Golda Meir Israel's matriarch

Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (1898--1978) is having her moment. Helen Mirren plays her in a new biopic, Golda (2023), and she forms the subject of a recent well-regarded feminist biography by Pnina Lahav entitled The Only Woman in the Room (2022). Now, Ambassador Lipstadt (Emory Univ.), US Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, offers this compelling short biography as part of Yale's acclaimed "Jewish Lives" series. Lipstadt acknowledges her indebtedness to Francine Klagsbrun's massive Lioness (2017), still the definitive biography. Her own contribution, less than a third as long, is likewise sympathetic to Golda but seeks a middle ground between excessive praise and criticism of Golda's career. Lipstadt displays an eye for telling quotations and even offers readers nuggets from her own life to personalize this account. Her discussions of Golda's engagement with the Holocaust and the Eichmann trial are particularly valuable. By contrast, the Yom Kippur War (1973), so central to the biopic and to Israelis' memory of Golda, receives inadequate treatment. Overall, this is a reliable and highly readable short biography that belongs in all libraries. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals. --JONATHAN D. SARNA, Brandeis University

Comprehensive biography of the famed Israeli leader whose legacy has come under criticism in recent years. As Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and author of Antisemitism: Here and Now and History on Trial, amply demonstrates, Golda Meir (1898-1978) was a woman of action, and she had a way with a sharp riposte: When Richard Nixon commented on Abba Eban's appointment as her counterpart to his Henry Kissinger, saying, "Just think, we now both have Jewish foreign ministers," she replied, "Yes, but mine speaks English." When a British official told her that German POWs would build military bases in Palestine during World War II, she pointed out that Jews were already there and in need of work. When he answered that Jewish militants tended to blow up British structures, she replied, "Nazis are more reliable?" More than possessing a sarcastic streak, Meir held fast to a number of beliefs that both hampered and furthered her goals: that the Arab nations were bent on annihilating Israel, the great powers were not to be trusted, and "her total devotion to the Zionist dream realized in a socialist context." As Israel's sole woman prime minister, she defended these views against both conservatives and a generation of younger Israelis such as Moshe Dayan while retaining strong ties to David Ben-Gurion and his cohort. "Golda and her fellow veterans dismissed this cadre of younger leaders as ambitious technocrats," writes Lipstadt, while they strongly criticized her for her performance during the Yom Kippur War, which "became a little Vietnam, a never-ending encounter with continual losses and no change in the situation." In this always thoughtful analysis, the author closes by wondering whether depictions of Meir as "stubborn" and unable to see shades of gray might not have been rendered as "firm" and "decisive" if Meir had not been a woman. A nuanced account of a leader whose influence endures in the Middle East. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.