a little kid living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. And my parents—these two young Israelis who find themselves there in the early ’70s—send me to a Christian school, because it’s free and that’s what they can afford. All my teachers are from the South, they’re Black, and they’re talking about Jesus all the time. Then one day my dad picks me up, I jump on him because I’m so happy to see him and I say, “I love you! Jesus loves you!” And that results in him having an absolute crazy reaction. He becomes furious and I am terrified. He puts me in the backseat. He tells me to stay silent until we get home. Then he sits me on the sofa. He turns on the analog TV and then he turns off the TV. On and off again; we see that little tiny white dot in the TV just before the screen turns black. He points at it and he shouts: “‘That’s Jesus!’ And then tells me to repeat after him: ‘Jesus was a nobody who thought he was a somebody!’” over and over again. I never mentioned Jesus again at home, that is for sure. So, I try to capture that as a funny moment; because, retrospectively, it is really funny. But I also try to highlight that as a kid I must have been terrified. I had no idea what was going on, and I aligned with my dad (out of fear). Still, I tried to turn it into a fun experience. JH: Like a coping mechanism. GH: Exactly. And then, from that moment on, of course I continue to talk to Jesus (because Jesus is my best friend), but I do that in hiding. JH: The messianic fantasy is an odd fantasy for a Jew, since it is time, as Walter Benjamin proposed, that is messianic, not people. And, in this sense, there is something too literal about your father’s fantasy. It seems to me that this is a more Christian idea of messianism—namely that the Messiah will actually arrive—and … it turns out to be your dad!? GH: Haha yes, indeed. But there are some Jewish traditions that are more aligned with this personification of the Messiah. My dad wasn’t the only one. There are many self-nominated messiahs also in Judaism. Writing the book and reflecting on my childhood with him I could see that, even back then, his psychosis was already in motion. After all, it wasn’t so much Christianity that he was responding to, but the fact that Jesus was the alleged Messiah—and there can only be one Messiah. He’s rivaling with Jesus, which meant that Jesus had to be “a nobody.” JH: Everything in your work is an argument against partition and against the particular partitions imposed by Israel and the violence of the partitions that Zionism demands. And so, here you are with a father for whom Zionism is not simply an ideology. It’s actually part of his psyche. That must have been hard. GH: The complete breakdown that he had (starting in 1989, going forward into the ’90s) manifested in his personal nomination of himself as the Messiah. It doesn’t mean that he didn’t have grandiose feelings before. He’s always had both inferior and grandiose feelings, which is a common bipolar feature, but the language of that grandiosity being messianic was new and his symptoms were becoming more extreme and noticeable. This had happened together with his return to living permanently in Israel, and also with a shift in the public discourse in Israel. In the first years of the ’90s there was almost a euphoric sense of peace, global peace; the Oslo Accord was something the great majority of Israelis fully believed was going to secure an actual peace. Then the assassination of Rabin indicated how terrified the right wing was about that peace potential (whether it was real or not). So, with the assassination of Rabin and the end of the Oslo era, a very, very fast turn happens. It was broiling during the early ’90s, but the Israeli center-left did not see it, did not have any idea. JH: They did not see the rise of a new right-wing Zionism? GH: They did not see it at all. I didn’t. I didn’t even see that my father was completely part of it. Yes, he was ill independently of course; but nationally, a psychotic illness was brewing. JH: Right, and this is really one of the controversial pieces of your memoir: You link your father’s psychosis to a nationalist psychotic fantasy of possession, dispossession, persecution. All of these things that are now features of the paranoid psyche of your father. GH: I’m not trying to suggest that Zionism made my father ill. That would be silly. But what is clear to me is that his language of psychosis was borrowed from everyday Israeli TV and radio. JH: And this links also to the way that your inheritance is not only your family’s dispossession in Europe but also the earlier acts of violent dispossession of Palestinians from their land. This comes up in the memoir when you realize that in your father’s will, he’s left you nothing but “a wall in Hebron,” not a house but a wall and not an inheritance of violence but of violence and fragmentation. That violent dispossession is transformed in your father’s disturbed fantasies into a firm belief that he has been displaced, or was it a revenge for him to leave you that wall? GH: I am certain it was both. But the book makes no arguments. That’s part of the relief of writing a book that isn’t academic. I find argumentation to be a strange mode of communication. It is a closure of curiosity. I am more interested in openings. JH: You interview a colleague of his and talk to him about your father. And he tells you that in 1995, your dad went to a statistics conference and lectured all acclaimed professors from all over the world about the importance of Zionism, the biblical promise of the land, Palestinian terrorists, and the arrival of the Messiah. And you responded, “Yes, I