Julian Furman was born in London by sheer chance.

His mother was brought up in Japan. Her father was a penniless German Jewish refugee who survived WWII in Tokyo; her mother is the daughter of an Austro-Hungarian painter to the Japanese Imperial court who became stranded in Japan after the collapse of his empire, and his Japanese wife. 

Julian’s father was born and raised in Argentina, but moved to Israel in the 1970s to escape Argentina’s frequent turbulence. There, he met Julian’s mother while she was serving in the Israeli Army’s Military Intelligence during the near-defeat of the 1973 war.

Julian was educated in London at St. Paul’s School, but spent long periods as a child at his father’s office overlooking Tiananmen Square in Beijing, until he watched the sparks of protest flare in 1989 beneath the window. As an adult he gained an MA in International Studies and Diplomacy from SOAS, and worked with the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee during their aborted attempts to draft an Israeli constitution.

Married and living in Tel-Aviv with a newborn baby, Julian was sitting on a park bench surrounded by the aftermath of the social protests racking the city when he began writing a portrait: both of new fatherhood and the crisis of self it engenders, and of Tel-Aviv, the vibrant, modern,  youthful city struggling not only with the international economic crises of the age, but also with a crippling existential insecurity, and the souring of the country’s nationalist dream. As he wrote, he would witness the protests spasm to a violent end, and Tel-Aviv would come under direct rocket attack for the first time in over twenty years.

Julian splits his time between London and Tel-Aviv, with his wife, three daughters, and two female dogs.