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Conversation with Toby Perl Freilich

Documentary filmmaker examines the kibbutz – past, present and future

By Cindy Mindell

Toby Perl Freilich

Toby Perl Freilich

Filmmaker Toby Perl Freilich is a freelance film producer and writer. The daughter of Holocaust survivors from Poland, she grew up in New York in a Yiddish-speaking home.

Freilich co-produced and wrote the documentary film, Secret Lives: Hidden Children & Their Rescuers, selected by Andrew Sarris as one of the ten best non-fiction films of 2003 and featured on HBO/Cinemax. The film also won a Christopher Award for “affirming the highest values of the human spirit.” Freilich was nominated for a news and documentary Emmy in the category of Outstanding Achievement in a Craft: Writing, and Secret Lives was nominated in the category of Outstanding Historical Programming. She also was co-producer of the Emmy-nominated Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans, an independent PBS documentary that was broadcast nationally in April 2002. Freilich is a contributing writer to The Forward and Tablet Magazine.

Freilich’s 2012 film, Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment, traces the history and contradictions of this social, ideological, and economic movement that defined Palestine as it became Israel. Freilich will present it on Sunday, Dec. 15 at Temple Israel in Westport.

She spoke with the Ledger recently about how a changing Israel has impacted this utopian movement.

 

Q: How did you develop an interest in the kibbutz movement?

A: My sister has been living in Israel since 1968 and moved to Tirat Tzvi, a religious kibbutz, in 1972 after getting married. Her five children were born there and now five of her grandchildren live on her kibbutz and three live on a different religious kibbutz. The first time I went to visit her in the early ‘70s, I was 14 and the kibbutz looked very different from the kibbutz of today. When my oldest nephew was born – he is now 40 and father of two sets of twins born on his kibbutz – he still slept in a communal baby house. They abolished the children’s house when he was four – all kibbutzim did so, starting in the ‘70s, until the last one was closed in 1994. Flash-forward 40 years, my nephew still lives on the kibbutz he was born on, he’s a lawyer and his wife is a doctor; they both work outside the kibbutz, which was unheard of original kibbutz model. The communal dining hall does not serve three meals 365 days a year; there’s a cash register; they dock it from your budget.

So the kibbutz was an institution I was familiar with. The idea began germinating in 2004. I wanted to make a film with historical sweep.

Every point of modern Israeli history going back 100 years intersects with the institution of the kibbutz, so that is the lens. The closer I looked at the story it was incredibly rich in irony and paradox and a beautiful human story that is still playing itself out in a very dramatic way. Most non-religious communitarian movements don’t survive beyond three generations, and we’re entering the fourth and fifth generations of the kibbutz. The secret is adaptability. The kibbutzim were never utopian societies that separated themselves from the rest of society, but rather were always looking for a way to serve the needs of the country as a whole. But you can adapt yourself out of existence, and that was the thing that drew me into the story: how much change can an institution sustain before it stops being the thing you’re trying to preserve and becomes something different than it started out to be?

I was interested in making a film about Israel on a subject other than Arab-Israeli conflict, to show that questions of distributive justice are still relevant and the country is struggling deeply and people construct their whole lives striving for those issues.

In those seven years between research and development and finishing the film, a lot of people started moving back to kibbutzim, and now it was a new model, not your grandfather’s kibbutz any more. It had started to change, and young people were giving it a fresh look. They were disaffected with city life and the rat race and wanted a bucolic lifestyle or something simpler for their kids.

 

Q: What did you find that surprised you in the course of making the film?

A: All the Israelis I encountered, especially the ones living in cities, asked, “Why are you doing a film about kibbutzim?” “It’s so boring; isn’t the kibbutz dead?” They were so surprised and discouraging. Then I’d go to these kibbutzim and meet people, both the older and younger generations, all committed to the concept of kibbutz, and to them it was very much alive. The only difference was that they were looking for a way to make it meaningful again, and not just for themselves but for their fellow Israelis. I was very moved by that, especially coming from America, where everyone is looking for meaning, but only in their own lives, and they were looking to make things better for their countrymen.

I was finishing [the film] in summer 2011, and two interesting things were happening then in the streets of Tel Aviv and New York: one Saturday night on Rothschild Boulevard, one million Israelis turned out for a social protest, saying that the nation demands social justice. In New York, barely a handful of people were protesting in the Occupy Wall Street movement. That was a real stark contrast for me; it reflected the founding ethos of each country. In Israel, the founding principle is equality and social justice; ideas that are still very much alive. In America, the founding concept is freedom and no government intrusion. Even though we had just gone through a terrible economic upheaval and it was clear that something was off in our country and that people were off, they were not willing to come out to protest in numbers. In 2012, a lot of people came to the opening of the film, and the social-justice issues came up in the Q&A session.

