The Ravenna Kibbutz

Last night at the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, I joined a rowdy delegation from the Ravenna Kibbutz to watch a documentary about some other Jews (about 2,000, as it happened) building a cooperative vision of their ideal community, back in the ‘30s. At Home In Utopia followed one of the numerous Jewish housing co-ops that appeared in the Bronx during the American Communist Party’s heyday—this one, known as “The Coops,” possibly the most devoutly Communist of them all—from the far-fetched, spunky imaginings of Lower East Side garment workers, to a triumphal and pioneering start, through many trials and tribulations, to the eventual exodus of Jewish families from The Coops (and the Bronx in general) to the burbs.

What moved me most was the Q&A session afterward with the film’s producer, during which many audience members emotionally recounted their childhoods in Bronx Jewish housing co-ops. I thought to myself, as an elderly gentleman with the microphone fought back tears: these elders’ parents and grandparents who built those co-ops must have been braver than we, the Ravenna Kibbutzniks. They had cops and mobs, anti-Communists and antisemites, standing in their way. Our greatest obstacle is that property isn’t cheap like it used to be.

But perhaps we’re just as crazy. That’s got to count for something.

So what if we’re coming full circle now? What if the Ravenna Kibbutz is actually laying groundwork for some documentary to screen at the Jewish Film Festival in Rio or Beijing in the year 2090, depicting the birth from passion and thin air of an intentional Jewish community in Seattle where kids grew up together in a ferment so compelling and formative that they will cry and regale a filmmaker and some young upstarts with stories of That Place in Those Days?

If you want to take a swing at that possible future, you should try applying to join the Ravenna Kibbutz this summer when we’re opening our third house. (Applications are on our web site now.) I just returned from a visit to Vancouver, BC, where I met some folks who want to start a kibbutz there too. It ain’t Communism, but it could be a movement!

My takeaway from the film was that passionately believing in what you’re building is the key. We don’t have political ideology like The Coops did. But that passion, I’m thinking (as I listen to a fellow kibbutznik scrape a shovel where we’re building a new garden outside)—yeah, we just might have that.