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The word “kibbutz” may suggest a healthy, outdoorsy lifestyle on a self-sustaining farm, a cooperative of hardy, dedicated men and women, living and working together, sharing their lives. Yael Neeman’s memoir, We Were the Future details a surprisingly different scenario.

The book is large and fits comfortably on a lap. The color photographs nearly fill each page. Each image depicts real people doing everyday Jewish things — a young girl eating matzah ball soup; a  bubbe  and her grandchildren lying in the grass; a man wearing tefillin, praying. The sentences are in large print; they are simple ("Mother says the blessing over the candles") and easy to read.

There is a photograph in my study of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands with me in a crowded Jerusalem hotel ballroom. 

The Great Shift is both an indictment of modernity and a hope that tightly closed modern people can regain the unique “semipermeable” qualities that defined spiritual lives of long ago.