I expected, when I started the project, that I would find all the old people heartbroken and disillusioned with the change in the kibbutz movement, and the young people plunging headlong into the future with no regard for the past or the founding principles. The founding generation told me, “We’re not long for this life; this is the society we created because it’s the life we wanted, but our children and grandchildren need to figure out what kind of life they want and create that society.”

I feature one young man in my film, who could have been a high-tech entrepreneur, who told me, “It’s not enough that my kids have clean t-shirts to wear; I want all the kids to have clean clothes.” He wanted his kids to grow up in a place where they would learn those values. That’s the kind of society they’re going to create; that kibbutz will work for them, not the other way around, which is a different attitude from the older generation’s.

Even with the Me Generation in Israel wanting to have a comfortable life and a cappuccino instead of just a cup of coffee, they still were interested in questions of distributive justice and wanting to make sure the other person’s kid had what theirs did.

I want my audiences to understand the complexity of the kibbutz institution in Israeli society, and see the audacity of the experiment. Martin Buber said, “The kibbutz is an experiment that has not yet failed,” and I think that’s true. I think that the kibbutz is just as good as the people who make it, only as good as the society and the people who generate it.

 

Q: What are some of the major changes you discovered?

A: The old Israel was the bronzed, tan, super-soldier and the kibbutznik was the exemplar of that; kibbutznikim were members of combat units and the military elite in numbers that far exceeded their population. If you look at new Israel, now with the high-tech industry, kibbutzim contribute to the GDP of the nation through industry that is way out of whack to their population. The irony is that sometimes it’s only the richest kibbutzim that can afford the inefficiency of the pure socialist model: one kibbutz among the most traditional, in terms of its socialism, serves three meals a day 365 days a year in the dining hall and nobody pays. They’re a rich kibbutz and have a multi-million-dollar industry, so they can afford the inefficiencies and waste of socialism.

The old system was paternalistic, chauvinistic, centralized, leaning toward totalitarianism, heavy-handed, and provided no individual or personal freedom. If you were born an artist or a scholar, something that didn’t fit the kibbutznik model, or you didn’t want to work in the fields or in the factory, you were miserable. Kibbutzim learned that if they wanted to keep their best and brightest or attract back the younger generation, they would have to allow for a different model that allowed their kids to pursue different kinds of work. Then, they understood that that could be lucrative to the kibbutz. I wanted to explore this new model.

Only a handful of kibbutzim shut down; most limped along, and three-quarters of the 270 kibbutzim became privatized, at least to some degree or another. They made a pact with the capitalist devil, in the form of differential salaries, which is the big bugaboo in my film. In the old days, the kibbutz operated on the principle of ‘from each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.’ They did not distinguish value in work, but everybody contributed to this one organism and whether you spread manure in the fields, ran the dining room, or worked in the factory, no one said that your work was worth more than somebody else’s. That led to a lack of productivity, especially when kibbutzim began to industrialize and some people were taking advantage of the system. Many of the kibbutzim were in poor financial shape and couldn’t sustain the model anymore. So they instituted a modest incentivization that recognized value in earnings.

Some kibbutzim survived, some thrived, and some are still limping along. The kibbutzim were founded to feed people and, for many years, they literally fed a starving country. They presented a model that was enormously efficient; when there was no food, they developed agricultural techniques, and they filled a very important function. Many were running factories to keep their own people employed but were not efficient in producing products people needed. So they had to transition from that agricultural model. Most still have agriculture, but if it used to represent 85 percent of their revenue, it now represents 15 percent. They still have fields and lands, but it’s not something that can sustain them income-wise.

What was so moving is that I kept running into very idealistic people who completely belied the cynicism I kept encountering from their cousins in the city. What they were genuinely struggling with was finding a new model. They believed in the underlying social-justice ethos of their lives, but were asking, “how can we make it pertinent in the 21st century and give young people a way to engage in a life based on social justice?”

 

Toby Perl Frielich will discuss “Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment” on Sunday, Dec. 15, 2 p.m., at Temple Israel, 14 Coleytown Road, Westport. For information call (203) 227-1293.

Comments? Email cindym@jewishledger.com.

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