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Chasing Utopia: The Future of the Kibbutz in a Divided Israel
Say the word “Israel” today and it sparks images of walls and rockets and a bloody conflict without end. It wasn’t always so. For decades, the symbol of the Jewish State was the noble pioneer, in a blue work shirt and white sunhat, draining the swamps and making the deserts bloom: the legendary kibbutznik. That romantic picture — plus the exotic promise of sun, sand, and sex — drew young backpackers from around the world to volunteer on Israel’s country communes. Foreign volunteers returned home to spread the myth of the Marxist Marlboro men (and women) who had built the Jewish nation from scratch. So what ever happened to the pioneers’ dream of founding a socialist utopia in the land called Palestine?
Chasing Utopia: The Future of the Kibbutz in a Divided Israel draws readers into the quest for answers to the defining political conflict of our era. After a 20-year absence, acclaimed author David Leach revisits his raucous memories of life as a kibbutz volunteer and returns to meet a new generation of Jewish and Arab citizens struggling to forge a better future together. Crisscrossing the nation, Leach chronicles the controversial decline of Israel’s kibbutz movement and witnesses a renaissance of the original vision for a peaceable utopia in unexpected corners of the Promised Land. Chasing Utopia entertains and enlightens with a darkly comic journey of personal discovery and political awakening through a divided nation where hope persists against the odds.
Chasing Utopia: The Future of the Kibbutz in a Divided Israel draws readers into the quest for answers to the defining political conflict of our era. After a 20-year absence, acclaimed author David Leach revisits his raucous memories of life as a kibbutz volunteer and returns to meet a new generation of Jewish and Arab citizens struggling to forge a better future together. Crisscrossing the nation, Leach chronicles the controversial decline of Israel’s kibbutz movement and witnesses a renaissance of the original vision for a peaceable utopia in unexpected corners of the Promised Land. Chasing Utopia entertains and enlightens with a darkly comic journey of personal discovery and political awakening through a divided nation where hope persists against the odds.
320 pages, Paperback
Published September 13, 2016
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279 people want to read
About the author
David Leach
2 books12 followersDavid Leach is an award-winning magazine editor, nonfiction author and writing teacher. He lived in Israel and the Czech Republic and is now the Chair of the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. He has written about adventure travel, the arts, digital culture, and the communal movement for Canadian and international publications. His first book, Fatal Tide: When the Race of a Lifetime Goes Wrong), is a true-life misadventure about the lure and dangers of extreme sports. His second book, a tragicomic travel memoir about the kibbutz movement and dreams of peace in the Middle East called Chasing Utopia: The Future of the Kibbutz in a Divided Israel will be published by ECW Press in Fall 2016.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 17, 2017
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
It wasn't until publishing Kevin Haworth's 2012 essay collection Famous Drownings in Literary History that I learned for the first time about the Jewish institution known as the kibbutz, a concept that is part practical and part political; in reality not much more than a collectively owned farm in the style of '60s hippie communes, the part that's important to Judaism is that they were founded by the very first "Zionists" who in the 1910s moved to the region now known as Israel, explicitly to establish a nation for Jewish people where none had existed for thousands of years, and it was these mostly Eastern European radical socialists who believed that the key to a "Jewish state" was the embrace of these communist-style cooperatives, even going so far to believe that such collective farms would transform the deserts of the Middle East and eventually bring peace between Jews and Muslims.
As American non-Jew David Leach points out in his fascinating new personal-essay collection, Chasing Utopia, although it's considered a duty by every Jewish person worldwide to regularly spend volunteer time at a Israeli kibbutz, these organizations also accept volunteers from all walks of life, Jewish or not; and back in the '70s and '80s when Leach was a youth, such kibbutzes were considered by many young people to be "the place where backpacking college students went on holiday when they didn't have any money" (or so once said Duran Duran's Simon Le Bon, merely one of thousands of such '70s youths to spend a summer on one of these farms, helped immensely by kibbutzes' reputations as places where the liquor flowed freely and sexual opportunities were easy). That's what led Leach to spend a summer at a kibbutz himself, an experience he would fondly remember with hazy nostalgia well into his middle-aged years as a Catholic Canadian journalist; but one day thirty years later, he happened to catch an item on the news about one of these kibbutzes recently filing an initial public stock offering (IPO) for their brand-new high-tech startup, which made him realize that the very nature of these organizations had gone through a radical transformation during the last half of the Postmodernist Era.
