Yaacov Oved

Yaacov Oved was born in 1929 in Haskovo

Yaacov Varsano was born on 19 February 1929 in Haskovo, Bulgaria. At age 8 he immigrated to the Land of Israel with his parents, Ovadia and Bella, and his brother Eliyahu. The family lived in Tel Aviv, where he attended Ahad Ha'am School and Gymnasia Herzliya and joined the Scouts.

He joined the Haganah in 1946 and served with the Palmach. In 1949 he helped found Kibbutz Palmachim, and in 1951 he married Tehila Kiriaty. He worked as an emissary in Argentina, farmed on the kibbutz from 1954 to 1959 and later taught at its high school.

In 1958 he wrote that Fidel Castro would overthrow Batista. He joined the Israel-Cuba Friendship League and visited Cuba with it in 1964, but left after seeing parts of the regime he did not support. In 1967 he changed his surname to Oved.

He studied history and philosophy at Tel Aviv University from 1969 and began a doctorate at Oxford in 1971 on anarchism in the Argentine labor movement. After its approval in 1975 he became a lecturer at Tel Aviv University and a research fellow at Yad Tabenkin, where he began studying communes worldwide.

In 1985 the International Communal Studies Association was founded, and he served as its executive director until 2004. He became a full professor in 1994 and retired in 1998, continuing his work at Yad Tabenkin.