[3] Born in Vienna to a "bourgeois" secular Ashkenazi Jewish family, Frey was active in the Socialist-Zionist Hashomer Hatzair youth movement as a child.

As a young woman, after living on a kibbutz in southern Israel, Frey returned to Austria and developed a diasporic, Yiddishist, non-Zionist worldview.

[5][6] Frey became a bat mitzvah at Or Chadasch, the Reform synagogue in Vienna that was founded by her grandparents and where her father serves as president.

[10] Neither religious nor nationalist, she tries to find other forms of articulating Jewishness in the 21st century that enable transcultural solidarities between Jews and other oppressed groups.

Frey dislikes the militarism within Israeli culture and supports a "multinational, liberal, democratic Israel-Palestine", whether that would be in the form of one state or two.