100 Books Like The Mystery of the Kibbutz

Asking me to pick my favorite Amos Oz book is like asking me to pick my favorite child: they are all uniquely wonderful. Still, this book best captures the gossipy joys and frustrations of life on a frontier kibbutz.

At age 15, Oz left his home in Jerusalem to become a member of a socialist commune in the countryside and later described his life there as the “ultimate university of human nature.” I love how his wry early novel transforms one imaginary kibbutz into a microcosmic mirror in which we can all see our own petty vanities. 

One of the treasures in my large collection of kibbutz books is a signed edition of this dreamy memoir by Yael Neeman. In-person and in print, she is wise, funny, observant, and prone to memorable metaphors.

I savoured every word (in Sondra Silverston’s wonderful English translation) of her poignant and often ironic reflections about growing up in the most controversial experiment of the kibbutz movement: the collective “children’s house,” in which kibbutz kids slept apart from their parents to be raised by nannies in mini-communes of their own.

Full confession: I only picked up this novel in my attempt to read every book with “kibbutz” in the title. Lucky me!

I became a fan of Michael Ohayon, the moody outsider who stars in Batya Gur’s series of Hebrew whodunnits, all set in various closed societies and institutions. Ohayon is like an Israeli Inspector Rebus, and no amount of duplicity by the members at an indebted kibbutz can keep him from cracking the case.

The novel doesn’t paint a pretty picture of communal life, but I recognized many of the fatal flaws of the real kibbutz movement magnified to deadly dimensions in this slow burn of a murder mystery.

I get professional envy every time I read one of Daniel Gavron’s vivid collections of literary journalism. He is such an attentive observer and compassionate interviewer, and the conversations he preserves on every page bring a diverse range of Israelis to life in all their hopes and fears.

Published at the turn of the millennium, this book is a classic of kibbutz history in which Gavron, a former kibbutznik, travels to communities in various stages of decline or revival. His book inspired my own return to Israel to discover more about the uncertain future of Israel’s utopian movement. I can’t thank him enough for that.

I admire every detail in this beautifully written family saga that reaches from Lithuania to Jerusalem.

When Amos Oz’s family escapes the antisemitism of Europe in the 1940s and resettles in Palestine, they seem to construct their new home of books rather than mortar. And beyond the towering bookcases, the volumes in twelve languages, lies a city of ancient stone torn by history and religion and competing claims.

Oz’s profound and personal understanding of the Holocaust leads him to conclude that Israel will be stronger by ending the occupation and forging paths that help to unite Jews and Palestinians.

I love the truth, the fact that empathy and compassion have the potential to heal the deepest wounds.

The approach of Milanovic is very different from that of Hickel in that it is intensive in the use of data which, he would argue, shows a much more nuanced picture of the success of the global economy in reducing poverty than argued by Hickel.

He begins by reproducing the ‘Elephant Chart’ from his earlier work. This is a chart showing the relative gain in real per capita income by global income level. The name ‘Elephant’ comes from the shape of the chart which shows the largest income gains to have occurred for those in the middle of the distribution and the lowest in the range of 70 to 80 in the percentile distribution and the highest for those at the very top. Those in the middle being the hump of the elephant those at the top being its trunk.

Milanovic argues that in many respects the years before the… show more.

Have you ever really wondered why Dutch parents are so calm and don’t push academics so much? Is it because of some secret special technique that they use? Nope. It’s because cultures that value cooperation over competition – like the Netherlands – feel less pressure for their children to excel in school. Turns out the secret to good parenting is having a good social support system. 

I like books about parenting that are counter-intuitive and this one, while more academic than the other ones on the list, is no exception. I have picked it because it proves that parents, like all humans act under economic, financial, and social constraints—a fact that gets easily ignored.

Frank is, in my view, one of the most engaging writers on inequality. 

He has developed interesting insights like the “winner takes-all society”: the idea that we live in a world in which a small group of people reaps most of the benefits in all markets from sports to music or academia. 

In Falling Behind, Frank shows how inequality does not only harm the poor but the middle class as well.

I like how he combines economic data with many examples to show how consumption patterns among the wealthy lead to an “expenditure cascades” that force the middle class to borrow too much money and consume more than it should. 

The book is a reminder that inequality must be explored from many dimensions and its solution will require a lot of creativity.

We intuitively understand that decarbonization and social justice are deeply interwoven as 21st-century challenges.

Dr. Chancel’s book shows us in great detail how this is the case, and therefore why it is important to keep inequalities in mind when designing policies to accelerate the decarbonization of the economy. After all, the poor are also more exposed to the catastrophic events associated with climate change.

But perhaps my greatest takeaway was looking at the problem the other way around, meaning that Chancel also shows us how tackling social inequalities can actually help us address some environmental challenges. 

Moretti’s book is, I think, woefully underappreciated. He gives a clear portrait of different regions of the United States, classifying them on the basis of their current economic structure and not on a predetermined political split or on industrial classifications from fifty years ago. It shows that we are in the midst of a substantial economic transformation that likely rivals the shifts seen during the early industrial revolution. This book gives you a real sense of what a “knowledge economy” will look like. More than that, though, he shows how that transformation could be beneficial to everyone (but might not).