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Zion in the Desert: American Jews in Israel's Reform Kibbutzim.

Publication: American Jewish History
Publication Date: 01-SEP-08 		Format: Online
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Full Article Title: Zion in the Desert: American Jews in Israel's Reform Kibbutzim.(Book review)

Article Excerpt
Zion in the Desert: American Jews in Israel's Reform Kibbutzim. By William F. S. Miles. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. vii + 240 pp.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Reform Zionists (once an oxymoron) along with the Israeli kibbutz movement established two kibbutzim, Yahel and Lotan. These kibbutzim embodied a relatively anomalous juxtaposition of purposes: liberal Judaic (non-Orthodox) religiosity with the far-reaching social and economic communalism of Israeli kibbutzim. Yahel and Lotan present the twinned paradox of a religiously based Israeli kibbutz: Most (though not all) kibbutzim are secular rather than religious (in the Israeli sense of these terms); and Reform Judaism generally is uninterested in socialistic ideologies.

Nevertheless, "a few radical rabbis and Israel immigration activists" invoked Ben-Gurion's call for Jewish settlement in the Negev and managed to bring about the establishment of Yahel, dedicated in 1976, and Lotan, founded as Yahel Bet in 1983,...

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