Jen: Hi, it’s Jen Richler, here to kick off the fall season of Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet.

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[Phone rings]

Golda: Mr. Secretary?

Kissinger: You are to open a humanitarian corridor to the third army, Golda. We cannot allow 30,000 men to die of thirst.

Golda: We’ll send them water when we have got our prisoners back.

Kissinger: I will try to arrange—

Golda: And Sadat agrees to direct talks with Israel. Not the Zionist entity. Israel.

Kissinger: That would be tantamount to recognition.

Golda: Yes.

Kissinger: He will never agree to that. The Arab world would turn against him.

Golda: If he doesn’t, I will order my planes to attack. All those men will die.

 

Jen: That’s a scene from the new film Golda—Helen Mirren plays Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, and Liev Schreiber plays US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The film tells the story of Golda Meir’s leadership during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Israel came close to being wiped out.

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It’s been 50 years since that war—a war that’s defined Golda Meir’s legacy. In the last few years, that legacy is being re-examined with books and films about one of the world’s first female leaders. In this episode of Can We Talk?, we'll go beyond the caricatures of the gruff, chain-smoking Golda and talk about aspects of her career that are often overlooked: the ways she helped build the fledgling state of Israel, her relationship with Israel’s Mizrahim, and her complicated attitude toward feminism. We’ll speak with the new film’s director, Guy Nattiv, and with author Francine Klagsbrun, whose biography of Golda, Lioness, came out in 2017.

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Golda Meir was born Golda Mabovitch in Ukraine in 1898. When she was eight, her family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to escape the pogroms that were raging across the Russian Empire. As a teenager, she wanted to be a teacher, but her father said, “Men don’t like smart girls.” So she ran away to live with her sister and brother-in-law in Denver. There she became a fervent Zionist.

In 1921, Golda made aliyah to Palestine with her husband, Morris Myerson. As a young immigrant, she quickly rose through the ranks of the Histadrut, the national labor union. After the founding of the state of Israel, she had a prominent role in Mapai, the precursor to the Labor Party. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, appointed Golda to be Labor Minister, and then Foreign Minister.

In February 1969, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died of a heart attack. To avoid a power struggle within the party,  Golda was convinced to take his place, and became Israel’s first—and so far only—female prime minister. At the time she took up the reins, she had an approval rating of almost 90 percent.

Just a few years later came a war that changed everything. On Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel.

Over the next eighteen days, more than 2,500 Israeli soldiers died and thousands more were wounded. The biggest losses happened in the first ten days of the war, and those ten days are the focus of the new film, Golda.

Jen: I spoke with director Guy Nattiv over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. He told me it was personal experience that drew him to the story of Golda and the Yom Kippur War.

Guy: I was born into this war. My mother went into the shelter with me as a baby…um, and my father went to the war. I always grew with the sense of—that I don't really know who Golda was. Just, you know, she was on a stamp, she was a name on schools, and she was, kind of, a statue. But never I really understood what really went on with her during those ten days in the war that was so tough on her.

Jen: The film depicts a tense and haunted Golda during the early days of the war: She smokes nonstop, she wakes up to nightmares of screaming soldiers, and in meeting after meeting, she is the only woman in rooms filled with military men. Even though Israel survived the war, the human toll was disastrous, and Golda Meir took most of the blame.

Guy: It was so easy and comfortable to accuse her of the debacle, accuse her of the failure of this war. And she was not the only one. I wanted to change this narrative.

I wanted to show that she did care about every single soldier. Um, she took it really personal. That's why she had this notebook that she's writing every single soldier that died, and that's why she's standing in front of those coffins at the end. She really…she was the grandma of our nation, in a way.

Jen: Where do you think the Yom Kippur war fits into Golda's legacy?

Guy: Requiem. This is her death. It’s her…the last accord of her life, which is tragic in a way, because she did so many good things before, and she was a great state woman.

