The Ardent, Stiff-Necked Spirit of Golda Meir

One of God’s less charitable epithets for the children of Israel in the desert is am k’shey oref: a “stiff-necked” people. Yet some biblical scholars have seen the phrase as a kind of backhanded compliment. Rigidity, myopia, lack of imagination are hardly admirable traits; but when expressed as fastidiousness, perseverance, single-minded devotion to a worthy goal, mightn’t there be something to say for them?

This, at any rate, is the label that repeatedly comes to mind for the subject of Francine Klagsbrun’s Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel, a mammoth, meticulously researched, and engaging biography of Israel’s fourth prime minister. Golda, as she was universally known, was a famously stiff-necked individual if ever there was one.

Klagsbrun, a long-time literary journalist, is the author of more than a dozen books on Jewish and non-Jewish subjects. Lioness is her first foray into Israeli history, a daunting field of inquiry through which she has steered with impressive scholarship; her research in Israeli and American archives seems to have left no stone unturned. Though clearly sympathetic to her subject as a kind of Jewish and feminist hero, Klagsbrun has also written a balanced work, and indeed largely resists the urge to psychoanalyze her subject or parse her thoughts.