The interview traces Daniel Libeskind’s impoverished Ashkenazi Jewish family background in Poland. His parents survived World War II camps, gulags, and prisons; his mother was an anarchist and his father a socialist Bundist. Despite their hardships, both were self-educated, deeply intellectual, and anti-religious despite their religious roots. It highlights their hardworking lives as immigrants in New York, where they worked as a seamstress and a printer, respectively, as well as their emphasis on literature, philosophy, and existential discussion and the critical, left-leaning but anti-ideological politics they passed on to him. The interview also covers his architectural path integrating phenomenology and deconstruction, including his 1991 dialogues with Jacques Derrida; the Jewish Museum Berlin; theory conferences in the 1990s; academic roles at Cranbrook, UCLA, and in Germany; and his deliberate shift from academia to full-time practice following his success.