SUMMARY

The interview traces Daniel Libeskind’s impoverished Jewish Ashkenazi family origins in Poland, with parents who survived WWII camps, gulags, and prisons; his mother an anarchist, his father a socialist Bundist; both self-educated through hardship, deeply intellectual, and anti-religious despite religious roots. It highlights their hard-working immigrant lives in New York (seamstress, printer), emphasis on literature, philosophy, and existential discussion, and transmission of critical, left-leaning but anti-ideological politics. It emphasizes his architectural path integrating phenomenology and deconstruction (Derrida dialogues, 1991), Jewish Museum Berlin, 1990s theory conferences, academic roles (Cranbrook, UCLA, Germany), and deliberate shift from academia to full-time practice after success.