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The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia
The Israeli kibbutz, the twentieth century's most interesting social experiment, is in the throes of change. Instrumental in establishing the State of Israel, defending its borders, creating its agriculture and industry, and setting its social norms, the kibbutz is the only commune in history to have played a central role in a nation's life. Over the years, however, Israel has developed from an idealistic pioneering community into a materialistic free market society. Consequently, the kibbutz has been marginalized and is undergoing a radical transformation. The egalitarian ethic expressed in the phrase, "From each according to ability, to each according to need," is being replaced by the concept of reward for effort. Cooperative management is increasingly giving way to business administration. Kibbutz members, who were obligated to and dependent on their community, are now responsible for running their own lives and earning their own living. Through distinguished journalist Daniel Gavron's revealing portraits of ten kibbutzim we hear the voices both of the veterans who are witnessing the collapse of their dream and of the youngsters who have rejected the vision of their parents. The author also analyzes the economic collapse that triggered the changes and the failure of the unique kibbutz education system to perpetuate communal values. The opening and concluding chapters provide a compelling overview of the situation and look toward the future. Gavron, a former kibbutznik, brings a keen and sensitive eye to this first overview of the current revolution in the Israeli kibbutz. Jewish readers and all those interested in Israel will find this book a compelling portrait of a country trying to hold onto its past while facing its future.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published May 25, 2000
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September 13, 2019
To paraphrase the author: the structure of kibbutzim makes them “superlative human laboratories” uniquely suited to the study not only of voluntary socialism and the development/survival of egalitarian principles (and the trade-offs they often necessitate), but also of human nature as it manifests in different socio-economic, political environments. I thought Daniel Gavron did a great job not only of discussing the different elements of the kibbutzim but also of making the reader think of these elements and their implications beyond the kibbutz context. The book offers an insightful documentation of the human side of the kibbutz – adding a human element to the history and economics - in a way that I think would make it interesting to a lot of readers and not just to those with a preexisting fascination with the movement like myself.
The author takes what I suppose could be called a sociological approach (including topics such as the internal dynamics/politics of the different kibbutz movements, the complex political involvement of the kibbutz movement with Zionist and labor politics, education, gender, ethnicity, family and social arrangements, etc.) so the book is great for an overall, well-rounded understanding of the movement, but perhaps less appropriate for a reader more interested specifically in the economic side of things - for this I would recommend The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World (2018) by Ran Abramitzky, which offers a primarily economic perspective (presenting econometric analysis in a way that is easily accessible to the nonspecialist) and also presents more up-to-date information and a lot more quantitative research and data (*a few notes on this book at the end of the review). For a reader specifically interested in getting a detailed, in-depth history of the movement, I would recommend Henry Near's The Kibbutz Movement: A History, Volume 1: Origins and Growth, 1909-1939 (1992) and Volume 2: Crisis and Achievement, 1939-1995 (1997), which, as far as I know, are the only definitive and comprehensive history books on the movement (and are cited in both Gavron and Abramitzky's books).
What made this book particularly engaging for me was that although the author drew information from dozens of books, documents, journals and archives in order to present a fuller picture, the core of the book is based on the informal interviews he conducted between 1998 and 1999. The interviewees included members/ex-members/non-member-residents, veterans, managers, teachers, teenagers, etc. - basically, a wide range of people with different perspectives: the proponents for change (to varying degrees), the minority who resist it, as well as those that were just swept up in all the panic or disillusion and felt as though they had no choice but to go along with it.
Whenever a book is so heavily based on interviews it runs the risk of becoming a bit cliché and overly dramatic, with the interviewees basically serving as confirmations of the author's mission statement, but this really wasn't the case here. There was something very natural about the interviews, which I suspect may have had something to with the author's own “comparatively short” kibbutz membership (an experience he only briefly discusses towards the end of the book, which thankfully isn't in the “memoir in disguise” genre) as well as what I imagined to be the author's empathetic and understanding attitude towards interviewees with varying opinions (we almost never see the author's direct speech, but we can more or less deduce the nature of the questions based on the sort of responses he got).
