Golda Meir

Diverse and innovative films

A still from Amanda Kinsey’s documentary Jews of the Wild West, a series of vignettes that shines a light on a noteworthy and usually overlooked history.

The Wild West, Jews in Germany and a surprisingly vivacious Israeli seniors home feature among the diverse films at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival this year.

Somehow, we tend not to associate Jews with the legends that have built up around the development of the American West, a serious oversight that is in the crosshairs of filmmaker Amanda Kinsey’s documentary Jews of the Wild West.

The mythology of the Wild West is perhaps as much an invention of Hollywood as of history, so it is notable that the 1903 film The Great Train Robbery, which introduced the genre of the cinematic Western, featured Gilbert “Broncho Billy” Anderson – né Max Aronson.

The myth of the West was no less inspiring to Jews than to other Americans and dreamers from around the world. Perhaps one of the most famous names in the lore was Wyatt Earp. The film introduces us to Josephine Marcus, who fled her family in San Francisco to become an actress and ended up being Earp’s wife. Earp himself is buried along with the Marcus family in a Jewish cemetery.

The gold rush drew Jewish peddlers and merchants to the West Coast in the late 19th century including, most famously, Levi Strauss, who left the Lower East Side and, via Panama, arrived in San Francisco. His brothers sent dry goods from New York and Levi sold them up and down the coast. When Jacob Davis, a tailor, was asked by a woman to construct pants that her husband wouldn’t burst out of, he imagined adding rivets. He took the idea to Strauss and the rest is American clothing history. As one historian notes, it was a Jew who invented “the most American of garments.”

The rapid industrialization in the mining sector is where the Guggenheim family got its start and so, while the name is now most associated with Fifth Avenue, the finest address in New York City, their start was in the gritty West of the 19th century.

We meet Ray Frank, the first woman said to have preached from a bimah. Called the “golden girl rabbi,” she was not ordained, but was apparently a phenomenon that drew crowds to her sermons.

Many people will know that Golda (Mabovitch/Meyerson) Meir spent formative years as an immigrant from Russia in Milwaukee and then Denver. This footnote to her history is often considered curious and interesting, but in this film it integrates the Jewish experience of the 20th century and its roots in the American West with the development of the Jewish state – the opening up of another frontier, one might say.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, seeing the poverty in the Lower East Side, actively encouraged migration to the West. The film introduces families who have worked the land for generations, some of whom have maintained their Jewish identity and at least one of whom was raised Methodist. But, it suggests, the thriving Jewish community of Denver owes much to the failed farmers of the West who made their way to the nearest metropolis to salvage their livelihoods.

The documentary is really a series of vignettes and at times the shift from one story to another is confusing but, as a whole, Jews of the Wild West successfully shines a light on a noteworthy and usually overlooked history.

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The festival features two German films that complement each other in interesting ways.

In Masel Tov Cocktail, a short (about 30 minutes) film, high schooler Dima (Alexander Wertmann) welcomes viewers into his life just as he is suspended for a week as a result of punching a classmate in the face during an altercation in the washroom. The “victim,” Tobi (Mateo Wansing Lorrio), had taunted the Jewish Dima, graphically play-acting a victim in a gas chamber, a performance enhanced by the austere, sterile setting of the restroom’s porcelain-tiled walls. So begins an interplay of victim and perpetrator that is just one of several provocative themes weaving through this powerful short.

Dima’s family, it turns out, heralds from the former Soviet Union, like 90% of Jews in today’s Germany. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, the German government actively encouraged migration of Jews to revitalize Jewish life in the country. This fact, like other statistics and tidbits, is flashed across the screen.

Juxtapositions pack a punch, including Dima’s switching between a baseball cap and a kippa, perhaps reflecting his complex identities, as well as the schism in the identities of post-Holocaust Jews more broadly in a society that struggles to assimilate the idea of contemporary, living Jews in the context of the blood-soaked soil of their state. A shift from colour to black-and-white also evokes the stark break between the present and the past.

But the present and the past are themselves in conflict as Dima recounts how other Germans react when they learn he is Jewish. Why does he only meet Germans whose grandparents weren’t Nazis, he wonders. Statistic: a survey indicates that 29% of Germans think their ancestors helped Jews during the Holocaust, while the screen text helpfully informs us the number was more like 0.1%.

Dima’s teacher, who can’t utter the word Jew and struggles to get the word Shoah out of her mouth, wants Dima to share his family’s Holocaust story with the class. The film’s implication is that Dima’s family was largely spared the trauma of the Holocaust, but he decides to play along because, “There’s no business like Shoah business.”

