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Valerie Harper isn’t a Jew, but she famously played one on TV as Mary Tyler Moore’s wisecracking friend, Rhoda Morgenstern. Now Harper stars as another strong Jewish woman, Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister from 1969 to 1974. Since last October, Harper has been touring with Golda’s Balcony, Broadway’s longest-running one-woman show. Written by William Gibson (The Miracle Worker), the play takes place during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, but flips through Meir’s life: from the Russian pogroms of her early childhood, to her family’s immigration to Milwaukee, to Meir’s cofounding of the state of Israel.

Would you say this is a pro-Zionist play?

Oh, yeah. I would say that it is Golda Meir’s personal journey, so it’s not really a political stance, except [that Gibson] expresses her political views, her feeling that Zionism is nothing if not the rescue of Jews.… There must be justice for Palestinians, but as long as they call for the destruction of Israel, it’s almost a nonstarter. It’s so impossible a discussion when Israel’s there and Israel’s there to stay, and now with the nuclear option, they might take out the whole Middle East rather than be destroyed. This is Valerie, this is not the play. “Never again”—they really mean it. If you are doing a play about Golda Meir, it has to embrace her stand for the Jews, i.e., Zionism.

There’s a line in the play: “There will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate the Jews.” What do you make of that?
I think [Meir’s] talking about the fact that if [the Arabs] would consider their children’s future rather than removal of Jews from the area, then peace would come. There’s another expression: “If the Arabs put down their arms, there would be peace. If Israel puts down their arms, there would be no Israel.”

Yet in the play, Meir seriously considers the nuclear option.
America came through with conventional weapons for Israel so that Israel would not drop the bomb. The question in Meir’s heart: How can I do this? One of the tenets of Judaism is to heal the world.… [But] there’s that other saying. Golda said, “We have a secret weapon against the Arabs: no alternative.” That’s that Israeli point of view: There’s a new kind of Jew in town. And I don’t think the world liked losing their nice little sweet “Put my head down. Let me help you with the ax. Is this good? Is my neck in the right spot?”…There is a line in the show: “What happens when idealism becomes power? It kills.” And here’s the terrible question: How many people do you kill to protect yourself?

What would Meir have answered, do you think?
At the end, she says, “I can’t answer.” She knows it’s wrong. She wishes it would be otherwise. But she wasn’t going to let her people be rolled over. She was a toughie.

Why should we see your play?
Golda’s life chronicles the experience of the Jewish people in the 20th century. She’s born in 1898, died in ’78; she was there at every huge development. Listen, Israelis aren’t saying—neither are Jews—that Jews get everything and the Arabs get nothing. That’s not my feeling, and I don’t think it was Golda’s, either. But she was not going to go quietly into that dark night ever again.—Novid Parsi

Golda’s Balcony inaugurates the newly revamped LaSalle Bank Theatre on Tuesday 30.