Golda Meir, one of Israel's prime ministers and Labor leaders, was born in Kiev, Russia, where her father was a skilled carpenter. Because of the family's extreme poverty, they emigrated to the United States in 1906 and settled in Milwaukee, where Golda graduated from high school and enrolled in the Milwaukee Normal School for Teachers. Childhood memories of Russian pogroms, intensified by the anti-Jewish massacres during the civil war in Russia after 1917, led her to embrace Zionism and, being a socialist as well, she joined Po'alei Zion in 1915. A gifted orator in Yiddish and English, the young girl quickly attracted attention; however, she rejected the role of a "Diaspora Zionist" and in 1921 settled in Palestine with her husband, Morris Myerson, joining kibbutz Merhavyah.

Although Golda Meir rapidly adjusted to the hard conditions, including malaria, then prevailing in the kibbutz, she soon became involved in political and social activities that took her from Merhavyah. In 1928 she became the executive secretary of Mo'ezet ha-Po'alot and was sent as an emissary to the Pioneer Women's Organization in the United States from 1932 to 1934.

Upon her return to Palestine in 1934, she was invited to join the Executive Committee of the Histadrut. Golda Meir rapidly rose in the hierarchy of the Palestine labor movement, and was appointed head of the Political Department of the Histadrut, a task which proved to be invaluable training for her subsequent role as leading statesman of Israel. In the 1940s, during the struggle with the Mandatory government, she was in the forefront of the conflict as an organizer of its various facets. When the British, determined to crush the Haganah and Jewish resistance, arrested the leaders of the yishuv in June 1946, Golda Meir was chosen to be acting head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency, instead of the arrested Moshe Shertok (Sharett), thus becoming the principal Jewish representative in the difficult negotiations with the Mandatory power. After Sharett, upon his release from the camp in Latrun, left for the United States to take charge of the fight for the partition plan at the UN, Golda Meir served as the head of the Political Department in Jerusalem until the establishment of the state in 1948.

During the Arab attacks between November 1947 and the proclamation of the State of Israel, Golda Meir engaged in two major endeavors. In January 1948, she visited the United States and proved extremely successful in presenting the case of the embattled yishuv and enlisting the aid of U.S. Jewry. On May 10, 1948, four days before the proclamation of the state, she made a dangerous and dramatic journey across the Jordan in order to meet secretly with King Abdullah, hoping to persuade him not to join the attack on the newborn Jewish state. After the establishment of Israel she was appointed minister to Moscow, a post she held until April, 1949. Her presence elicited an extraordinary congregation of Jewish masses at the Moscow Great Synagogue on the High Holidays -- the first dramatic expression of long-suppressed Jewish identity in the Soviet Union.

After the elections to the First Knesset in 1949, to which she was elected on behalf of the Mapai party, Golda Meir was appointed minister of labor. She initiated large-scale housing and road-building programs and vigorously supported the policy of unrestricted immigration despite the great economic difficulties faced by the young State of Israel. In 1956 she became foreign minister of Israel and held the post until 1965.

President Sadat sharing a joke with Golda Meir and Shimon Perez, at the Knesset

As one of the few women to hold so high an office, Golda Meir became a famous figure on the international scene and displayed an extraordinary capacity to convey, in public and in private talks with foreign statesmen and representatives, the moral aspect of Israel's vital interests. She was frequently active at the United Nations, especially in the period following the Sinai Campaign; and her speeches from its rostrum became central events of the General Assemblies' debates. Among her main achievements in foreign relations was extension of Israel aid to the emergent African nations and the establishment of friendly relations with them. Upon her retirement from the Foreign Ministry, Golda Meir became secretary-general of Mapai, and after the Six-Day War (1967) she was instrumental in bringing about the union of Mapai, Rafi, and Ahdut ha-Avodah, becoming the secretary-general of the new unified Israel Labor Party. After the death of Levi Eshkol on Feb. 26, 1969, Golda Meir became the fourth prime minister of Israel. In 1969 she paid an official visit to President Nixon in Washington and subsequently led her party to victory in the general elections. She again became prime minister retaining at first the broad coalition of "national unity" established on the eve of the Six-Day War. She dramatically voiced the identification and solidarity of Israel and its government with the Soviet Jews who courageously engaged in an open struggle for their right to settle in Israel. Her concept of Israel as a focal center of a united Jewish people the world over was a conspicuous element in her activities as prime minister.

In August 1970 she accepted the American peace initiative, based on a stoppage of the "war of attrition" with Egypt and an Israel pledge to withdraw to "secure and recognized boundaries" under a general peace settlement. In consequence Gahal seceded from the government of national unity, and Golda Meir continued to lead the remaining coalition and the nation as a whole in the delicate relations with the U.S. government and other international factors. She won great popularity as an outstanding "team leader" of the coalition government and as an exponent of the national consensus on Israel's crucial interests while entering the new phase of indirect negotiations with Egypt.

Despite the losses suffered by the ruling Labor Party in the elections of December 31, 1973, Golda Meir succeeded, after lengthy and difficult negotiations, in forming a new government, a coalition of the Labor-Mapam Alignment, the National Religious Party, and the Independent Liberal Party, which received the approval of the Knesset on March 10. The protest movements led by demobilized reservists and the publication of the Agranat Commission's interim report on the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War reopened the controversy over the responsibility for the mistakes that preceded the war. Demands for Defense Minister Moshe Dayan's resignation were countered by his supporters with a call for the resignation of the government as a whole, and on April 11, Mrs. Meir submitted her resignation to the President, which involved that of the government. During the negotiations for the formation of a new cabinet, she continued to lead the caretaker government and was successful in bringing the negotiations for an agreement for the disengagement of forces between Israel and Syria to a successful conclusion. On the appointment of the new government under Yizhak Rabin on June 3, she resigned her seat in the Knesset and retired into private life, but she continued to be active in the deliberations of the Labor Party.

Her collected papers, This is Our Strength, edited by H.M. Christman with an introduction, appeared in 1962, her memoirs, Bet Avi, were published in 1972 and her autobiography, My Life, (Hayyai), published in 1975, became a best seller. In the same year, she was awarded the Israel Prize for special services to state and society. Golda Meir died on Dec. 8, 1978 and was given a state funeral. She was buried next to Levi Eshkol in the section reserved for distinguished citizens on Har Hamenuhot, Jerusalem. In her will she requested that no eulogies be delivered at her funeral and no institutions be named after her. Nevertheless, on December 3, 1979, New York City dedicated the Golda Meir Memorial Square on Broadway.