State of Shock: The Kibbutz in Israel from Avant-Garde to Fetish, 1948-1955

Argues that the foundation of Israel was a trauma that destabilized the kibbutz’s conceptual grounding

State of Shock decodes one of the most iconic images of Zionism and Israel: the kibbutz. Lior Libman offers original theoretical and historiographical insights into the imagery and the history of the kibbutz, and, through them, of Hebrew literature and Israeli culture more broadly. Arguing that the establishment of the State of Israel was a rupture that destabilized the kibbutz’s deepest conceptual ground and shifted its history, the book uncovers the seemingly surprising Hasidic resonances in the identity of the kibbutz and its self-perception as fulfilling the metaphysical in the physical.

By interrogating the changes and upheavals brought about by Jewish sovereignty, their impact on the kibbutz, and its response to them, Libman defines the kibbutz’s transition into Israeli statehood as a cultural trauma which robbed it of its familiar frames for interpreting historical experience. Disoriented, the kibbutz reacted in shock: it was unable to reimagine itself in the new conditions. Libman charts how the demise of the kibbutz, originally avant-garde--a political and aesthetic form that acts in history--began in 1948. Turning from its origin as a breakaway human-creation engaged in a constant process of becoming--of history-making--the kibbutz, Libman shows, transformed into a fetish in the early years of the State of Israel: a sanctified, substitutional, fossilized political and aesthetic object of compulsive metaphysical longing, frozen in time and detached from history.

Lior Libman is Assistant Professor of Israel Studies and Associate Director of the Center for Israel Studies at SUNY-Binghamton.