Jen: In a scene near the end of the film, we see a worn and weary Golda standing on a tarmac and watching as coffins are lined up row after row. We can feel the heavy toll the war has taken on her.

But Golda’s career was about much more than the Yom Kippur war. To give us a fuller picture, I talked to Francine Klagsbrun, author of the 2017 book Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel.  To write the book, Francine spent years poring over archival documents and talking to scholars, politicians, and some of Golda’s closest colleagues and confidantes. She also got to know Golda’s children and grandchildren, even visiting Golda’s son Menachem in the house he’d shared with his mother.

The result is an 800-page biography—a detailed and intimate portrait of Golda that spans her entire life.

Jen: One of the things that comes across so vividly in your book is the idea of Golda as a woman of contradictions. Could you talk about some of those contradictions?

Francine: Well, I think, you know, in terms of today, one would say today she was an example of a strong feminist woman, in a way, right? She did things no other woman did. She was the first and only, so far, premier of Israel. So you would think that this was a real farbrente feminist, a woman—a feminist who really was committed to women's rights. And yet, she was not at all that way.

If you asked her, she would say, Oh, those bra-burning women—which of course there were never bra-burning women—but, you know, she was very opposed. She did not want to be called a feminist. She did not want to be identified in that way, because she was living in a man's world, and she was making her way in that world, and for her—see, I believe—to identify with the women, she would not have achieved what she wanted to achieve, which was to be a leader of her country, male or female. So I think that was one of the biggest contradictions in her life…was this contradiction between becoming a symbol of feminism and yet, being, almost, one would say, anti-feminist for her time.

Another interesting thing was, she was born in Kiev in eastern Europe, but she grew up in the United States. And that was a strange contradiction also, because she understood and she thought, in some ways, in this old world: [in] term[s] of pogroms and everybody hates the Jews, and, you know, we're always being persecuted, and at the drop of a hat, she would tell everybody, anybody, about her fears as a child growing up in Kiev. But she also had an American outlook. She was an optimist…and a kind of American optimism. So, she was always wrestling between those two sides of herself.

She was a woman who very much wanted to have children, and she did. And yet, she left her children all the time, growing up, because she was so busy pursuing her career and working for what was then pre-state Israel. And her children resented that. They really resented growing up, very much, not having their mother around.\

And then she was also, in a way, um, the mother of the nation. She saw herself as the mother of the Jewish people, and she would present herself…she would talk about her chicken soup, and when she spoke about her chicken soup everybody wanted her recipe, and she would have recipes, you know, already prepared for them. She was this nice, you know, mamaleh, right?

But she was tough as nails. People said that one look from Golda…the icy look could turn you into an iceberg.

Jen: What do you consider some of her most significant accomplishments?

Francine: There were a great many, but—and each position that she held, she did important things. As labor minister, she instituted social service laws that had not been done before that are still, you know, important in Israel today, that help, particularly, women and children. She instituted laws that pregnant women could only work certain hours. And that was, at the time, very important. But in later years, people said, Oh, that was condescending. It was looking down on women. But, at the time, it really was very forward-looking.

But to me, one of her greatest achievements was her connection to the United States. Because she was American born, because she spoke English well, because she was who she was, with her humor and her insights, she knew how to speak to President Kennedy, for example—and then to Nixon—to establish very warm ties between Israel and the United States. There had not been such warm ties before. We forget that.

Jen: The fact that Golda was able to rise to the level that she did, to ultimately become the leader of the country—it might make you think that it was somehow a reflection of Israel being very progressive on women's rights, gender equality, but the reality was quite different. So can you talk a little bit about the myth of gender equality in Israel versus the reality?

Francine: It was this attitude…it was run by this group of these men, starting with Ben Gurion. Ben Gurion said about Golda, “She was a great woman. But, she is a woman.”

And there were women's groups that really were struggling for women's rights, but right from the beginning, women came over to do what men had done, to build the country. And they were put into the kitchen to take care of—the kibbutzim, you know, the collectives— to take care of the cooking and the children, typical traditional roles for women. Right from the start, in a country that one saw as a pioneer country…women had a rough time, particularly because there were so many wars, and wars connected with men, and men were the ones who went and did the fighting.