That's what Chasing Utopia basically is, a record of Leach's revisit to Israel for the first time in decades to learn what's happened to the collective farms he so warmly remembered from his youth, a trip that took him on a circular tour of the entire country and that entailed dozens of probing interviews with the remaining communards, government officials, NGO personnel, and fellow journalists. And the results are gripping: profoundly scaled back in number from hundreds to now dozens, the kibbutzes still remaining in Israel have largely been forced through economic circumstances to abandon their old collective roots, transforming themselves into traditionally capitalist, publicly held corporations, ones that have largely given up on agriculture to specialize instead in such 21st-century items as transistors, high-quality mirrors for medical equipment, and even cutting-edge women's razors. And in the meanwhile, as the politics of the region have continued to get even more fractured and complex with every passing year, instead of less like the originally Zionist founders of modern Israel envisioned, this too has had an effect on the kibbutzes, propagandized as a source of nationalist pride by conservatives (with the resulting terrorist attacks by Palestinians you would expect), while being held up as a bold experiment for inter-faith peace by liberals.
The lovely thing about a book like this being written by a non-Jew like Leach is that you don't have to be Jewish yourself to follow along with the issues; Leach approaches these subjects exactly like the disinterested outsider he is, and in many ways this is a great exercise in traditional journalism that helps explain these complicated issues in a clear and balanced way. But what makes the book even more interesting is Leach's personal connection to it all, which is why the sum of this book's chapters is a bigger whole than simply an addition of its parts, and why you couldn't just run these chapters as individual articles in a place like The Huffington Post; for in the spirit of 21st-century personal essay, Leach delicately weaves his personal story into these traditional journalism pieces, not afraid to express his own opinions about the things he's seeing and the people he's talking to. It makes for a fascinating book when all is said and done, my favorite type of nonfiction and the kind of book I would've published if it had been submitted to CCLaP; and it comes strongly recommended to one and all today, a book inherently interesting to those already familiar with the subjects at hand, and a book that will likely make you interested if you never have been before.
Out of 10: 9.6
It wasn't until publishing Kevin Haworth's 2012 essay collection Famous Drownings in Literary History that I learned for the first time about the Jewish institution known as the kibbutz, a concept that is part practical and part political; in reality not much more than a collectively owned farm in the style of '60s hippie communes, the part that's important to Judaism is that they were founded by the very first "Zionists" who in the 1910s moved to the region now known as Israel, explicitly to establish a nation for Jewish people where none had existed for thousands of years, and it was these mostly Eastern European radical socialists who believed that the key to a "Jewish state" was the embrace of these communist-style cooperatives, even going so far to believe that such collective farms would transform the deserts of the Middle East and eventually bring peace between Jews and Muslims.
As American non-Jew David Leach points out in his fascinating new personal-essay collection, Chasing Utopia, although it's considered a duty by every Jewish person worldwide to regularly spend volunteer time at a Israeli kibbutz, these organizations also accept volunteers from all walks of life, Jewish or not; and back in the '70s and '80s when Leach was a youth, such kibbutzes were considered by many young people to be "the place where backpacking college students went on holiday when they didn't have any money" (or so once said Duran Duran's Simon Le Bon, merely one of thousands of such '70s youths to spend a summer on one of these farms, helped immensely by kibbutzes' reputations as places where the liquor flowed freely and sexual opportunities were easy). That's what led Leach to spend a summer at a kibbutz himself, an experience he would fondly remember with hazy nostalgia well into his middle-aged years as a Catholic Canadian journalist; but one day thirty years later, he happened to catch an item on the news about one of these kibbutzes recently filing an initial public stock offering (IPO) for their brand-new high-tech startup, which made him realize that the very nature of these organizations had gone through a radical transformation during the last half of the Postmodernist Era.
