JOCELYN NOVECK
ONE of the more famous quips attributed to Golda Meir, Israel’s first and only female prime minister, was her response to how it felt being a woman in an overwhelmingly male political arena.
“I don’t know,” she was oft quoted as saying. “I’ve never tried being a man.”
Meir indisputably broke a glass ceiling — one that hasn’t been broken since — but she had a prickly relationship with feminism, a label she certainly didn’t embrace. Still, argues director Guy Nattiv, the trajectory of Meir’s career — especially the nature of the public blame she received for losses in the 1973 war between Israel and a coalition of Arab states — was very much connected to her gender.
“A hundred percent,” Nattiv says, “if she was not a woman it would have ended totally differently.” And that’s one of the reasons Nattiv says he relished directing “Golda,” starring
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