I have a new fangirl crush filling most every free moment these days: Golda Meir. I rarely read the genre of biography, yet I canNOT put down the recent one by Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel (2017).
“Fangirl” gives the right timbre and tone of the fascination–a bit obsessive, hugely energizing, curious. Golda clearly touches the conscious feminine in me, but also so very much more…
The title Lioness connected immediately. A cherished nickname Brian offered me way back in college was Elsa, the lioness in Born Free. Something deep in me that Brian saw ages ago resurfaced.
Then I was fascinated, felt seen/heard somehow, when reading about Golda’s early work with Pioneer Women and Histadrut. Klagsbrun observed Golda’s life to be obviously feminist, yet she noted patterns that also confronted and contradicted feminists of her day, making her not feminist as expected. I feel that all the time.
Klagsbrun offers a glimpse of an article Golda wrote for Der Yiddisher Kaempfer, reprinted in Hebrew in Davar, a Labor Zionist newspaper. “There were feminists who didn’t want to join the Pioneer Women because they considered themselves already liberated, [Golda] wrote. For such women, “independence grows in proportion to their war against the species ‘man.’” [The oft-progressive “freedom-against” that I, Lisa, cannot embody in myself, at least any longer.]
Then Golda described other “avowed feminists” who did join PW but wanted to “shrink” the group’s programs by avoiding strong connections to the party or the Histadrut, concentrating more on women’s issues. “Golda, having learned from her own experience,... asked, “Can anyone then deny ... that the emancipation of the woman in the end also emancipates the man’?”
For a variety of reasons, Golda refused to allow anyone to shrink the Pioneer Women organization to women’s interests alone, in women's or men's perspectives; instead, she insisted they remained devoted to the larger labor movement, each shaping the other.
In sum, “Golda aimed to be at the center of her country’s life and not in its margins, at the heart of Labor Zionism and not on the periphery. … by sharply differentiating herself from other strong women while taking on the wider interests of the party and the movement.” (20% kindle). I feel like I’ve found an ancestral-mentor voice somehow, consciously feminine yet invested in the larger flows of wisdom traditions so clearly (if unconsciously?) hostile to the feminine.
I am also appreciating deeply (in this time of such violence-unrest-war) that I am learning much much more about the formation of Israel as a country, a homeland for one of the most persecuted populations on planet earth, over centuries. Does that make me un-see the violence against the Palestinians for decades? No. Does that make me un-see the nuances/complexities of Hamas and Gaza, which are distinct from the Palestinian cause? No.
I simply feel like I’ve found a grandmother in my own soul-journey.
Or a sister.
Or maybe even a beloved, flaws and all.