I knew someone would get it.

More seriously, the 20th century was full of communal living experiments and kibbutzim are probably the most successful! And they needed a lot of generational rethinking *and* arguably depended upon a shared settler ethos and militant attitude that had a whole set of problems.

It definitely seems like there's a level of "they assumed the hard part would be doing it themselves and for their kids it would just be natural, and instead it turned out that their kids didn't want to go against things the way they had self selected by doing", in particular

This is also the plot of House of Government and, more broadly, of every "sect to religion" transition on earth

also they had a genuine problem because communal child rearing meant almost nobody wanted to hook up inside the kibbutz (they saw them as siblings)

Though I believe they did in practise tend to couple up with someone from the kibbutz down the road who they shared a secondary school with?

(Which is um, actually also closer to how peasant marriages have worked historically AIUI, at least in some places - the expectation is marrying someone from the next village over)

I suppose what it does imply is part of the reason kibbutzim were a relative success is scale so there /were/ others nearby for that (and for that matter, that it was relatively easy for people to leave /a/ kibbutz without leaving kibbutzim as a whole?)

My parents met on a kibbutz (as 2 adult Americans who had separately been in Israel for awhile at that point) in the 1980s and by then the issue of people not staying was already a major one The couple they knew best were sort of the exception that proved the rule, having been sweethearts since 10

On my kibbutz, the volunteers were seen by a lot of residents as a pool of people available so that kibbutz residents could sow their wild oats. It was loathsome. Also, we might need to talk about the attitude of many kibbutzim towards nearby Arabs. 😬

I will never forget the time I was drinking coffee at 3:30am waiting for the tractor to take us to work, and one of the kibbutzniks said to me: Yoni is back on leave. You should take him. -- Take him?, I said; what do you mean? The answer was that he "needed a woman."

I said: I'm not Florence fucking Nightingale. I don't sleep with people because they "need it." This actually happened.

there's a whole book to be done on Israel and sex and nationalism, from stuff like this to marriage debates to the way getting a handjob on Birthright is a rite of passage to the obsession with birthrates and frozen sperm of soliders, etc.

Yep.

sunday school teacher never mentioned any of this when i put my quarters in the tzedakah box

I suppose the "culture" wasn't strong enough that later-generation kibbutzniks would hook up with young people from other kibbutzim?