“I knew living in the multi-layered city of Jerusalem was going to be an intense experience, but I still underestimated how bizarre and complex of a place it is. There are so many overlapping religious, national, and historical universes here, and you never know when you’re going to turn a corner and suddenly find yourself confronting a new one. Each of these interwoven urban narratives is beautiful in its own way, but each has also been shaped and transformed by the deep trauma and grief that permeates the stones of this divided city. Learning from and navigating between as many of these narratives as I can has stretched the limits of my empathy, and I’ve been grateful to the Pardes Center for Judaism and Conflict Resolution for providing a framework through which I can process these conflicting and often painful stories.”
Gene likes to describe himself as the only gay Jewish kid homeschooled by lesbians in North Carolina, because it usually gets a laugh, and it also happens to be true. He made his way to the San Francisco Bay after a stint at Brown University, where he studied cities and cooked giant vats of quinoa in a house of 14 hippies. He worked an assortment of odd jobs in SF over six years, ranging from real estate consulting to Jewish non profit management to bicycle courier, before deciding to take a break from America and come study at Pardes.
