Yaacov Oved

In 2014, he published an article about independent kibbutz high education that reviews the history of the Efal high education courses in which Yaacov Oved was both a student and a teacher.

The Communal Studies Association, USA, bestowed honorary awards on Prof. Yaacov Oved in the years 2000 and 2004 for his research and contribution to promoting international relations:

In 1994, Yaacov Oved was nominated full professor at Tel Aviv University, retiring in 1998. During the years that followed, he was dedicated to the Yad Tabenkin Communes Department. In this framework he cultivated relations with commune researchers from around the world. These relationships deepened the ties between the Kibbutz Movement and the world communes. Prof. Oved was devoted also to enlarging the Yad Tabenkin scientific library on communes, whose collection on communes and kibbutz publications has earned a high reputation among scholars of these fields.

In 1986, Yaacov Oved published his comprehensive book Two Hundred Years of American Communes, and subsequently published additional books on contemporary communes. In addition to his books about communes, Prof. Oved has published books and articles about anarchism, utopian anarcho-communist philosophy and anarchistic communes in the Spanish Civil War.

Yaacov Oved’s PhD thesis on anarchism in the Argentine labor movement in the early 20th century was published as a book in Spanish in 1978 by Siglo XXI Publishing and an extended second edition was printed in 2013 by Imago Mundi, Buenos Aires.

After his thesis was approved in 1975 by the Senate of Tel Aviv University, Oved was appointed as a lecturer in the Tel Aviv University's Department of History. At the same time he joined Yad Tabenkin, the Institute for Study and Documentation of the Kibbutz Movement, as a teacher and research associate. It was in this institute that he began to study the history of communes around the world. In 1978, while on a research journey to investigate communes' archives in the United States, he participated in a conference of the American National Historic Communal Studies Association in Omaha Nebraska. In the meeting with the association's president, Donald E Pitzer, he raised the idea of holding an international conference of commune and kibbutz researchers in Israel. Yad Tabenkin undertook the initiative and in 1985, under its auspices, the first international conference of kibbutz and commune scholars took place. At the end of the conference, the International Communal Studies Association was founded. Prof. Oved elected to serve as its Executive Director, a position which he continued to fill until 2004. Since its founding, the association has held 11 tri-annual international conferences in different universities and commune venues around the world. During that period, Yaacov Oved served as the acting chairman of the association.

In 1959-1961 he studied in the Higher Education Course of social sciences run by Hakibbutz Hameuchad in Efal. Later he became a teacher at the Kibbutz Palmachim High School. In 1969 he started to study at the Departments of History and Philosophy at Tel Aviv University and graduated with "Summa cum Laude". In 1971, he started his PhD at Oxford University. His dissertation was on Anarchism and the Workers’ Movement in Argentina in the Early Twentieth Century. It was supervised by Professor Michael Confino of Tel Aviv University and Professor Ezequiel Gallo of the University of Buenos Aires.

In the 1950s he published several articles about Latin American affairs in Israeli journals. In 1958, in one of the articles about Cuba, he predicted that Fidel Castro would overthrow the dictatorship of Batista and start a Socialist revolution. In 1960 he joined the Israel-Cuba Friendship League and in 1964 was part of the League's delegation to Cuba. In the course of his visit he witnessed several facets of the regime that he did not regard favorably, and after the visit he left the League.

Yaacov Oved (born 19 February 1929) is a historian and Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Tel Aviv University, member of Kibbutz Palmachim, research fellow at Yad Tabenkin: the institute of research and documentation of the kibbutz movement, researcher of the history of communes in the world and co- founder of the International Communal Studies Association.

Yaacov Varsano-Oved was born on 19 February 1929 in Haskovo, Bulgaria. When he was eight years old, he immigrated to Palestine with his parents, Ovadia and Bella Varsano and brother Eliyahu. The family resided in Tel Aviv. Yaacov went to Echad Haam School and Gymnasia Herzliya High School and joined the Scouts youth movement. In 1946 he enlisted in the "Hagana" organization and was a member of the Palmach unit and was assigned by it to be a leader in the Scouts Movement in 1947. In 1949 he was part of a Palmach core-group that established Kibbutz Palmachim. In 1941-1954 he was sent by Hakibbutz Hameuchad to Argentina to work as educator emissary in the youth movement "Hanoar Hechalutz iBorochovy Hakibbutz Hameuchad". In 1951, he married Tehila Kiriaty and the couple made their home in Palmachim, where their son and three daughters were born and educated. In 1954-1959 he worked in agriculture on the kibbutz, and from 1959 to 1961 he studied in the two-year higher education course in the Hakibbutz Hameuchad Seminar at Efal. Later he began teaching at the high school in kibbutz Palmachim. In 1967 he set out on a brief mission to Argentina. On this occasion he changed his surname to the Hebrew name Oved.