That's what Chasing Utopia basically is, a record of Leach's revisit to Israel for the first time in decades to learn what's happened to the collective farms he so warmly remembered from his youth, a trip that took him on a circular tour of the entire country and that entailed dozens of probing interviews with the remaining communards, government officials, NGO personnel, and fellow journalists. And the results are gripping: profoundly scaled back in number from hundreds to now dozens, the kibbutzes still remaining in Israel have largely been forced through economic circumstances to abandon their old collective roots, transforming themselves into traditionally capitalist, publicly held corporations, ones that have largely given up on agriculture to specialize instead in such 21st-century items as transistors, high-quality mirrors for medical equipment, and even cutting-edge women's razors. And in the meanwhile, as the politics of the region have continued to get even more fractured and complex with every passing year, instead of less like the originally Zionist founders of modern Israel envisioned, this too has had an effect on the kibbutzes, propagandized as a source of nationalist pride by conservatives (with the resulting terrorist attacks by Palestinians you would expect), while being held up as a bold experiment for inter-faith peace by liberals.
The lovely thing about a book like this being written by a non-Jew like Leach is that you don't have to be Jewish yourself to follow along with the issues; Leach approaches these subjects exactly like the disinterested outsider he is, and in many ways this is a great exercise in traditional journalism that helps explain these complicated issues in a clear and balanced way. But what makes the book even more interesting is Leach's personal connection to it all, which is why the sum of this book's chapters is a bigger whole than simply an addition of its parts, and why you couldn't just run these chapters as individual articles in a place like The Huffington Post; for in the spirit of 21st-century personal essay, Leach delicately weaves his personal story into these traditional journalism pieces, not afraid to express his own opinions about the things he's seeing and the people he's talking to. It makes for a fascinating book when all is said and done, my favorite type of nonfiction and the kind of book I would've published if it had been submitted to CCLaP; and it comes strongly recommended to one and all today, a book inherently interesting to those already familiar with the subjects at hand, and a book that will likely make you interested if you never have been before.
Out of 10: 9.6
January 7, 2017
Leach lived on a Kibbutz for 8 months when he was a young man. When he sees the kibbutz listed on the stock market over 20 years later, he decides to go back and see what other changes have happened in Israel since he was away. He discovers that the kibbutz system as he knew it, and perhaps as many in the West still think about it no longer exists. To survive they have had to find a niche--are you green and off grid? Do you grow something specific the world wants/needs? Etc. People from the West can't just come live here anymore--there is no welcome or room, in general. Communal living really doesn't exist either. People live in individual dwellings and no longer share funds and meals--people are paid for their work. Also, the sympathy for Israel that helped establish the kibbutz programs has also shifted to more empathy for Palestinians.
An okay read, but definitely not for everyone.
An okay read, but definitely not for everyone.
March 27, 2020
I picked up this book expecting it to be a history of the kibbutz movement and an analysis of its future, but it's more a work of narrative journalism. Leach - a former magazine editor and creative writing professor - volunteered on a kibbutz in the 80s and returned to see what had happened in the interim. He summarises the collapse of the movement into privatisation and bourgeois suburbia, and interviews other people trying to create modern Utopias from different perspectives (Jewish-Arab co-existence, New Urbanism, eco-villages...), None of them are large movements; they are more nice ideas in the spirit of the kibbutz, and most have are not connected to the (still-existing) kibbutz movement.
Leach is a good journalist and gets his facts straight, but the book wanders frequently from its remit into larger sociological or geopolitical issues which would require a longer, more expert book. I got somewhat frustrated by these soundbites taken out of context: this would probably have been better if it was just the past, present and future of kibbutzim. But with so many great characters and human-interest stories along the way, I can't blame a writer for getting sidetracked.