Dima’s grandfather is taken in by the AfD, the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany party, convinced that their pro-Israel and anti-Muslim rhetoric means that they are defenders of the Jewish people. In a moment that confounds the AfD campaigner (and causes the viewer to reflect), Dima drags his grandfather away from the campaigner while yelling: “Don’t let foreigners take away your antisemitism.”

The film is kooky, funny and light, while also serious, dark and thoughtful throughout.

That description applies to the similarly named feature film Love and Mazel Tov, which features Anne, a non-Jewish bookstore owner who has Munich’s largest selection of Jewish titles and who herself is more than a little obsessed with all things Jewish – including potential romantic partners.

“Some are into fat. Some are into thin. Anne is into Jews,” a friend explains. This turns out to be more than a romantic or erotic attraction, perhaps a disordered response to national and family histories.

Thinking she has found not only a Jewish boyfriend but a doctor at that, Anna (Verena Altenberger) courts Daniel (Maxim Mehmet), who in typical cinematic fashion lets her believe what she wants to believe until the inevitable mix-up explodes in a farcical emotional explosion – though not before an excruciating family dinner.

Parts of the film exist on a spectrum between cringey and hilarious. The film features (at least) two fake Jews who don this identity for extremely different reasons, inviting reflections on passing, appropriation and the fine line between veneration and fetishization.

Both of these films use humour to excavate deeply troubling concepts of identity and addressing horrors of the past. They approach these challenging themes in truly innovative and entertaining ways.

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Understated comedy is key to the success of Greener Pastures, an Israeli film in which Dov, a retired postal worker, has lost his home after a “pension fiasco” involving the privatization of the postal service.

He is a curmudgeonly old square when it comes to marijuana, which the government has decided should be available to anyone 75 and over, but he sees a moneymaking opportunity. Dov (Shlomo Bar-Aba) enlists a network of seniors to order medicinal cannabis and mail it to him so he can distribute it to his “connection,” who shops it around to younger consumers. This “kosher kush,” guaranteed “Grade A government-approved stuff” sold in tahini bottles, brings Dov into conflict with a two-bit drug kingpin in a wheelchair and, of course, a snooping police officer.

There is romance and suspense in this madcap caper, but there is also the theme of elder empowerment, along with the laughs.

The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival runs online only March 3-13. For the full festival lineup and tickets, visit vjff.org.

Question that won’t die

“How does a housewife decide between generals?” asks Golda Meir (played by Tovah Feldshuh) in Golda’s Balcony. In this instance, she must decide between the counsel of David (Dado) Elazar, her chief of staff, left, and Moshe Dayan, her minister of defence. (production still)

Tovah Feldshuh is incredible to watch in Golda’s Balcony, The Film. Not just in her passionate and sympathetic portrayal of Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister from 1969 to 1974, but in her depiction of all 45 characters in William Gibson’s one-woman play. She’s Meir, David Ben-Gurion, David (Dado) Elazar, her husband Morris, Holocaust survivors and Israeli soldiers, among many others. She moves as easily between the personalities as a child raised in a multilingual household moves between languages. And with powerful effect.

Golda’s Balcony, The Film has two screenings at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival – March 1, 1 p.m., and March 2, 3:30 p.m., at Fifth Avenue Cinemas. See it. You will have a more nuanced understanding of Meir, as well as of Israel, its origins and the struggles it has faced and will face. Gibson’s text is superb; it is engaging and insightful, with enough humour along the way that you’ll be able to breathe on occasion, as Meir deals with the existential crisis of the Yom Kippur War. Fluidly switching from wartime to other parts of her life, the play depicts, if nothing else, the stressful, heart-wrenching, thankless job that is being prime minister of a country that is constantly under threat.

The film is a recording of the play’s soldout Off-Broadway première on May 4, 2003, at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, presented by Issembert Productions. After a four-month soldout run at MET, the show moved to Broadway, and the Helen Hayes Theatre, where it ran for 15 months, making it, apparently, the longest-running one-woman show in Broadway history. It has won countless awards.

The set is relatively simple. A table with a couple of chairs on a tile floor. On the table, a dial telephone, a pitcher and water glass, an ashtray, cigarettes. Light shines on the table from the right, as if from a window. The backdrop is a wall of reddish stone or metal slabs of varying sizes that protrude outward. Images are projected onto the wall or chairs when relevant, giving the audience a visual of the person Meir is talking about, or that Feldshuh is portraying – though it is hard to see these images in the film version. To the side and a step down is a small piece of stage covered in dirt, with a few rocks, which acts as refugee camps in Cyprus, the kibbutz on which Meir lived for a time, Russia when Meir visits on a diplomatic tour, etc. The focal point for the entire production is Feldshuh.