Written with what I perceived to be both the nostalgia and frustration of a former “believer” if you will, the book examines how small, struggling egalitarian communes developed into large, influential and important parts of society, where things started to go down hill (the economic collapse of 1985, during which “the collective kibbutz debt escalated to between 5 and 6 billion dollars”, etc.), and uses the changes and debates going on within the movement at the time to predict what it's future might look like – all the while shedding light on some common misconceptions often held by both idealisers and critics of the movement. Although stressing that of the 267 kibbutzim at the time, no two were exactly alike, the author uses 10 kibbutzim to illustrate/represent the most common trends of the movement – through these descriptions we also get a glimpse into what daily life looked like at the different kibbutzim at different points in time, absurdities and all - these sections were often humourous and amusing.
As the title suggests, the book focuses on the different obstacles faced by the kibbutzim to surviving in the modern world, as well as the variety of solutions they employed in an attempt to overcome them. While some sacrifice ideological purity in order to attain economic success, others actually attribute their economic success to their ideological purity (crediting their combination of “socialist idealism with financial prudence”). Economically successful kibbutzim have the luxury of being able to afford to maintain their egalitarianism without severe consequences to their communities, but even there, the reader discovers that not all kibbutz problems are purely of an economic nature.
As for their solutions, it was interesting to see just how far some of the kibbutzim were willing to take the idea of the “separation of the community from the business, as put forward in The New Kibbutz by Yehuda Harel” and how much of the “the old system of trust” they were willing to replace “with a legally guaranteed social contract, as proposed by Ariel Halperin”. This isn't a philosophical book, but the changes to the social and economic fabric of the kibbutzim inevitably leads to the redefinition of the term and a re-interpretation of how it's core values of egalitarianism, cooperation and mutual assistance are implemented in practice. Can you have a “capitalist kibbutz”? Is a kibbutz it's values, or is it the structure that those values result in? Can a kibbutz still be a kibbutz with the systematic severance of the link between ideology (in it's unadulterated, un-commercialised form) and practice, without having corrosive effects on the very concept of “principles”? Where do you draw the line? In a memorable interview at Kibbutz Hasolelim, a kibbutz member defends some of the more “capitalist” changes being made and nicely illustrated this somewhat philosophical problem:
The changes and the rationalisations behind them say a lot, not just about the kibbutzim implementing them, but also about Israeli society and the world at large. Unlike most other relatively long lasting communes around the world, the kibbutz movement was not isolationist and instead stood out for its “centrality to the national life of the Jewish community in Palestine and then of Israel”. The downside of the symbiosis between kibbutz and society is that the kibbutz relies too heavily on the rest of society for it's survival - “As a vital, organic part of the community, it was not immune from its diseases. It strongly influenced society, but it was influenced in its turn.” And so “Deprived of its sympathetic "sea" of a national pioneering, egalitarian, and cooperative ethos”, according to the author, “the kibbutz "fish" cannot survive” - at least not in it's traditional form, or the way it was intended to by it's founders.
Perhaps I shouldn't end this review on such a downer. The book provided a rare glimpse into some of the better qualities of human nature, which, although present in a debatable percentage of humanity, are usually dormant until they are forced out by some combination of circumstances. “Even if kibbutzim eventually disappear, they have taught us that appropriate incentives can shape human nature to be cooperative, considerate”, and can drive people to create egalitarian communities, which, despite being “difficult to manage in light of the forces that undermine them”(quotes from Ran Abramitzky's book), still exist, and sometimes even thrive .
***
I read Ran Abramitzky's The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World (2018) as a follow up to Daniel Gavron's book (since there are about 18 years between them), and decided to include a mini-review of it here to avoid repetition. I would say that chapters 1-4 are more or less a condensed (more concise) version of Gavron's book, which is actually mentioned numerous times throughout this book. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are where Abramitzky starts to bring something new to the discussion in the form of econometrics and his analysis of statistics to reveal the extent of issues such as “free- riding (lack of incentive to work hard), adverse selection (the tendency of less- productive workers to enter), brain drain (the tendency of the most productive members to exit), and under investment in human capital (lack of incentive to study hard)”.
