“Pure act.” This was how the nineteenth-century essayist Henry Adams famously described Theodore Roosevelt. It’s also a good description of Israel’s first and, so far, only female prime minister, Golda Meir. Beloved abroad and a figure of controversy at home, Meir was one of a handful of political leaders who helped will the Jewish state into existence more than seventy-five years ago. As Deborah Lipstadt makes clear in her new biography, Golda Meir: Israel’s Matriarch, Israel’s Iron Lady was unafraid to speak her mind, come what may.
Lipstadt, a noted historian of the Holocaust and current U.S. envoy for combating antisemitism, faces the formidable task of reconstructing the life, and legacy, of a woman whose public career spanned nearly half a century in a short, one-volume biography.
(Read the rest of CAMERA’s review of Lipstadt’s new book at Providence Magazine)