Tom Singer has spent a lifetime weaving together the personal and the collective, the symbolic and the social. “I think I always had a sense of living on the edge of things,” Tom reflects, “between the inner world and the outer world, never quite feeling at home in just one.”

Early years
Tom was born in 1942 in St. Louis, Missouri, at a time when the city still held its place as a major hub in the American heartland. His family had deep roots in the country’s German-Jewish immigrant story. “My great-grandfather ran a whiskey distillery—the largest west of the Mississippi at one point,” he says with pride and humour. “Barkhouse Brothers’ Gold Dust Whiskey. That didn’t get passed down, unfortunately!” His ancestors were civic-minded and philanthropic; both grandfathers helped found Jewish hospitals in Louisville and St. Louis. “They were good citizens,” Tom says simply. “I grew up in a prosperous, engaged Midwestern Jewish family.”…
Click HERE to read Stephen Garratt’s full interview with Tom Singer