In Gavron's book we see the different trends in the changes that the kibbutzim were implementing (privatization to varying degrees) and some of the immediate/short term effects; in this book we get to see the longer term effects in the form of statistics and empirical data collected by institutions such as the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, as well data collected from Israeli population censuses and by the author himself. Chapters 9: Why Some Kibbutzim Remained Egalitarian and Others Did Not and 10 The Consequences of Rising Income Inequality, in particular, provided exactly the sort of follow up that I was looking for – we get statistics on how the changes impacted the use of money, the number of children per family, education, etc. The research presented has broad implications that extend far beyond the kibbutz setting since privatization on kibbutzim provides a rare opportunity to test “economic logic about the effects of income equality and redistributive policies” and economic predictions (regarding free-riding, adverse selection, brain drain, etc.) which, “despite their centrality in modern economics […] are challenging to test empirically, both because of data limitations and because sharp changes in the redistribution schemes, which are necessary to test these predictions, are rare.”
The best parts of the book are all the statistics and econometric analysis. When it comes to the discussion sections however, I thought the author was a bit too repetitive, even though I do understand the logic behind making each chapter readable on it's own, or rewording certain ideas in different ways to make them more understandable. I also found some of the author's descriptions/explanations lacking – for example, despite this book being the one focused on the economics, I actually thought Gavron's Chapter 6: The Collapse of 1985 did a much better job of explaining the financial crisis/“the kibbutz crisis” of the 1980s and everything that lead up to it, the mechanisms that facilitated it, etc.
Also, if you're already familiar with the movement, it's the sort of book that will, for the most part, just put statistics and numbers to things you're probably already aware of or were probably already able to predict – which is, of course, a necessary confirmation and hugely important, but can also get a little bit boring :) There is the occasional surprising detail in the data that's enlightening in a way that you might not have expected though, so it's definitely worth carefully going through.
In short - I think this is definitely a worthwhile book and an important read for anyone interested in having a meaningful conversation about the economic trade-offs of varying degrees of egalitarianism/voluntary socialism in general, and the kibbutz in particular.
***
On a side note: Chapter 11: On The (Lack Of) Stability of Communes (where the author “uses the economic perspective developed in this book to shed light on the conditions under which communes that strive for equality and cooperation are stable, how they persist, and why they often collapse”) drew some interesting parallels and comparisons between some North American communes and kibbutzim. It was interesting enough to make me add the most cited book in the chapter to my to-read list: Two Hundred Years of American Communes by Yaacov Oved.
The author takes what I suppose could be called a sociological approach (including topics such as the internal dynamics/politics of the different kibbutz movements, the complex political involvement of the kibbutz movement with Zionist and labor politics, education, gender, ethnicity, family and social arrangements, etc.) so the book is great for an overall, well-rounded understanding of the movement, but perhaps less appropriate for a reader more interested specifically in the economic side of things - for this I would recommend The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World (2018) by Ran Abramitzky, which offers a primarily economic perspective (presenting econometric analysis in a way that is easily accessible to the nonspecialist) and also presents more up-to-date information and a lot more quantitative research and data (*a few notes on this book at the end of the review). For a reader specifically interested in getting a detailed, in-depth history of the movement, I would recommend Henry Near's The Kibbutz Movement: A History, Volume 1: Origins and Growth, 1909-1939 (1992) and Volume 2: Crisis and Achievement, 1939-1995 (1997), which, as far as I know, are the only definitive and comprehensive history books on the movement (and are cited in both Gavron and Abramitzky's books).
What made this book particularly engaging for me was that although the author drew information from dozens of books, documents, journals and archives in order to present a fuller picture, the core of the book is based on the informal interviews he conducted between 1998 and 1999. The interviewees included members/ex-members/non-member-residents, veterans, managers, teachers, teenagers, etc. - basically, a wide range of people with different perspectives: the proponents for change (to varying degrees), the minority who resist it, as well as those that were just swept up in all the panic or disillusion and felt as though they had no choice but to go along with it.
