About Marilyn

Marilyn Garson grew up in Halifax, Canada, the youngest of four sisters. She has degrees in political science, philosophy and international development. A few weeks before she was due in law school, Marilyn discovered the backpack and absconded. Immigrating to Hokianga in the mid-1980s, she owned a weaving design label and taught other small business owners.

From 1998 she worked with marginalised communities affected by war, launching locally owned social enterprises. She worked with Cambodian former child combatants and people with disabilities (1998-2001), established an import channel for global handmade goods as the founding director of Worldstock.com (2001 – 2003), worked with Afghan family businesses and led an enterprise that employed at women at home in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2005 – 2010).

In 2011, she received an unsolicited offer to work and live in the Gaza Strip—an extraordinary invitation to live among people she had been told were her enemies. Her first book, Still Lives – a Memoir of Gaza tells the story of four years, two wars, and the most unlikely social enterprise. She wrote to add adjectives to public understanding of the community of Gaza: educated, ambitious, and audaciously human behind a blockade wall.

Garson returned to Aotearoa in late 2015 to live as a member of the Jewish community, settle down, and speak about the human rights of Palestinians. As she recounts in Jewish, not Zionist, it didn’t turn out that way.

Garson is the co-founder of Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa, and a steering committee member of Global Jews for Palestine. She co-leads Aotearoa’s only not-Zionist independent minyan Ranu! and blogs at www.ajv.org.nz