Now, you today have a very powerful, unique, creative voice. You use it loudly. How difficult was it to find that voice, to make that move away . Now, i should say, i do come from a traditional observant background. However, my father is a professor of history. So from that perspective, i came from an intellectually very open culture, even whilst, yes, i have been to a talk as a young woman on the subject, the beauty of a woman is in her silence. So, yes. And you were brought up in a religion and you talk about it quite openly in stuff youve written about your past, where at school, every morning, everybody said, thank you, god, for not making me a slave. And then the boys said, thank you, god, for not making me a woman. Yes, and the girls say, thank you, god, for making me according to your will. Yes, its, in some ways, quite a misogynist religion. I think that is a very misogynist type of prayer. I think i became increasingly. Well, i certainly increasingly had the feeling that it wa
Naomi alderman, welcome to hardtalk. Thank you for having me. I want to start at the beginning. You were raised in a very traditional, observant orthodoxJewish Community in north london where, i think its fair to say, women and girls were expected, by and large, to stay in the background. Now, you today have a very powerful, unique, creative voice. You use it loudly. How difficult was it to find that voice, to make that move away . Now, i should say, i do come from a traditional observant background. However, my father is a professor of history. So from that perspective, i came from an intellectually very open culture, even whilst, yes, i have been to a talk as a young woman on the subject, the beauty of a woman is in her silence. So, yes. And you were brought up in a religion and you talk about it quite openly in stuff youve written about your past, where at school, every morning, everybody said, thank you, god, for not making me a slave. And then the boys said, thank you, god, for no
Women and girls were expected, by and large, to stay in the background. Now, you today have a very powerful, unique, creative voice. You use it loudly. How difficult was it to find that voice, to make that move away . Now, i should say, i do come from a traditional observant background. However, my father is a professor of history. So from that perspective, i came from an intellectually very open culture, even whilst, yes, i have been to a talk as a young woman on the subject, the beauty of a woman is in her silence. So, yes. And you were brought up in a religion and you talk about it quite openly in stuff youve written about your past, where at school, every morning, everybody said, thank you, god, for not making me a slave. And then the boys said, thank you, god, for not making me a woman. Yes. And the girls say, thank you, god, for making me according to your will. Yes, its, in some ways, quite a misogynist religion. I think that is a very misogynist type of prayer. I think i became
Since you wrote sapiens. It was a worldwide hit, and in essence, it was a very sort of positive explanation of how we humans have come to sort of dominate this planet. It was about our ability to cooperate, to tell shared stories, to give ourselves common purpose. Ijust wonder whether in the last decade, youve lost some of that optimism. I think our shared stories and our ability to cooperate, both as a species, but also on the national level, is collapsing in more and more places. I see it now in my home country of israel, which is really on the verge maybe of a constitutional crisis or even a civil war. Maybe what we need to understand specifically about democracies is that democracy, in essence, is a conversation. You know, dictatorship, there is one person dictates everything. Democracy is trying to reach some agreement through conversation, and conversation is not always possible. For most of history, large scale conversation was just technically impossible. You had small scale de