Whenever a book is so heavily based on interviews it runs the risk of becoming a bit cliché and overly dramatic, with the interviewees basically serving as confirmations of the author's mission statement, but this really wasn't the case here. There was something very natural about the interviews, which I suspect may have had something to with the author's own “comparatively short” kibbutz membership (an experience he only briefly discusses towards the end of the book, which thankfully isn't in the “memoir in disguise” genre) as well as what I imagined to be the author's empathetic and understanding attitude towards interviewees with varying opinions (we almost never see the author's direct speech, but we can more or less deduce the nature of the questions based on the sort of responses he got).
Written with what I perceived to be both the nostalgia and frustration of a former “believer” if you will, the book examines how small, struggling egalitarian communes developed into large, influential and important parts of society, where things started to go down hill (the economic collapse of 1985, during which “the collective kibbutz debt escalated to between 5 and 6 billion dollars”, etc.), and uses the changes and debates going on within the movement at the time to predict what it's future might look like – all the while shedding light on some common misconceptions often held by both idealisers and critics of the movement. Although stressing that of the 267 kibbutzim at the time, no two were exactly alike, the author uses 10 kibbutzim to illustrate/represent the most common trends of the movement – through these descriptions we also get a glimpse into what daily life looked like at the different kibbutzim at different points in time, absurdities and all - these sections were often humourous and amusing.
As the title suggests, the book focuses on the different obstacles faced by the kibbutzim to surviving in the modern world, as well as the variety of solutions they employed in an attempt to overcome them. While some sacrifice ideological purity in order to attain economic success, others actually attribute their economic success to their ideological purity (crediting their combination of “socialist idealism with financial prudence”). Economically successful kibbutzim have the luxury of being able to afford to maintain their egalitarianism without severe consequences to their communities, but even there, the reader discovers that not all kibbutz problems are purely of an economic nature.
As for their solutions, it was interesting to see just how far some of the kibbutzim were willing to take the idea of the “separation of the community from the business, as put forward in The New Kibbutz by Yehuda Harel” and how much of the “the old system of trust” they were willing to replace “with a legally guaranteed social contract, as proposed by Ariel Halperin”. This isn't a philosophical book, but the changes to the social and economic fabric of the kibbutzim inevitably leads to the redefinition of the term and a re-interpretation of how it's core values of egalitarianism, cooperation and mutual assistance are implemented in practice. Can you have a “capitalist kibbutz”? Is a kibbutz it's values, or is it the structure that those values result in? Can a kibbutz still be a kibbutz with the systematic severance of the link between ideology (in it's unadulterated, un-commercialised form) and practice, without having corrosive effects on the very concept of “principles”? Where do you draw the line? In a memorable interview at Kibbutz Hasolelim, a kibbutz member defends some of the more “capitalist” changes being made and nicely illustrated this somewhat philosophical problem:
“Was Hasolelim more of a kibbutz when each member thought that he was doing all the work and the other members were living on his back? […] Was it more of a kibbutz when we were forced to stop calling volunteer work days because no one turned up? Was it a kibbutz when we couldn't persuade members to help prepare for the celebration of a festival, and, if we did get a celebration organized, nobody cleaned up afterward? Is a kibbutz simply a joint bank account, or is it rather a good quality of life and a cooperative partnership?”
The changes and the rationalisations behind them say a lot, not just about the kibbutzim implementing them, but also about Israeli society and the world at large. Unlike most other relatively long lasting communes around the world, the kibbutz movement was not isolationist and instead stood out for its “centrality to the national life of the Jewish community in Palestine and then of Israel”. The downside of the symbiosis between kibbutz and society is that the kibbutz relies too heavily on the rest of society for it's survival - “As a vital, organic part of the community, it was not immune from its diseases. It strongly influenced society, but it was influenced in its turn.” And so “Deprived of its sympathetic "sea" of a national pioneering, egalitarian, and cooperative ethos”, according to the author, “the kibbutz "fish" cannot survive” - at least not in it's traditional form, or the way it was intended to by it's founders.
