Author(s): Deborah E. Lipstadt (Contribution by)

Judaica

In the eyes of millions of American Jews, she could do no wrong. For close to five decades, for better and for worse, she shaped how American Jews saw and understood Israel and its place in the world. If the laudatory works depict a woman who built a nation, sent men into battle, negotiated treaties, spoke truth to power, and still found time to make homemade chicken soup, her critics depict a Golda who is domineering, uneducated, unimaginative, incapable of conceptual thinking, and unable to break out of her preconceived perceptions about many things, particularly the peace process. She was, they contend, at her very best an apparatchik who, absent her own ideas, loyally executed what was demanded of her. Who. then, was the real Golda Meir?