When, in 1910, a dozen Romanian Jews set out to cultivate a plot of land next to a marooned Arab village in Palestine, their mission seemed suicidal. But that bewildering act laid the foundation for the socialist utopia of the kibbutz, or collective farming community, examples of which would soon sprout all across Israel. Within a century, the country boasted over two hundred and fifty kibbutzim. Though their members only ever accounted for about five percent of the Israeli population, the kibbutzim’s cultural influence was outsized—they were hailed as the “army of Zionist fulfillment,” their