Film: Fog
It’s been several weeks since I watched Fog, an hour-long documentary film from 2008 by director Rafik Halabi, and yet I remain haunted by its story, as though I’d been immersed in an epic novel or dramatic film. What I mean is that Fog, a fact-based foreign video...
Revenge of the Kibbutz?
The kibbutz movement began, over 100 years ago, when a handful of young Zionist pioneers grew fed up with the manager of the Kinnereth training farm where they were working and decided, rather than continue to be exploited, that they would start their own community...
Book: Mourning a Father Lost, by Avraham Balaban
The kibbutz might have remained just a footnote in the history of Israel or 20th-century socialism if it weren’t for one major twist: the decision to raise the “children of the dream” communally, separated from their parents except for evening visits, eating and...
Film: Not Quite Paradise
The film Rex Reed called, uh, "Charming!"If you were a volunteer on an Israeli kibbutz in the 1980s (like me), then Not Quite Paradise is your Breakfast Club, your Quadrophenia, your Hair. It’s the film that captures the cultural moment of your rebellious youth and...
Book: The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad
I’m likely the only reader of Michael Ross’s memoir, The Volunteer, who wished he had written more about his life on a kibbutz. I’m sure his co-author, his agent, his editor, and just about everybody who bought his book wanted him to skip quickly through his two years...
Until Daybreak: stories from the kibbutz
The kibbutz movement has always been well documented in literature, from the poet Ra’hel to the memoir of Degania pioneer Josef Baratz to internationally acclaimed novelist Amos Oz. I recently finished an anthology, selected by Oz in 1984 and translated into English,...
Review: The World of Yesterday
I’ve had a DVD copy of Did Herzl Really Say That? (ordered through Ruth Diskin Films) for six months now but only got around to watching it last week, in part because I wasn’t sure (from the back cover blurb) what the film was exactly about. It turns out that Herzl is...
Review: Murder on a Kibbutz: A Communal Case
“Anyone who has never lived on a kibbutz doesn’t understand the first thing about it,” one of the characters warns the lead detective in the delightful mystery novel Murder on a Kibbutz, by the late Batya Gur. “It’s impossible to understand from the outside and this...
Review: Inside-Out
One of the things I love about researching a book or an article are the serendipitous encounters and discoveries along the way. One good example: last year, on my research trip to Israel, I made plans to visit Kibbutz Urim, in the Negev Desert, on the slightest of...
Rumours & Myths
Life as a kibbutz volunteer was sustained by a variety of necessities: cold beer, free cigarettes, chocolate from the shop, all-you-could-eat chicken and rice, bad Jordanian TV, a weekly movie in the sports hall. Mostly, though, we thrived on gossip, rumour and...