The Children's House: Life, Literature, and Memory on the Kibbutz

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. The practice began to wane in the 1970s, and today only a handful of kibbutzim still maintain it 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 this singular institution 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.

• 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.

• A deeper understanding of one of the kibbutz movement's most radical social experiments.
• Exposure to key literary and cinematic works exploring the Children's House.
• New perspectives on the lasting impact of communal education on those who grew up in it.
• A framework for thinking about the Children's House's echoes in broader debates about family and child-rearing.