And so it was…the women's role was seen in a way, you know, to take care of the men, to cook for them, to comfort them. Moshe Dayan had lots of women around him, but they were all, you know, women he was sleeping with mostly.

So, yes one would have the impression, this pioneer country, it's so advanced. But Golda was an exception. And that's the thing that people forget. She was an exception. And she struggled to get where she was.

Jen: Why do you think then, that Golda was so intent, you know, even in interviews later on in life, of saying that her gender had never been an obstacle in her career?

Francine: She was very determined to be one of the—not just one of the boys, but just the same as everybody else. She had to show the men she was as tough as they and that she was not segregating herself as a woman.

Jen: It's interesting, though, just getting to the contradictions: On the one hand, she didn't want to be thought of as a special case, and she wanted to be just like everyone. But she did bristle at some of the ways in which she would be talked about, including, and I think you talk about in the book, Ben Gurion calling her “the only man in the cabinet”?

Francine: She hated that. She hated that term. Now here was something where she portrayed herself in a much more feminist way, because what her response was: That makes it sound as if it's so much better to be a man than to be a woman. And she wouldn't accept that.

She used to love telling how in the early years, before the state, there would be a spate of rapes—you know, women would go out in the evening when they would get raped, so the government, in its wisdom, decided that they would put a curfew on women so they wouldn't go out late at night and expose themselves to being assaulted. And Golda said, It's the men who are doing the raping, let them have the curfew.

Jen: We've talked about how Golda saw her own gender. But to what extent do you think gender and misogyny shaped the way that Golda was seen by other people throughout her career, and also in the way that she is remembered?

Francine: I think misogyny particularly had a very significant part of that. Take what happened in the Yom Kippur War.

She relied on her generals. Her generals: Dayan, the great, brilliant General Dayan, Al Azhar, I mean, Zahira, who was in charge of defense, they were absolutely sure that Egypt would not attack until it got certain planes and stuff, other ammunition, from the Soviets, and that Syria would not attack if Egypt didn't—that they would be together.

They absolutely assured her of this, over and over, and she in her guts was nervous about it. But she said, these are my generals, you go—you know, you listen to your generals. Now, she's very much criticized for that, very much criticized for listening to the generals. Did she depend too much on her generals?

So, the question is, would a man leader not have depended on his generals? I don't know. I don't know the answer. Depends on the leader, I suppose. But I think a lot of that criticism of Golda has to do with her being a woman relying on men's opinion, when they were really her generals, not men as men. And I think there's a lot of misogyny involved in that.

Jen: I want to shift and ask you about Golda’s relationship with Mizrahi Jews, many of whom immigrated to Israel in the fifties and sixties from countries like Iraq and Egypt to escape persecution. Can you talk a bit about that?

Francine: Yeah, um, Mizrahi Jews, certainly at that time, were a minority. They're no longer a minority. But in her day, the Ashkenazim, like Golda and Gurion and Eshkol and so on, were the main leaders.

So the Mizrahim—the first generation who were brought over—their children recognized that they were still living in poverty, whereas the Ashkenazim Jews had gotten ahead, because the Ashkenazim were in control of the country, and they knew the ways to do that.

Golda was, on one hand, very sympathetic with the Mizrahim. She understood what it was to grow up poor. She grew up poor and hungry, and she understood that. But she didn't understand the way they…their thinking.

It was, again, her sort of Protestant ethic, you know, American outlook, you know, Ashkenazi outlook. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Go to work. What do you mean you're not working? What do you mean you're not looking for a job? What do you mean you didn't get past third grade? Why didn't you work harder? She didn't understand, you know, the atmosphere they lived in, how poor they were. She didn't understand how beaten down they felt.

Jen: What about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? How did Golda approach that?

