More Golda

My studying for my daughter's Golda Meir essay continues, with news last night that said daughter suspects that her modern history teacher (a pretty young guy) didn't recognise who she (Golda) was during a discussion regarding what the essay should address.   Should that concern me?   I mean, that Haaretz review I linked to in my first post said that lots of Israelis prefer not to commemorate her legacy given the blame they put on her for not pre-empting the Yom Kippur attacks.   But seems to me a modern history teacher should know of her.  Or maybe my daughter's mistaken?

Anyway, I was reading another Haaretz article from 2013 which went into detail as to her actions at the start of that war.  But more interestingly, it discussed her recurring nightmares:

Golda Meir, it turns out, suffered from recurring nightmares. Obliquely, she revealed a glimpse of them during a discussion held on the third anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War, during the War of Attrition. Posing his question in a challenging, defiant tone, the writer Amos Oz asked: "What do you dream about?" Meir replied tersely: "I don't have time to dream. I don't really sleep because the telephone rings at night to inform me about Israelis who have been hurt."

After Meir's death, Yaakov Hazan, a leader of the left-wing Mapam party, wrote in the kibbutz movement journal Shdemot that Meir told him about her recurring bad dream. "`Do you remember, Hazan,' Golda told me, `the question that Amos Oz posed to me? I was surprised. I knew which dreams he was referring to. Because what sort of person worthy of being called a human being doesn't dream? His question struck me as being offensive. I mumbled my answer because I didn't want to, and I couldn't, tell him what I dream about.

"`Yes, I dream, intensely. But it's all one nightmare. Suddenly all the telephones in my home start to ring; there are a lot of phones, located in every corner of the house, and they don't stop ringing. I know what the ringing means, and I'm afraid to pick up all the receivers. I wake up covered in a cold sweat. It's quiet in the house. I breath a sigh of relief, but can't get back to sleep. I know that if I fall back to sleep, the dream will return. I sometimes wonder when that dream will go away - when it does, I'll once again dream about our happy lives.'"

Update:   I briefly mentioned in the previous post that I have never read Leon Uris's Exodus, which (rather like The Kon Tiki Expedition)  I remember as something of a 60's publishing phenomena, in that you would see it on every household bookshelf (OK, I'll correct myself - every Council library) or in every second hand store, but it seems half forgotten now.

Looking at the Wikipedia entry on it, I was interested to read this part about how it came to be written:

Numerous sources say that Uris, motivated by an intense interest in Israel, financed his own research for the novel by selling the film rights in advance to MGM and writing articles about the Sinai campaign.^[9][10] It has also been reported that the book involved two years of research and involved thousands of interviews.^[11]
According to Jack Shaheen: "In the 1950s, when Americans were largely apathetic about Israel, the eminent public relations consultant Edward Gottlieb was called on "to create a more sympathetic attitude" toward the newly established state. He therefore sent Leon Uris to Israel to write a novel, which became the bestseller Exodus... Exodus introduced filmgoers to the Arab–Israel conflict, and peopled it with heroic Israelis and sleazy, brutal Arabs, some of whom link up with ex-Nazis. The movie's only "good Arab" becomes a dead Arab."^[12] Shaheen did not identity the person or collection of persons who sought Gottlieb's assistance.

 I didn't realise there was a perceived need to raise American consciousness of, and support for, Israel.  I more or less assumed that the Jewish influence was big enough that Americans as a whole would be enthusiastic about Israel.  But then again, Gentlemen's Agreement only came out in 1947 on the topic of hidden anti-Semitism (never seen it either), so the point is - I don't really know anything about post War World 2 American popular sentiment towards Jews and Israel.