The play begins in darkness, a man chants a prayer, the words “Golda’s Balcony” appear briefly on the wall. Thunder claps, lightning flashes, gunshots ring out, then darkness again, but the sound continues: guns firing, bombs exploding, planes overhead. A housecoat-garbed Golda, sitting at the head of the table, strikes a match and lights a cigarette; the lights rise a bit and calmer music prevails.

“I’m at the end of my story,” says Golda. “I’m old. I’m tired. I’m sick. Dying, the doctors tell me. The picture you have of me as Mamaleh Golde, who makes chicken soup for her soldiers, it’s a nice picture. And I do make chicken soup. But let’s empty it all out for keeps right now because, at the bottom of the pot, is blood. At the bottom of the pot is the question that won’t die. I can do without that music!” she yells. It stops. The lights come on more fully, as Golda then starts to relate the story of her first voyage to Palestine, with her husband, in 1921 – 52 years later, she would become prime minister.

“I remember, starting with a phone call, that woke me up at four o’clock in the morning. Saturday, Yom Kippur, 1973,” she says, as she closes her eyes, looking exhausted, her right arm holding up her head, the left one sliding off the table. The phone rings. Startled, she answers it, hearing the news that Egypt and Syria have attacked Israel. As she takes off the housecoat, Golda is in her familiar muted woolen skirt suit; energy, anger and fear all come to the surface as she relates her generals’ differing views as to what Israel needs to do. Dado: attack! Moshe Dayan: don’t be seen as the aggressor! “How does a housewife decide between generals?” she asks.

Of course, she does decide. But the agonizing and tension-filled process leads her – and Israel – down some very dark paths and the play masterfully depicts her sadness, anxiety and frustration; the sacrifices to her family, her health, as well as to others. Throughout the many narratives, it is the story of the Dimona nuclear facility to which she will get, the story that haunts her, that took her to hell; the story she needs to gather the strength to tell.

Thunder, lightning and gunfire divide the scenes in the whirlwind of action that Golda describes, her domestic life almost as tumultuous as her political life. We see her humanity, but also her toughness. Luckily, she never had to answer the question that “won’t die”: if Israeli forces hadn’t been able to cross the Suez Canal and if the United States had not come through with the needed military aid, would she have ordered the dropping of the nuclear bombs with which she had armed Israel’s planes?

Golda’s Balcony is a must-see in a festival with many excellent films. For the full schedule, visit vjff.org.

Golda Meir lived her beliefs

Foreign Minister of Israel Golda Meir meets with U.S. President John F. Kennedy on Dec. 27, 1962. (photo by Cecil Stoughton, National Archives and Records Administration, via commons.wikimedia.org)

Few people reach the pinnacle of power in their country of origin. Even fewer born outside their country of residence climb all the way up the political ladder of their adopted country. Finally, almost no women attain the highest positions of any national government. Yet one woman defied all these societal norms to become the fourth prime minister of the state of Israel – Golda Meir.

Meir (1898-1978) was born in Kiev, Ukraine, raised in the United States and lived in Israel for 56 years. Her long Israeli political career began in America in 1918 when she attended a Philadelphia conference. She wrote in her autobiography, My Life (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), that she “sat for hours listening, completely absorbed … [in] the excitement of the debates and of being able to cast my own vote.”

This American right to voice an opinion was a value she treasured all her political life. Hence, even in her later power-wielding positions as Israeli government minister, ambassador and prime minister, she sought the views of people from all walks of life. She saw it her duty to leave the door open to common citizens and diplomats alike. Life in the United States had given her “an understanding of the meaning of freedom, and awareness of the opportunities offered to the individual in a true democracy.”

At the time of the above conference, she was 20 years old. Though she was already planning to move to Palestine, it is unlikely she envisioned becoming an Israeli prime minister, as no Jewish state existed then. In fact, she believed young people did not need to pick a profession they would follow, so much as they needed to pick the way they would behave. When, in 1971, she met with students from her old Milwaukee, Wisc., elementary school – then called Fourth Street School, today named after her – she advised: “It isn’t really important to decide when you are very young just exactly what you want to become when you grow up. It is much more important to decide on the way you want to live.” She suggested it was enough for a young person “to be honest [and] to get involved with causes which are good for others, not only for yourselves.”

