Kibbutzniks in the Diaspora (review)

The author, an Israeli professor of education, spent a sabbatical year in California and was struck by the phenomenon of kibbutz-reared Israelis, "kibbutzniks," who now live in Los Angeles. To her, this was a double-anomaly. As a Zionist, emigration from Israel is "yerida," going down and, by definition, negative. Kibbutzniks who emigrate were viewed as rebelling against both Zionism and kibbutz ideology. That there were kibbutznik yordim, emigres, in significant numbers in Los Angeles was assumed by the author to be a failure of the kibbutz educational system, and it is this failure that she seeks to explore. Sabar is an Israeli and not a post-Zionist, which she readily reports to the reader. She uses terms such as "aliyah" and "yerida" rather than migration, and she speaks of the former as positive and the latter as negative.

In contrast to the authors of too many "studies," Sabar is realistic and candid about her research and findings. She readily indicates that they are suggestive rather than definitive. It is a qualitative rather than quantitative study, and her sample is purposive rather than representative. It included males and females in the Los Angeles area who were raised and educated on kibbutzim representing various ideological streams, who served in the Israel Defense Forces, came to the United States either directly from the kibbutz or after a brief stay elsewhere in Israel, and were in the United States for at least three but no more than ten years.

Sabar interviewed some who remained deeply attached to the kibbutz and hoped to return to it, others who yearned to return to Israel but not to the kibbutz, and others who had no expectations of returning on any permanent basis. The theme underlying almost all her interviews is a search for identity. However, among the problems of this type of research - asking respondents to reflect back on their situation in the kibbutz - are the problem of authenticity and the difficulty of determining the actual sequence of events. Especially for those who are critical of the kibbutz and/or Israeli society, it is hard to tell how much of their thoughts and feelings about the kibbutz and Israel are what actually motivated them initially to leave and how much is a contemporary rationalization.

One finding which repeated itself frequently is that those reared in secular kibbutzim now find meaning in religion. Some have affiliated with synagogues and some have undertaken a measure of observance of religious rituals. Some were motivated by authentic religious yearnings while for others the motivation was more ethnic than religious. In either case, this finding highlights the very different role of religion and religio-ethnicity in American society, where Jews, and especially Israeli Jews, are a minority, and in Israel, where Jews are the dominant majority. In addition, for Israeli-Americans, their new experience with religion is more broadly related to the role of religion in immigration and absorption which is obvious among many groups of new Americans, especially among Koreans and other Asian-Americans.

Despite Sabar's focus on kibbutzniks and her assertion that their yerida is a reflection of the failure of kibbutz education, it remains to be demonstrated that kibbutzniks are really that different from other Israelis. One suspects that interviews with yordim of non-kibbutz backgrounds would find that they respond in many of the same ways that the kibbutzniks did to Sabar's probing questions.

Sabar suggests that the existence of an Israeli subculture, if not a kibbutz subculture, in Los Angeles is a reflection of the Israelis' lack of acculturation and assimilation into American society. It might, however, be suggested that the opposite is the case-- that a large measure of the existence of the Israeli subculture is precisely the result of the multicultural character of American society. American society and culture tolerate, if not encourage, that type...