I grew up in the Valley and the New York City suburbs with  my sister, Laura Frances Weyl, an artist and entertainer. My paternal grandfather K. Peter Weyl, a founder of physical oceanography, fled Nazi persecution and I am thus a restored German citizen, as well as an American citizen. 

During my freshman year at college, I met the love of my life, Alisha Caroline Holland, who went on to become one of the leading political scientists of Latin America of her generation. After almost 7 years together, we married in the summer of 2010 and, almost nine years after that, she gave birth to our first daughter, Alma Margret Weyl. Her first name was chosen to work in four languages (English, Spanish, German and Hebrew), as well as in honor of composer Alma Mahler and journalist Alma Guillermoprieto. Her middle name is an Anglicization of the Dutch name Margarethe, after one of my favorite political leaders, European Union Vice-President Margarethe Vestager. 

Two and a half years later, she got a sister, Talia Audrey Weyl, whose middle name comes from my hero and co-author, Audrey Tang. Also because of Audrey, Alisha and I are Taiwanese permanent residents (Gold Card holder).

As I grew older, however, I came to see that my deep skepticism of organized Judaism and universalist rationalist outlook was disproportionately common among my social class of overeducated Jews from secular families. As such, I realized my attitudes were paradoxically more expressions, rather than rejections, of my cultural inheritance. This led me back to Judaism, first as a topic of academic analysis in relation to economics (I was briefly joint appointed in a department Jewish studies), then as an impetus to a strong though often deeply critical connection to the State of Israel and finally to raising our daughters Jewish. 

We began Alma’s life attending Lab/Shui, a God-optional, everybody-friendly, artist-driven experimental pop-up Jewish community, under the leadership of Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie. I am today a proud Jew, who wears a Star of David around his neck, encloses his Twitter handle in triple parentheses and wears a kippa on Shabbat and High Holy Days. With my daughters, we worship and study at Beth-El Temple Center, a Reform congregation. In addition to Judaism, the Tao te Ching and Catholic social thought, as well as theistic ideas in complexity science, have shaped my image of the Divine.