My Father, the Messiah: A Memoir

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.

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.