Perhaps I shouldn't end this review on such a downer. The book provided a rare glimpse into some of the better qualities of human nature, which, although present in a debatable percentage of humanity, are usually dormant until they are forced out by some combination of circumstances. “Even if kibbutzim eventually disappear, they have taught us that appropriate incentives can shape human nature to be cooperative, considerate”, and can drive people to create egalitarian communities, which, despite being “difficult to manage in light of the forces that undermine them”(quotes from Ran Abramitzky's book), still exist, and sometimes even thrive .
***
I read Ran Abramitzky's The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World (2018) as a follow up to Daniel Gavron's book (since there are about 18 years between them), and decided to include a mini-review of it here to avoid repetition. I would say that chapters 1-4 are more or less a condensed (more concise) version of Gavron's book, which is actually mentioned numerous times throughout this book. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are where Abramitzky starts to bring something new to the discussion in the form of econometrics and his analysis of statistics to reveal the extent of issues such as “free- riding (lack of incentive to work hard), adverse selection (the tendency of less- productive workers to enter), brain drain (the tendency of the most productive members to exit), and under investment in human capital (lack of incentive to study hard)”.
In Gavron's book we see the different trends in the changes that the kibbutzim were implementing (privatization to varying degrees) and some of the immediate/short term effects; in this book we get to see the longer term effects in the form of statistics and empirical data collected by institutions such as the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, as well data collected from Israeli population censuses and by the author himself. Chapters 9: Why Some Kibbutzim Remained Egalitarian and Others Did Not and 10 The Consequences of Rising Income Inequality, in particular, provided exactly the sort of follow up that I was looking for – we get statistics on how the changes impacted the use of money, the number of children per family, education, etc. The research presented has broad implications that extend far beyond the kibbutz setting since privatization on kibbutzim provides a rare opportunity to test “economic logic about the effects of income equality and redistributive policies” and economic predictions (regarding free-riding, adverse selection, brain drain, etc.) which, “despite their centrality in modern economics […] are challenging to test empirically, both because of data limitations and because sharp changes in the redistribution schemes, which are necessary to test these predictions, are rare.”
The best parts of the book are all the statistics and econometric analysis. When it comes to the discussion sections however, I thought the author was a bit too repetitive, even though I do understand the logic behind making each chapter readable on it's own, or rewording certain ideas in different ways to make them more understandable. I also found some of the author's descriptions/explanations lacking – for example, despite this book being the one focused on the economics, I actually thought Gavron's Chapter 6: The Collapse of 1985 did a much better job of explaining the financial crisis/“the kibbutz crisis” of the 1980s and everything that lead up to it, the mechanisms that facilitated it, etc.
Also, if you're already familiar with the movement, it's the sort of book that will, for the most part, just put statistics and numbers to things you're probably already aware of or were probably already able to predict – which is, of course, a necessary confirmation and hugely important, but can also get a little bit boring :) There is the occasional surprising detail in the data that's enlightening in a way that you might not have expected though, so it's definitely worth carefully going through.
In short - I think this is definitely a worthwhile book and an important read for anyone interested in having a meaningful conversation about the economic trade-offs of varying degrees of egalitarianism/voluntary socialism in general, and the kibbutz in particular.
***
On a side note: Chapter 11: On The (Lack Of) Stability of Communes (where the author “uses the economic perspective developed in this book to shed light on the conditions under which communes that strive for equality and cooperation are stable, how they persist, and why they often collapse”) drew some interesting parallels and comparisons between some North American communes and kibbutzim. It was interesting enough to make me add the most cited book in the chapter to my to-read list: Two Hundred Years of American Communes by Yaacov Oved.
June 8, 2015
I was pretty hesitant to read this, thinking it might just be a piece of Zionist propaganda. The author at least used to label himself a Zionist, not sure what exactly his views are now. For the most part this book is at least fair when mentioning Arabs, pointing out that the Jewish immigration has been a provocation for their anger, and even mentioning the early terrorist attacks conducted by Jews against the British authority in Palestine. I basically decided to read this just because I'm interested in the successes and failures of back-to-the-land movements. Unfortunately, the Kibbutzim aren't really too inspiring in that regard. Even early on they were pretty dependent on operating businesses that sell exports, as well as donations from sympathetic Jews abroad, rich philanthropists like the Rothschilds and a lot of their later wealth came from Nazi reparations. So not exactly the paragon of self-sufficiency. These days they're not really much different than the mainstream. Similar to the Amish they've continually made compromises with the high-tech world around them to try to keep the younger generations from abandoning the project, which really tends to just create a "worst of both worlds" scenario (all the stupid crap of modernity to worry about while still having to adhere to the most annoying religious traditions). And the Kibbutz also wasn't really a withdrawalist movement like modern eco-villages (technically) but actually more of a colonial tool for the state of Israel to establish itself. There are some interesting discussions in here though, like the different spectrums between individualism and communalism, egalitarian and hierarchical, socialism/anarchism and capitalism, rural and urban, etc. as well as how religious commune experiments tend to stay together longer than secular ones. In my opinion it's worth skimming through if your library has it or something. Don't buy it though, especially if this guy is still supporting Zionism.
December 15, 2025
I read 2 books about kibbutz now and the other one was way worse as it's the same yet less focused. This one was not really as focused as one would except. There are no timeline, no clear map, no start to finish story. It's insane how many books about kibbutz there are where we only hear about observations and opinions on how it is to experience the change emotionally. What is kibbutz? How is it run? There is nothing about it here. The book is well-written with clever observations about the capitalist change and how they think about it. Yet it's repetitive in this aspect as you get the point after 2 pages.
There are a lot of curious stories and events described here yet you need to read 2 pages for every new point. Everything else is filler. A fun read yet absolutely not the kibbutz intro book as rather it focuses on how the utopia failed. I wish I had found some intro instead before reading this. Yet I still recommend it. It's a very unique idea breaking apart. They were bailed out by the state regularly and in 1985 they were forced by the state to become profitable which forced them to abandon communist ideas. They were billions in depth and the state needed assurances this time around.
Initially men and women worked together and so children were raised by a care worker. Moms were allowed to see their kids for 2-3 hours a day. This made many unhappy and they moved out. You also didn't own your own clothing. It was washed by others then you just picked out new pants. You couldn't get your own money or wage as all were paid the same even if you worked outside the kibbutz. No matter the skills, work rate, or job all were paid the same in mainly free housing, food, electricity. Yet today you can only join one if you pay a percentage of your wage like 40% and they need to know you can work hard before accepting you.
There are a lot of curious stories and events described here yet you need to read 2 pages for every new point. Everything else is filler. A fun read yet absolutely not the kibbutz intro book as rather it focuses on how the utopia failed. I wish I had found some intro instead before reading this. Yet I still recommend it. It's a very unique idea breaking apart. They were bailed out by the state regularly and in 1985 they were forced by the state to become profitable which forced them to abandon communist ideas. They were billions in depth and the state needed assurances this time around.
Initially men and women worked together and so children were raised by a care worker. Moms were allowed to see their kids for 2-3 hours a day. This made many unhappy and they moved out. You also didn't own your own clothing. It was washed by others then you just picked out new pants. You couldn't get your own money or wage as all were paid the same even if you worked outside the kibbutz. No matter the skills, work rate, or job all were paid the same in mainly free housing, food, electricity. Yet today you can only join one if you pay a percentage of your wage like 40% and they need to know you can work hard before accepting you.
February 8, 2023
A bit dry in parts and I found myself getting the kibbutzim mixed up, and repetitive. But still a very informative read.
I felt some parts of the argument were missed out though.
I felt some parts of the argument were missed out though.
February 22, 2013
boring, repetitive
December 19, 2013
Rather journalistic (in a negative sense). Nevertheless useful for an overview of some key developments and debates over the last half century. Contains material on donkeys and mules as well.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews