We Were The Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz

The kibbutz movement is one of the most fascinating phenomena of modern history and one of Zionism's greatest stories. Several hundred communities attempted to live the ideas of equality, freedom, and social justice by giving up private property, individualism, and the "bourgeois" family unit to create an Israeli utopia following the Holocaust-the only example in world history of entire communities attempting to live in total equality. However, for the children raised in these communities, the kibbutz was an institution collapsing under the weight of an ideology that marginalized its offspring to make a political statement.In this spare and lucid memoir, Yael Neeman, born in 1960 at the height of the kibbutz movement, skill-fully captures the defining memories of her childhood, which were shared by hundreds of thousands of Israeli children in the kibbutz. Using the collective narrator "we," Neeman recounts the experiences of the children of the kibbutz movement, as well as the sociopolitical circumstances within which the communities functioned. We Were the Future is more than a compelling personal account of growing up in the kibbutz movement; it is an unstintingly honest examination of the price of equality and a new lens through which to see the history of Israel.