Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment (2012)

Director: Toby Perl Freilich
Run Time: 89 min.
Call Number: HX742.2 .I58 2012

"In 1910 a dozen young Eastern European Jews moved to the Jordan Valley, then under Ottoman rule, and began to build an agrarian community based on a utopian socialist vision. Men and women were treated equally, everyone shared all they had, and no one had more than anyone else. 

That collective, called Degania, was a kibbutz, the first of a communal movement that symbolized aspirations for a Jewish homeland and became, after Israel’s statehood, an influential force that eventually was overwhelmed by the capitalistic society that it had helped to foster. 

As 'Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment,' an engrossing documentary by Toby Perl Freilich, shows, the kibbutz movement, now more than 100 years old, has been under constant siege of one form or another. The film meshes interviews with first-, second- and third-generation kibbutzniks— including those from Sasa, the first kibbutz founded by Americans—and commentary from Israeli scholars with tours of numerous kibbutzim today and vintage footage from as far back as the 1920s."

—Daniel M. Gold, New York Times

The Law in These Parts (2012)

Director: Ra'anan Alexandrowicz

Run Time: 105 min.

“Explores the four-decade-old Israeli military legal system in the Occupied Territories. Since Israel conquered the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 War, the military has imposed thousands of orders and laws, established military courts, sentenced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians…and developed a system of long-term jurisdiction by an occupying army that is unique in the world.”
—The Law in These Parts DVD cover