Leach is a good journalist and gets his facts straight, but the book wanders frequently from its remit into larger sociological or geopolitical issues which would require a longer, more expert book. I got somewhat frustrated by these soundbites taken out of context: this would probably have been better if it was just the past, present and future of kibbutzim. But with so many great characters and human-interest stories along the way, I can't blame a writer for getting sidetracked.
December 1, 2021
It was a journalistic overview of kibbutz history and present, really did a very thorough job and can't really imagine doing any better congrats.
Anyways i think this book should suffice to conclude my investigation of kibbutz.
Anyways i think this book should suffice to conclude my investigation of kibbutz.
October 4, 2017
You might think this is a topic you're not interested in, but Leach is a lively, often funny writer, and this is a fascinating, compelling read populated by larger than life characters.
December 14, 2025
Meh, mediocre audiobook. No clear storyline or clear idea. Rather he jumps all over the place with random interviews and points. Nothing is sorted into segments or chapters. What did I even learn from this? It's a terrible overview of kibbutz living as we don't learn anything step by step.
The author is good and text clear. Audio clear and great. Yet this should have been a clear and concise overview start to finish not random interviews you can find in 100 other places anyhow. It's a shame as there is no great book on kibbutz anywhere. I read one that's quite decent yet it suffers from similar issues. Where is the historical overview? Don't we deserve one?
The author is good and text clear. Audio clear and great. Yet this should have been a clear and concise overview start to finish not random interviews you can find in 100 other places anyhow. It's a shame as there is no great book on kibbutz anywhere. I read one that's quite decent yet it suffers from similar issues. Where is the historical overview? Don't we deserve one?
September 2, 2025
In one of the final chapters he visits a "settler utopia" and they describe how they don't build walls. You think, hmmm, why not? Well it's so Palestinians can come get vengeance for all the killings the settlers go inflict upon them.
What??? Why would you want them to be able to kill innocent women and children?
Oh, so you can broadcast them as martyrs killed by terrorists. Israel has gotten too good at defending its people, they need to sacrifice some of their own babies to win the PR war.
Fucking harrowing.
What??? Why would you want them to be able to kill innocent women and children?
Oh, so you can broadcast them as martyrs killed by terrorists. Israel has gotten too good at defending its people, they need to sacrifice some of their own babies to win the PR war.
Fucking harrowing.
October 31, 2016
Very interesting book on the meaning of the kibbutz: historically, in the 21st century, and to this gifted author personally.
April 22, 2019
A highly enjoyable read.
October 24, 2023
Interesting read. Deepened my knowledge of kibbutzim and how they have evolved over Israel's history, interspersed with anecdotes of the author's time as a volunteer on a Kibbutz in the 1980s.
September 1, 2016
In the 20 years since the author was a volunteer on a kibbutz he goes back to not only revisit his old kibbutz but visits others to see how they have changed.
I enjoyed reading about his encounters with various leaders of the different kibbutz communities as well as his impressions of how these communities have changed with the times. The author gives us a good view of Israel as he travels from one end of the country to the other.
I enjoyed reading about his encounters with various leaders of the different kibbutz communities as well as his impressions of how these communities have changed with the times. The author gives us a good view of Israel as he travels from one end of the country to the other.
September 18, 2016
Excellent book. Well written by a Gentile Canadian who volunteered on a kibbutz in his youth and returns to Israel decades later. He analyzes the past kibbutz movement and ends with the many diverse kibbutzim which exist today. Fascinating.
November 10, 2016
I thoroughly enjoyed David Leach's "Chasing Utopia", which looks at the future of the Kibbutz, Israel, and Palestine, while interweaving engaging stories from the author's year long stay at a Kibbutz in northern Israel in the late 1980's. Entertaining and informative.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews