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"Kibbutzim"
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Imagining the Kibbutz
In Imagining the Kibbutz, Ranen Omer-Sherman explores the literary and cinematic representations of the socialist experiment that became history's most successfully sustained communal enterprise. Inspired in part by the kibbutz movement's recent commemoration of its centennial, this study responds to a significant gap in scholarship. Numerous sociological and economic studies have appeared, but no book-length study has ever addressed the tremendous range of critically imaginative portrayals of the kibbutz. This diachronic study addresses novels, short fiction, memoirs, and cinematic portrayals of the kibbutz by both kibbutz \"insiders\" (including those born and raised there, as well as those who joined the kibbutz as immigrants or migrants from the city) and \"outsiders.\" For these artists, the kibbutz is a crucial microcosm for understanding Israeli values and identity. The central drama explored in their works is the monumental tension between the individual and the collective, between individual aspiration and ideological rigor, between self-sacrifice and self-fulfillment. Portraying kibbutz life honestly demands retaining at least two oppositional things in mind at once—the absolute necessity of euphoric dreaming and the mellowing inevitability of disillusionment. As such, these artists' imaginative witnessing of the fraught relation between the collective and the citizen-soldier is the story of Israel itself.
eBook
Colonizing Palestine
Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements,
Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on
Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the
British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational
Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of
Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active
participants in the process that ultimately transformed large
portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej
Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how
three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with
Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn
'Amer.
Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and
national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a
microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and
indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as
left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork
for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not
conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their
displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the
kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in
their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury
demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the
Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a
protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing
Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which
forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the
present were gradually created.
eBook
Lessons from the Kibbutz on the Equality—Incentives Trade-off
The first kibbutzwas established southwest of the Sea of Galilee in 1910, but the vast majority of kibbutzim were established in the 1930s and 1940s, shortly before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Founders aimed to create a “new human being” who cared about the group more than about himself, a homo sociologicus who would challenge the selfish homo economicus. This idealistic view can explain many of the key features of kibbutzim: equal sharing in the distribution of income; no private property; a noncash economy; communal dining halls where members ate their meals together; high provision of local public goods for use by kibbutz members; separate communal residences for children outside their parents homes, which were supposed to free women from their traditional role in society and allow them to be treated equally with men; collective education to instill socialist and Zionist values; communal production, whereby kibbutz members worked inside their kibbutzim in agriculture or in one of the kibbutz plants; and no use of hired labor from outside kibbutzim—because hiring labor was considered “exploitation” under the reigning socialist ideology. To an economist, steeped in thinking about incentives that self-interested individuals face, there are three reasons why an equal-sharing arrangement of this sort seems unlikely to last. First, high-ability members have an incentive to exit equal sharing arrangements to earn a wage premium—so-called “brain drain.” Second, low-ability individuals have an incentive to enter equal-sharing arrangements so that they can be subsidized by more-able individuals—so-called adverse selection. Third, in context of equal sharing, shirking and free-riding are likely to be prevalent. However, kibbutzim have survived successfully for the past century and currently consist of 120,000 members living in 268 kibbutzim. In a number of ways, the kibbutzim offer an exceptional environment to examine the potential trade-off between equality and incentives.
Journal Article
Shifting Landscapes, Changing Perspectives: The Founding of Kibbutz Lochamei HaGeta'ot
Since its establishment, Kibbutz Lochamei HaGeta'ot has served as a living memorial to the Holocaust. This is reflected not only in its name, but also in the timing of its foundation (which coincided with the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising) and the establishment of the first Holocaust museum (the Ghetto Fighters' House) on the kibbutz. This article focuses on the early phase of the kibbutz's history, from September 1948 to April 1949, which predates its official establishment. During this period, the kibbutz relocated from the Jezreel Valley, where it was located on land that had belonged to the Templer colony of Waldheim to its current location in the Western Galilee on the site of the abandoned Arab village of al-Sumayriyya. The article traces the journey of the founders across these two locations, examines their shifting perspectives both at the time and in retrospect, and demonstrates how these evolving views reflect broader attitudes within the kibbutz regarding Israel-Germany relations and the Palestinian tragedy of 1948.
Journal Article
The kibbutz movement
The two volumes of this work comprise the first comprehensive history of the kibbutz movement in any language. Origins and Growth covers the first thirty years of this fascinating story, from the formation of the kibbutz in the opening years of the twentieth century to the eve of the Second World War. It is a masterly analysis of the genesis and expansion of the kibbutzim and their relations with the world around them. It considers not only the various components of the kibbutz movement but also the pioneering youth movements from which their members came. Henry Near’s analysis of the ideological, political, economic, and social development of the kibbutz movement is illustrated throughout by excerpts from historical sources, affording a wealth of colourful insights into the changing quality of kibbutz life as experienced by its members. The second volume, Crisis and Achievement, 1939-1995 extends the detailed historical analysis to 1977 and gives a comprehensive overview of subsequent developments.
eBook
The Limits of Equality: Insights from the Israeli Kibbutz
What limits the capacity of society to redistribute? What determines the structure of compensation in organizations striving for income equality? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the economic and sociological forces underlying the persistence of the Israeli kibbutzim, communities based on the principle of income equality. To do this, I exploit newly assembled data on kibbutzim and a financial crisis in the late 1980s that affected them differentially. The main findings are that (1) productive individuals are the most likely to exit and a kibbutz's wealth serves as a lock-in device that increases the value of staying; (2) higher wealth reduces exit and supports a high degree of income equality; and (3) ideology facilitates income equality. Using a simple model, I show that these findings are consistent with a view of the kibbutz as providing optimal insurance when members have the option of leaving. More generally, these findings contribute to an understanding of how mobility limits redistribution, and to an understanding of the determinants of the sharing rule in other types of organizations, such as professional partnerships, cooperatives, and labor-managed firms.
Journal Article
Hybrid Leadership Style in Kibbutz Industries to Promote Sustainability
This study investigates the use of a hybrid leadership style in three kibbutz factories—two in privatized communities and one in a cooperative community. The factory leaders integrate multiple leadership styles in managing their enterprises. This blended style reflects a hybrid approach to management that has democratic and autocratic elements as well as a transformational leadership style that is also community-oriented. The goals of the managers are to make the factory operations sustainable while remaining loyal to communal values. We conducted 75 interviews in the three kibbutzim with individuals from various ranks, ranging from senior leadership to production workers. In addition, to supplement the information, we analyzed organizational documents, including internal newsletters, reports, and booklets summarizing 50 years of activity, as well as news articles that provided up-to-date information on business transactions that contributed to the success of the kibbutz industries. The result identified a hybrid style that combines the communal, transformational, and democratic or autocratic styles. Many features of communal leadership were evident in the practices of kibbutz members rather than those of outsiders and by strategies focused on maintaining the industry for kibbutz members in the long run and an egalitarian communal style. The hybrid style contains democratic features such as transparent and open communication, and a transformational style was also found in key components of this leadership style, including innovation, professionalism, dynamism, adaptability to environmental changes, and human sensitivity.
Journal Article
Open-space design in kibbutz expansion neighborhoods as a tool for redefining social capital in the community
This article examines the impact of open space planning on relations and cooperation between locals and new immigrants in rural settlements. In recent years kibbutz settlements have transformed agricultural land into residential neighborhoods for migration of previously urban populations. We examined the relationship between residents and newcomers to the village, and the effect that planning a new neighborhood adjacent to the kibbutz has on creating motivation for veteran members and new residents to meet and build common social capital. We offer a method of analyzing planning maps of the open spaces between the original kibbutz settlement and the adjacent new expansion neighborhood. Analysis of 67 planning maps led us to define three types of demarcation between the existing settlement and the new neighborhood; we present each type and its components and offer their significance in the development of the relationship between veteran and new residents. The active involvement and partnership of the kibbutz members in deciding the location and the appearance of the neighborhood about to be built allowed them to determine the nature of the relations that would be forged between the veteran residents and the newcomers.
Journal Article
People’s Houses in Eretz Yisrael and Israel and the Memory of the Holocaust
The People’s House is a building and institution born of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, offering a sociocultural alternative to both the church and the alehouse. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the People’s House became a model of progress for a better society. The activists of socialist Zionism, who aspired to forge a new Jewish person along sociocultural lines, saw the People’s House as a crucible for Jewish communities who came to Eretz Yisrael from different countries. Indeed, beginning in the early twentieth century, People’s Houses were built in all manner of Jewish settlements in Eretz Yisrael, as centers for both creating and promulgating a new Hebrew culture. This article uncovers the historical link between the memory of the Holocaust and the conception and building of People’s Houses in Eretz Yisrael and Israel, through a discussion of the houses’ building initiatives, funding, ideological dependencies, naming, programs, and architectural and functional aspects. The essay’s conclusions are that: (1) The living memory of the Holocaust, both personal and communal, was a driving force in the conception and building of People’s Houses; (2) The built, functioning result proclaimed the lessons of Holocaust memory, reflecting an inversion of the scars left by the trauma; (3) The People’s House, designed as a workshop and a crucible for new Hebrew culture, was seen as a Holocaust-proof space, immune from the Holocaust’s painful memories.
Journal Article