know. His illness developed in that way. Maybe because all forms of national chauvinism are madness, he joined the crowd.” So, there’s a way in which there doesn’t need to be an argument. Your father is making the argument for you and then you pull your reader towards certain conclusions. You’re never finger wagging and saying Zionism is a national psychosis; but, as you say here, all forms of national chauvinism are madness. They contain equal parts political fervor and yes, psychological intensity that is often misplaced. GH: What happened to my dad was considered a complete psychosis and break from reality, for which he was hospitalized, et cetera. Yet that same break was happening on the ground. Other people were not calling themselves the Messiah. Still, they were following the same route of absolute craziness and biblical narratives and doing things that he was writing about or fantasizing in his head. So that is why I call it a national psychosis. JH: Let’s go to a funny moment, when you come out to your dad. You make an appointment with your dad to give him your news, but he basically upstages you. Do you want to talk about that episode because it’s really funny. GH: I will read from this chapter, it’s called “Coming Out”: I had just turned twenty when my dad told me for the first time that he was the Messiah. The two of us were sitting in a coffee shop near Tel Aviv University for a meeting that was set up by my mother, his divorcée of fourteen years. She called us both a couple of days earlier to tell us that we must discuss what she called “an emergency situation.” She never talked to him, which gave this event the aura of exceptionality. And for my dad, it meant that we were dealing with something of great urgency indeed. Something worth her calling him.” He could hardly hide his excitement when he called me and said, “Let’s make it easy and meet in our usual place.” “Our usual place” was a small coffee shop, walking distance from campus. It served nothing but coffee, tea, and dry pastry. But the truth was, that “our usual” was not usual at all. We hardly met in those days, and when we did, it was rarely around campus, and hardly ever just the two of us […] Now, summoned to the cafe, we were both visibly nervous […] He was nervous because he had no idea why we were meeting; I was nervous because I did. Just a few days earlier, I came out to my mother, hoping, assuming in fact, that being a poet, a bohemian and an open-minded romantic soul, she would embrace my lesbianism, hesitant as it was. Far from it. She didn’t welcome the news; worse, she denied it. “You are not!” was her first reaction. Her second, which followed right after […] was, “We’re not going to talk about this anymore. You’ll talk to your father about this. These kinds of perversions run in his family!” So, there we were, father and daughter, once very close, now quite removed, meeting in a cafe to discuss “perversions.” […] “Yalda?” his voice woke me up from my daydreaming. I felt a twisting in my chest. I missed him. I missed us and our special bond. It was gone now, the magic of our summers, like my childhood. I looked at him, this man in his mid-forties. I used to know him so well, or so I thought. His eyes looked sad when I looked up at his face. I don’t want to hurt him, I thought. Then, I don’t want to be hurt by him. “Come on now, what is it, Gilly? Drugs? Are you pregnant? You want to quit college?” No, No,” I responded, a bit disappointed with the list of clichés that he pulled out of his pocket. I took a big breath and said, “I think I’m a lesbian. Maybe bisexual.” My dad lowered his eyes, took another sip of his coffee, then released a soft smile, and said, “That’s it? That’s the emergency?! The big news?” He seemed overtly disappointed. Then he pulled his chair even closer to mine, locked eyes with and said: “None of this is important, Gilly: Gay, straight, bisexual, none of this matters. These are all Inyayani Dyuma” He used the rabbinic Aramaic inyanay Dyuma (matters of the daily), which took me by surprise and surely elevated the conversation to a register far beyond daily matters […] I stared at him, hoping that I will detect a smile, but no, he was dead serious. And after another sip of what was left of his coffee, he lifted his arms high to the sky and pronounced theatrically, “Thank you for sharing your news. Now let me tell you mine.” He leaned over even closer, and whispered in my ears, “Ani ha-mashi’ach…Aba shelakh nivchar…Abba shelakh masi’ach emet.” (I am the Messiah… Your father was chosen… I am the real Messiah”). And with a triumphant smile he added, “Now, that is big news!” JH: That’s a really good example of these parallel stories that you’re telling. One is being queer in Israel and the legacy of Zionism. Then, on the more personal front, dealing with your father’s breakdown. But it’s funny here that between your mother and your father, she’s supposed to be the enlightened one. She’s supposed to be the libertarian. And he’s all buttoned up. And yet, he’s the one for whom your lesbianism is just mundane. For her, it’s a state of emergency. So, I want to get into this relationship, the relationship between you and your dad and sex. In order to enter this tricky terrain, you use some combination of your psychoanalytic training and Butler’s Gender Trouble. And you write on page 58 that your father, through various kinds of games that you played as a child, “gave me the gift of queer survival two full decades before I read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and realized that performativity was a thing.” So, a simple question: How did he give you this gift of survival and what does that mean in the context of performativity? GH: This was not something I realized before I wrote the book. I knew we were close, but it was hard for me to fully understand what bonded me and him when I was a child. And as I was writing and also reading his texts and reading my letter exchanges with him (I have hundreds of letters because he lived in the US and I in Israel)—I realized it was performativity. And I realized that, of course, because at some point much later, I learned about performativity through Butler. My father didn’t exactly grow up in a secure environment. He grew up with two severely traumatized parents who spent many years as poor refugees, escaping from one country to another. And I came to realize that he dealt with his fears both through his sense of abjecthood and his sense of grandiosity. And with me, through games. We played make believe games all the time. I was the only person who he could play with because I was a child. He couldn’t play with adults. So, we would play these crazy games. I didn’t think they were crazy back then, but they really were odd. There was, for example, a game where an imagined giant toilet paper apparently invaded the house and was chasing my father. I had to save him from the toilet paper. Then there was a more explicit game called “the Gestapo is coming.” And then, the infamous game, which was our favorite, and we played it for years, which was “Mean Daddy.” This is how the game goes: I am a little girl and I misbehave, and he walks in with big, big steps. He picks up a broom and he says, “You have been a very bad child! Very, very bad! And you will be punished! Lie down on the bed!” And we reenacted this (there were no beatings just words and pretend beatings) and then we would laugh for hours. Now, at a certain age, we didn’t play this anymore, but we continued to talk about how we used to play it. Then years later, I read Freud, “A child is being beaten,” and I’m thinking, well, the difference was that we didn’t have any hidden subconscious going on or repression. We were actively performing this fantasy without calling it what it is, without naming it or repressing it. Clearly, we were both sharing a forbidden space and performing it in a way that made us giggle together. And for me, this was a realization that these games and this imagination and reenaction and the ability to act out fantasies and fears playfully without taking yourself too seriously, without going into that modality of trauma and repression that Freud left us with, can be joyful and empowering. I actively refused Freud’s reading. Because for me—here’s where I Butlerize Freud—I think, no, let’s not get too heterosexual and normative about this. Let’s see how the little girl is enjoying this game. How this game empowers her, Playing together was liberating—there was a lot of playing in our relationship—that is the gift he gave me without having to give anything. He needed to play. I needed to play. And when I played with him, he never felt like an adult pretending to enjoy it. He was, like I was, fully in the realm of imagination and make belief. JH: Right, and it actually corresponds certainly to Butler, but also to Avgi Saketopoulou’s work in Sexuality Beyond Consent, where she writes about traumatophilia; in other words, trauma isn’t necessarily a block for the child or the adult, it can also be the thing that you go through and you embrace. You can never resolve trauma. You can’t. It’s a wound that already happened so going back to it doesn’t mean that you can sew it up retrospectively. GH: Yes. Absolutely. And there’s something in writing and remembering these scenes of playfulness that involve the Gestapo for example, or the toilet paper, that earth the base material of life, trauma resides in that zone. JH: It’s like Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. And even in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? where there’s a similar game that she plays with her mother in which they fantasize that she’s disabled. GH: Now that you mentioned Avgi Saketopoulou, it’s got me thinking about the fact that there’s a whole new generation of psychoanalysts who are aiming to queer psychoanalysis, which tends to be a very heteronormative doctrine. JH: Yes. Saketopoulou has advanced a theory of trauma that she calls “traumatophilia” and that proposes not that we heal trauma but that we work with it. You seem to do this in your memoir. GH: Yes. My assumption is that life is traumatic. And then if you are queer, you are likely to have even more trauma. The question is not how to get rid of it, but what to do with it. JH: One of the nice things in the book is that on the one hand, you indulge your own idealization of your father. You’re idealizing him and he idealized you completely. But on the other hand, you resist your own idealizations and call attention to them in a critical way. But no sooner do you do this, than the idealization returns. And it’s a pattern throughout the book. For example, you tell us that when he was in a manic state with his new wife, he was sometimes violent. People who are manic get agitated at many different levels, and there’s no way that doesn’t get expressed as violence some of the time. Also, your mother keeps trying to correct your idealization of your father. She gives you narratives of a time when he nearly killed the whole family by driving recklessly. She gives you counterexamples to your child idealizations. But you consistently reject those narratives. And so, there’s one moment where you’re struggling with her narrative and you say, yes, he could be impatient, but violent, controlling? But by that time in the narrative, we know that he’s impatient, violent, and controlling, possibly even inappropriate in many different ways. So, tell us about this idealization. What is it? Why do you keep committing to it and then pulling back from it? GH: To write a book like this, it is very exposing. When I was writing it, I was feverish. And when I say feverish, I really mean it. For the entire time of COVID, I was constantly reorganizing his archive, building it meticulously, trying to save every ink dot. And that indicated that I hadn’t just loved my father. I realized that my idealization was profound; but, at the same time, I also realized that it doesn’t make sense. And I keep coming back to this tension. As a child, I created the schism: daddy is fun, mommy is sad, et cetera. And then, retroactively, when I got the terms, I thought, oh, this is what I did. Mommy was death drive. Daddy was pleasure principle. And so, also, when my father got sick or when it manifested, I got absolutely confused. My world shattered. I thought, wait, this is happy daddy. And then suddenly, he is in the mental hospital. She is not in a mental hospital. She is living, she’s stable. So, part of what this book tries to do is to hold both states of mind, or both frameworks at once: childhood and adulthood, idealization and reality. I wanted to capture and bring alive this process—this childish version of idealization that leaks into adulthood—but to also look at it as such. And that was very difficult, because it’s impossible to completely write from the place of this schism—and to go beyond it at once: the bad/good; the good breast/bad breast—many kids feel this way, but many adults, unfortunately, continue to feel this way about many things. Melanie Klein writes about this of course. And you’re right: My mother was actually right about him. My father was violent towards her and his second wife; and, yes, he was careless; and, yes, he has risked my life as a child in one of his crazy attacks. Still, it doesn’t mean I am ready to give up my fantasy. That is the tension I intentionally highlight in the book. It isn’t about accepting, forgiving, or anything like that. It is about the power of fantasy and how far one goes to protect one’s childhood dreams. JH: In a beautiful and very moving way, you make yourself his archivist. And in true Derridean form, you recognize that the archive will necessarily be one of loss, it will not be one of accumulation. It is an archive of lost things. You rescue this one file, but there were others that you didn’t rescue. And you write, at the end, you’re very clear, you say, I am paraphrasing: “In a way, this is not his archive. His archive, the one I’ve created, is mine alone.” And then you say, “The archive I created failed me.” Is your work done with these papers? Or, like, Alison Bechdel, do you now turn to your mother to repair the damage done there? What’s next? GH: Good question, yes. So, first of all, of course, Alison Bechdel is a prime model for me here because she has both a “daddy book” and a “mommy book.” But I’m not ready to write about my mother quite yet. JH: Daddy is idealized because of the fact that he’s a narcissist. And in both cases the mother is bad and punishing. GH: Absolutely. I see that. It’s part of the schism I ultimately try to reject. In terms of my use of the archive: a lot of the book is not chronological. It’s very fragmented. There is my childhood story; but there’s a lot of detours through his childhood, his family. And then there’s a lot of parts that are in the present, where I’m reflecting on this process of archiving and creating an archive. And then I discover myself in the archive. I found myself, surprisingly, in many of his writings. I, for example, found out that my lesbianism was part of his mental world and part of a messianic mission. In one of the texts, he thanks Yehovah for making me queer because … well, he had some long explanation about why that’s better for me and for the world at large. So, here I am in an archive that demands something completely different from what I initially intended. And I wrestle with it a lot in terms of, how to read it, how to make sense of it. At first there is this illusion that, yes, if I include every single word, and if I trace with my hands every single word he wrote to make sure it never fades off the page, and if I use the best preservatives and keep these pages forever, I will save the archive. But his archive, like all other archives, had its own plan; and in this sense, then, it failed me. It took away my fantasy of my father having a “sudden fall,” and it continued to challenge my childhood memories of comfort and playfulness. I had to come to terms with the fact that my starting point was wrong. I never had two dads. He was always the same one and split. He was the “king of Yahud,” the chosen son, the most brilliant; but deep inside, he was nothing at all. And a part of the realization for me was that the very belief that we have in the archive—whether it’s a national archive or any other—has to be reexamined. I was so determined to give shape to his archive, but eventually I surrendered and that’s also part of what this book is about. Giving up the fantasy of total control. For me, that meant two things. One, letting go of the structure of academic writing, and two, really without being too cliché, allowing myself to be lost in his texts rather than deciding in advance how to shape everything. At the end of the day, if you’re really tuned to the archive, it does its own thing. It has its own plans. It leaks, and it isn’t complete. The same is true about writing. This article was commissioned by Nicholas Dames.