Golda Meir: Great Russian Jews Series

Marking the 120th birthday of Golda Meir (1898-1978), this discussion panel celebrates the many contributions of the great Zionist leader and Jewish stateswoman. Born in Kiev and raised in Milwaukee, Golda Meir settled in the British Mandate of Palestine in 1917. One of the founders of the State of Israel, Meir was Israel’s ambassador to the USSR in 1948-49, subsequently served as Israel’s minister of labor and foreign minister, and in 1969 became Israel’s fourth prime minister.

With Samuel D. Kassow (Trinity College), Pnina Lahav (Boston University) and Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston College and Davis Center).

Samuel D. Kassow, born to Holocaust survivors in a displaced camp in Germany, is Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College. In 2006-2012 he was a lead historian for two of the galleries of Polin, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He has received the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson and Danforth Fellowships and has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. Kassow’s many publications include “Students, Professors and the State in Tsarist Russia: 1884-1917” (1989), “The Distinctive Life of East European Jewry” (2003) and “Who Will Write Our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive” (2007), which has been translated into eight languages and made into a documentary film.

Pnina Lahav, the Israeli-born scholar and author, is a professor of law and a member of the faculty of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University. Her fields of expertise are constitutional law, first amendment law and legal history. She is the recipient of many awards, prizes and distinguished fellowships, most recently the Israel Studies Award for Lifetime Achievement (2017) and the Boston University School of Law Silver Shingle Award (2018). She is the author of numerous publications, including the acclaimed judicial biography “Justice in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century.” Of late, Lahav has focused her attention on the status and history of women and is presently completing a biography of Golda Meir, Israel’s fourth prime minister, through a gender lens.

Maxim D. Shrayer, born and raised in Moscow, is a bilingual author, scholar and translator. A professor of Russian, English and Jewish studies at Boston College, Shrayer serves as director of the Project on Russian and Eurasian Jewry at Harvard’s Davis Center. Shrayer authored and edited over 15 books in English and Russian, among them the internationally acclaimed memoirs “Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story” and “Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration,” the double biography “Bunin and Nabokov: A History of Rivalry,” the Holocaust study “I SAW IT” and the travelogue “With or Without You.” Shrayer won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award and in 2012 received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Shrayer’s “Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature” was published in October 2018.

Cosponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University, and made possible with the generous support of Genesis Philanthropy Group.