She put words into practice. By age 11, she was already involved in her first public service project. With a friend, she formed the American Young Sisters Society. The group’s goal was to raise money for youngsters who had difficulty paying for schoolbooks. With her school friends, she painted posters, held community meetings and raised the much-needed funds.

This obligation to assist others was a major part of Meir’s life. In Israel, her goal was to achieve social equality for all people, and she insisted that this would not happen unless she had the help of all citizens. She asserted that people of lesser means must not sit back and be “passive,” that they had to speak up for themselves and work to better their life situation. On the other hand, she held that people of greater means had to work to close the social and economic gaps. She believed that, for everyone’s lot to improve, there had to be a sharing of responsibility.

Still, Jewish-American feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin criticizes Meir for not specifically advancing the case of women. On the Jewish Women’s Archive website, Pogrebin writes in the section on Meir: “She was, in current parlance, a ‘queen bee,’ a woman who climbs to the top, then pulls the ladder up behind her. She did not wield the prerogatives of power to address women’s special needs, to promote other women or to advance women’s status in the public sphere. The fact is that, at the end of her tenure, her Israeli sisters were no better off than they had been before she took office.

“Just as some Jews choose not to be Jewish-identified because they think they have the option to behave as if peoplehood doesn’t matter, Golda Meir chose not to be woman-identified and behaved as if gender doesn’t matter. But, of course, when one is Jewish and female, both facts matter.”

Meir’s career came to a relatively inauspicious end. After the Yom Kippur War, which was fought while Meir was prime minister, the government’s actions were questioned. Although the official investigation committee did not blame her for what had happened, she decided to resign. When she announced she was quitting in 1974, she said: “Five years are enough. I have come to the end of the road. It is beyond my strength to continue carrying the burden.” (reprinted in Front Page Israel: Major Events as Reflected in the Front Pages of the Jerusalem Post, edited by Ari Rath and Erwin Frenkel)

She later wrote that, while she did not feel guilty, she felt responsible for not having mobilized troops earlier in that conflict. She came to believe that she should have rejected the assessment of her military and intelligence staff. She writes in My Life: “That Friday morning, I should have listened to the warnings of my own heart and ordered a callup. For me, that fact cannot and never will be erased, and there can be no consolation…. I know that I should have done so, and I shall live with that terrible knowledge for the rest of my life. I will never again be the person I was before the Yom Kippur War.”

After 60-plus years of public service, Meir did what she had been doing since she lived in the United States. She listened to what people in the street were saying about the government’s actions, and she took responsibility for those actions.

Deborah Rubin Fields is an Israel-based features writer. She is also the author of Take a Peek Inside: A Child’s Guide to Radiology Exams, published in English, Hebrew and Arabic.

photo - In New York City, there is Golda Meir Square — In New York City, there is Golda Meir Square. (photo by Billy Hathorn (talk) via commons.wikimedia.org)

More on Meir

Looking at the current state of Golda Meir’s former places of residence, one could say they reflect the mixed feelings Israelis harbor toward her. On the one hand, not too long ago, northern Kibbutz Merchavia turned her first apartment into a small museum. Southern Kibbutz Revivim, moreover, established the Golda Meir Cultural Centre and the Golda Meir Memorial Wing, as Meir was a founding member of the kibbutz.

Her later Ramat Aviv apartment, however, stands derelict – a grimy plaque mentions she once lived there and the guard post, which once protected her, stands abandoned. Meir’s home while prime minister – the home that once served as the official residence for

photo - Golda Meir has been commemorated in Israel in various ways, including on the new sheqalim banknote in 1992, as well as in other countries — Golda Meir has been commemorated in Israel in various ways, including on the new sheqalim banknote in 1992, as well as in other countries. *(photo by Berlin-George via commons.wikimedia.org)*

Israel’s prime ministers – has fared a little better, perhaps because this prime piece of real estate is looking for a suitable buyer. While living at 46 Ben Maimon (Rambam) St., Meir customarily invited members of her inner cabinet – what became known as the “Kitchen Cabinet” – for advance briefing. She prepared the coffee and cake.

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Interviewed in 1973 for Ms. Magazine, Meir said: “Fashion is an imposition, a rein on freedom.” She wore sturdy, black, tie shoes with a thick low heel. In the early days of statehood, women soldiers wore similar shoes. They became known as “Golda shoes.”

– DRF