A remarkable number of Israel’s founding generation of writers were raised, or otherwise spent a significant number of years, on a kibbutz, and the kibbutz has played a pervasive and provocative role in the formation of Israel’s literary culture. The institution of the kibbutz was always treated with the same skepticism and questioning as any of Israel’s other national institutions but in recent decades, increasingly pessimistic portrayals of estrangement and alienation have sometimes seemed to eclipse more sanguine representations. Even as its older values fade under the pressures of globalization and privatization, the kibbutz ideal endures as a catalyst for the moral imagination of Israel’s writers.

Sherry Levy-Reiner Memorial Lecture, co-sponsored by the Department of English at the University of Cincinnati