Francine: I mean, she had no love for Arabs. Let's–they called them Arabs. No one, almost nobody called them Palestinians in those days. Let's be honest, it's not like she loved them. But she also recognized after the ‘67 war, which, you know, was this great victory for Israel—if Israel were to hold on to all that territory, and to control all those Arabs, as they call them, it would be a terrible thing for Israel because—from a demographic point of view—because how could Israel, how could it be a democratic state and do that? And she was ready to give back, I'd say, 80 or almost 90 percent of the West Bank of the territories captured.

Now, she's known for saying, and criticized very much for saying, “There are no Palestinians.”

What she meant is there's no such thing as a Palestinian nation. She didn't recognize the strength of that nationalism that was beginning to grow and didn't want to recognize it.

Jen: I want to talk about the film Golda, which you’ve seen. What did you think of the way Golda was portrayed?

Francine: You know, I had mixed feelings, to be honest. Helen Mirren, who you know, is a great actress, and who am I to criticize Helen Mirren?—however, I felt partly because she had so much makeup on as Golda, to make her look as Golda, it was hard to get a lot of expression. I didn't see a lot of expression in her face. You saw it in her eyes. But often those eyes look very frightened. I'm sure Golda was frightened, but I don't know if she looked so frightened all the time. I felt that Helen Mirren looked more vulnerable than maybe Golda looked. I mean, one of the things that was said about Golda—everybody, people who hated her—said she was a rock during the war. She really held the nation together.And that did not particularly come across in the film, how she held the nation together.

And I think the other thing that didn’t come across is, even in the worst of times, Golda always had this humor. It was an ironic humor and a little of it came across, but Helen Mirren never smiled. You almost never saw her smile in the film. I think, you know, there was more humor and more smiles than came across. It was not only terror all the time.

Jen: So, Golda died a few years after the Yom Kippur war in 1978. How did her image evolve after her death? And how is she thought of in Israel today and maybe outside of Israel in the US?

Francine: Well, people were very angry about the war. I mean, people who lost sons and brothers and, you know, fathers and so on. But it wasn't until the ‘80s that the negative stuff—because more archives were open and they got to see more about the war—that the younger people began to write more negative things about her.

And that criticism really seeped into Israeli society. And every year on the Yom Kippur War, there have been—there still are, you know, editorials, about what happened and criticizing her. I think it's beginning to become a little bit more positive than it had been. But there's still negatives.

In the United States, her reputation was always very high. She was one of us. She was our girl. The kid who made good. She was very American in many ways. And American Jews loved her, always loved her.

Jen: How do you think Golda should be remembered?

Francine: I think she should be remembered as an extraordinary woman who worked very hard, who believed one has to work hard for what they want, who achieved things that no woman before or since, unfortunately, has achieved.

She lived very humbly. She never lived in gorgeous big houses and, you know, with lots of servants. She took buses! She didn't take taxi cabs. And I think it would be very nice to remember that a leader can live a nice humble life and devote themselves to their people because that is…it's the people who come first,  it's the nation that comes first, and that was always her attitude. I think that's a very important legacy that she left us.

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That was Francine Klagsbrun, author of Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel.  Although the Labor Party won the election in December 1973, the coalition had lost seats and was unable to form a government. Golda Meir resigned as prime minister in April 1974, handing over the leadership to Yitzhak Rabin. She died on December 8, 1978 of lymphoma, a disease she had kept secret for years.

You can learn more about Golda Meir’s life and career in the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women at jwa.org/encyclopedia.

Thank you for joining us for Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Our team includes Nahanni Rous and Judith Rosenbaum. Our theme music is by Girls In Trouble.

Want to be the first to get podcast news, including behind-the-scenes footage and other surprises? Sign up for our newsletter at jwa.org/signup.

You can listen to Can We Talk? at jwa.org/canwetalk, or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can help spread the word about the podcast by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts

I’m Jen Richler. Wishing all those celebrating a sweet new year.

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