The Only Woman in the Room: Writing the life of Golda Meir

Yitzhak Rabin Lecture by Professor Pnina Lahav

Event hosted by the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at BU

Golda Meir was born to a poor and uneducated family in Kiev, Ukraine. At the age of eight her family settled in Wisconsin, USA. She became a passionate Zionist and immigrated to Palestine. Almost eighty years later she died in Israel, admired by people all over the world but also maligned by the Israeli public. She was Israel’s fourth prime minister and except for her no woman had ever ascended so high. Clearly, there was deep seated misogyny in Israeli culture, that looked unkindly at women in power.

In this recorded lecture, Prof. Lahav addresses the following questions: How did Golda overcome the gender bias and fulfill her ambitions? Why were people attracted to her and trust her leadership? And then, in 1973, why did Israelis turn against her and conclude that a woman could not be trusted with security matters?

Pnina Lahav is a Professor of Law, Emerita and a member of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University. Her fields of expertise are constitutional law, first amendment law and legal history. She is the recipient of, most recently, the Israel Studies Award for Lifetime Achievement (2017) and the Prime Minister Golda Meir for Society and Leadership Award (2021). She is the author of the acclaimed Justice in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century. Of late she has focused her attention on the status and history of women and her biography of Golda Meir, Israel’s fourth prime minister, presents Golda Meir’s life in the context of the twentieth century through the gender lens. This biography, titled “The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and Her Path to Power (Princeton University Press: 2022), is a part of the 2022-2023 book picks of the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Recorded April 25, 2023 | Posted May 2023