For decades, the children's house stood at the heart of the kibbutz movement's vision of communal education: from infancy through the teen years, children lived and slept there, apart from their parents, as an expression of the movement's founding ideals. Communal sleeping for younger children began to disappear in the 1970s and was gone by the 1990s, although some kibbutzim still maintain separate communal housing for teenagers. For those who lived it, the experience, especially at night, could be exhilarating or deeply traumatizing, and its legacy still shapes how many Israelis think about family, community, and child-rearing.

In three weekly sessions, we'll explore the children’s house through literature and film: short stories including work by Amos Oz, memoir excerpts, selections from Bruno Bettelheim's Children of the Dream, and the documentary Children of the Sun.

Who this is for:

• Anyone curious about Israeli history and the social experiments of the kibbutz movement
• Readers interested in Israeli literature, including the work of Amos Oz.
• Former kibbutz volunteers who want to revisit that experience through a new lens
• Anyone interested in the psychology of child-rearing and alternative models of family life

What you'll leave with:

• Discussion of stories by Amos Oz and others, memoirs, Bettelheim’s Children of the Dream, and the documentary Children of the Sun
• A sense of how growing up in the children’s house shaped the people who lived it

Three Mondays: November 16, 23, and 30, 7–8:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Avot Yeshurun (1904–1992) is one of modern Hebrew literature's most singular and disorienting voices. He was a poet who insisted Hebrew carry what it could barely hold: the diasporic weight of Yiddish and Arabic, and the ongoing presence of the dead among the living. Writing against the grain of the modern Hebrew literary establishment, Yeshurun forged an iconoclastic, idiosyncratic poetics that unsettles any clear border between languages, generations, and homelands.

In this three-session course, we'll enter Yeshurun's work through close attention to key poems in translation, alongside prose selections that illuminate his relationship to language mixing, translation, memory, and catastrophe. No prior familiarity with Yeshurun or Hebrew poetry is required, just a willingness to sit with the difficulty, strangeness, and resonant ghosts that his poetry hosts.

Who this is for:

• Readers curious about modern Hebrew poetry, Israeli literature, or twentieth-century Jewish writing
• Anyone interested in translation, multilingualism, and diaspora in literature
• Students of Hebrew literature, Yiddish studies, or Jewish intellectual history

What you'll leave with:

• Close familiarity with key poems and prose by Avot Yeshurun, in translation
• A framework for reading Yeshurun's hybrid Hebrew-Yiddish-Arabic poetics
• A deeper understanding of how modern Hebrew literature grapples with memory, loss, and catastrophe

Three Wednesdays: December 2, 9, and 16, 6–7:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.