THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Golda Meir—Israel's Founding Mother
By DAVID SCHWARTZ
President as her husband.
When America, after the
ratification of the Declara-
tion of Independence,
needed money for arms,
John Adams was sent
abroad to get some, but Mrs.
Adams was not sent.
When Israel, after her
declaration of indepen-
dence, also faced an empty
treasury, Golda Meir was
sent to America to get it. To
be sure, Ben-Gurion first
proposed to go himself but
Golda Meir vetoed the idea.
Ben-Gurion," she said,
"you are needed in Israel. I
will go to America." She
went — not even taking
time off to change her
clothes for the trip — and
she came back to Israel with
(Copyright 1978, JTA, Inc.)
Americans speak of the
"founding fathers" but not
of the founding mothers. Is-
rael is the first land with a
"founding mother" — Golda
Meir.
There were many able
women in America at the
time of the struggle for in-
dependence. If you read the
letters of Abigail Adams,
wife of John ,Adams, you
may conclude that she could
have been as able a
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The fact that she had
lived in America no
doubt is important in her
story. She was an Israeli
but she was also an
American. She wrote in
her autobiography that
when President Truman
recognized the state of Is-
rael, while all Israel re-
joiced, she felt that her
joy was greater, because
of her American back-
ground.
Golda was not the first
woman in America to raise
the Zionist banner. Back in
earlier days — before the
Civil War—the poetess and
actress Ada Isaac Menken
wrote beautiful poems cal-
ling on Jews to re-establish
their ancient state. Later
Emma Lazarus, one of
whose poems is inscribed on
the Statue of Liberty wel-
coming the immigrants to
America, also turned
Zionist, and wrote a poem
calling for a rebirth of the
Maccabean spirit and the
rebirth of Jewish nation-
hood.
Neither Ada Menken nor
Emma Lazarus had felt any
of persecution's fangs di-
rectly. Ada Menken was one
of the most popular actres-
ses of her day — alas, she
was to die very young— and
Miss Lazarus knew little of
Jewishness and did not suf-
fer on account of it. But the
tragedy of the Jews was too
universal not to be per-
ceived. Even a non-Jewess,
the British woman author,
George Eliot, in "Daniel De-
: onda," had anticipated
Theodor Herzl in calling for
the re-establishment of the
Jewish state.
Golda Meir knew of the
Jewish tragedy more di-
rectly. As a little child in
Russia, she had seen her
carpenter father climb a
'ladder to nail a board
against the door to protect
the home from a scheduled
pogrom. The next day the
hooligans would be visiting
the Jewish homes to rob and
kill. When the family
moved to Milwaukee, she
could not forget this. She
enlisted in the Zionist
struggle. The land of Israel
that she came to was then
no land of milk and honey.
Zionism offered no soft
berths. Nothing but hard
work.
Frances Perkins, the
first American woman to
have a post in a
presidential cabinet,
once laughingly said that
the only time her sex had
interfered with her was
in climbing trees. In the
world of Zionism, Golda
found no bars on account
of her sex. If there were,
she was too interested in
' the cause itself to think
about them.
Statesmanship, Plato
wrote, is simply a matter of
housekeeping. Statesman-
ship concerns itself with
groceries, clothes, homes.
What is there about these
subjects that is more alien
to women than to men? And
the anti-Semite worked as
perniciously against the
female as against the male.
The fact that Golda was a
.5 a
woman was significant
worldwide in two ways: in
advancing indirectly the
cause of women's political
liberation and at the same
time drawing greater world
attention to Israel itself.
Golda became not only a
symbol of Israel nationhood
but broader than that, a
world figure.
Friday, December 22, 1918 33
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