Galia Golan Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Galia, welcome back to Berkeley.
Thank you.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio but I was raised all over, in Florida, Chicago, Boston, and then we lived in Europe.
Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?
I didn't come from a political family. I came from a very, very secular, even anti-religious family, and a very independent mother, which I think made a great difference in my life because she was working in Europe, [which] made it possible for me to study in Europe. That's where I formed many of my views, certainly my political views.
Was there a discussion of politics around the dinner table?
Never. No discussion of politics. My brother's an artist, my mother was a jewelry buyer -- no, there was no politics, except at one point we lived with my mother's brother. He worked for Pan American as a purser and would travel to South Africa. When I was sixteen he told me about apartheid and the situation, and that had an enormous effect on me.
What about as you traveled around the country? Any teachers that influenced you towards this concern with the great issues of politics?
It's very hard to say. I went to my last years of high school in Forest Hills, New York, and it was the kids, it was my friends who were radical. We'd go to Pete Seeger concerts, and so forth. It was the 1950s, so combined with what I had learned about apartheid, civil rights already hit me, so to speak, in high school. Then I went on to Brandeis, and it was, of course, radical. This is the late fifties; I graduated in '60. So, it really came through the Civil Rights Movement, I think.
At Brandeis, any mentors or professors there that influenced you, or was it just the left-wing students?
I was a protégé of Marcuse. I studied with him at Brandeis, was a philosophy student, and then I studied with him in Europe and I was with him in Paris, although I wasn't a Marxist, and he knew that but that didn't stop him from supporting me. We were very close, as family, so to speak. So, yes, of course he had an enormous influence, but Brandeis altogether in those years was fantastic. I mean, Abe Maslow was there, and Frank Manuel, and Berkowitz -- it was a tremendously active place intellectually, extraordinary influence on me, in my opinion.
Looking back, what was the most important thing that Marcuse taught you, or what insights did he leave you with that influenced your future research?
Well, one thing -- it's not necessarily what was in his books but just in knowing him -- frankly I'll never forget a comment he made, and I was very flattered. He made a comment after class, and he said, "Yes, my dear, but you've got to remember that you're one of seven percent intellectuals in the world." I was very flattered he put me in that category, but it really did do a reality check. You know, seven percent, even that seems a high figure. It gave me an idea that my views were going to remain views of a minority. Not necessarily a tiny minority, but it sort of put me in place, so to speak.
And it was after graduation from Brandeis that you immigrated to Israel?
No, I went to France and studied there with Marcuse, and then I came back. Forty years ago, 1966, I immigrated.
Then you went on to do your graduate work at Hebrew University. What did you finally focus on there?
In the course of living abroad, mainly in Paris, I shifted from philosophy -- I did my MA on Marx's concept of freedom -- but I shifted to East European studies, mainly because while I was living in Europe I traveled a lot to Eastern Europe, and I really was quite horrified. I had never seen a dictatorship. It doesn't matter whether it was left or right, I had never seen anything like it, and decided to leave philosophy and go into East European studies, so that by the time I immigrated to Israel and had to do my doctorate I did it on Czechoslovakia, on the reform movement that was just coming to Czechoslovakia. My first two books, in fact, were on the Czechoslovak reform movement.
Only very gradually, I got into the Soviet stuff. A lot of East European specialists somehow graduate to the Soviet area. I didn't mean for it to happen but it happened in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. I was asked by our Knesset Foreign Affairs Committee to keep them up to date on the Soviet involvement during the war, put together a team. And so I started following it, and right after that there was a conference semi-sponsored by the International Institute of Strategic Studies. I wrote a paper for that on the Soviet involvement in the war.
This was which war now?
In 1973. I was in the '67 war but I wasn't doing anything academically. But the '73 war I did quite a bit of research on the Soviet involvement. My husband was a doctor in an artillery unit. When he came back from four months of war and mobilization he said, "Well, you've already done all of this. Why don't you write a book on it?" So I literally left one desk where I was writing a book on Eastern Europe, moved over to another desk and wrote the book on the Soviet Union in the Yom Kippur War, and after that everything was the Soviet Union.
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