The Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University is pleased to announce this year’s Yitzhak Rabin Lecture, featuring Professor Pnina Lahav and titled “The Only Woman in the Room. Writing the Life of Golda Meir.”
Join us on Tuesday, April 25th at 5:00 PM, at BU Hillel (4th Floor), for a thought-provoking discussion on Golda Meir’s life and journey to becoming Israel’s fourth prime minister. Before the lecture, we will hold a reception at 4:00 PM.
BREAKING NEWS: To accommodate those of you who live outside the Boston area, we have decided to offer a livestream option for this event. For those of you who live locally, we are going to have a wonderful reception at 4:00 PM where you will be able to converse with the speakers and enjoy the delicious refreshments. For those of you who would like the Zoom link, please fill out the form linked here by Sunday, April 23, and we will send you the Zoom link on Monday, April 24.
To register for the in-person lecture and reception, please use this link. Registration is required to attend this event.
Golda Meir’s life is an inspiring story of overcoming adversity and defying gender barriers. In this lecture, Professor Lahav will explore how Golda Meir overcame gender bias to achieve her goals and become a trusted leader. She will also delve into the misogyny that existed in Israeli culture, making it difficult for women to hold positions of power. In addition, she will explain why Israelis ultimately turned against Golda Meir in 1973 and concluded that a woman could not be trusted with security matters.
Professor Lahav is a renowned legal scholar and author of the recently released biography, The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and Her Path to Power. This book has gained widespread attention and is part of the 2022-2023 book picks of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Professor Lahav has received many awards, including the Israel Studies Award for Lifetime Achievement (2017) and the Prime Minister Golda Meir for Society and Leadership Award (2021).
The lecture’s respondent, Bat-Sheva Margalit Stern, Ph.D., is an expert in 20th-century Jewish women, specifically women in Zionism, mostly in Eretz Israel and Israel. She is the author of the Hecht prize-winning book Redemption in Bondage: The Women Workers Movement in Eretz Israel 1920-1939 and The Revolutionary: Ada Fishman Maimon-Biography, (2018), which won the prestigious Yad Izhak Ben Zvi Prize in 2019. Stern teaches women’s studies and Jewish history at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem and is currently working on new research focusing on radical Jewish women in the first half of the 20th century.
For more information about Pnina Lahav, her talk, and Bat-Sheva Margalit Stern, please check out the program for this year’s Yitzhak Rabin Lecture linked here.
The Yitzhak Rabin Lecture Series at Boston University is generously supported by Mr. Jonathan Krivine (CAS ’72).