Gal Beckerman was a staff writer and then the Forward’s opinion editor until 2014. He was previously an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review where he wrote essays and media criticism. His book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review and Bookforum. His first book, “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry,” won the 2010 National Jewish Book Award and the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, as well as being named a best book of the year by The New Yorker and The Washington Post. Follow Gal on Twitter at @galbeckerman
Gal Beckerman
By Gal Beckerman
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Opinion The Pathology Plaguing American Jews
My daughter is confused. She has asked me a number of times in the last few weeks what it means to be a Jew. She’s 5. So confusion about identity is not an unusual state for her — she’s also been wondering aloud lately about why she can’t fly. But her questions about Jewishness are…
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Culture Vladimir Slepak, Famed Soviet Refusenik, Dies
One of the most iconic activists in the Soviet Jewry movement, Volodya Slepak, has died. A man with a fascinating life story, Slepak’s father had been a diehard communist who opposed his son’s 17-year-long struggle to emigrate out of the Soviet Union (a generational battle chronicled beautifully by Chaim Potok in his book, ). Slepak’s…
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Opinion 66 Years of Israeli Voting in 1 Cool Graphic
If you want to see in one shot why many Israel observers are tearing their hair out in response to the country’s electoral process, feast your eyes on this cool infographic from the Economist. The chart shows the breakdown of each election since 1949 until the projected results of tomorrow’s vote. At the top are…
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Opinion France Was Dead Wrong To Ask Bibi To Stay Home
Benjamin Netanyahu gives a speech at the Grand Synagogue in Paris / Getty Images I’ve got two immediate and possibly contradictory takeaways from the news that French President Francois Hollande asked Benjamin Netanyahu not to appear at the unity rally that took place in Paris on Sunday. Let’s first look at the reasons Hollande reportedly…
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Opinion Would Charlie Hebdo Have Angered So Many Online?
Getty Images I’ve had a swirl of emotions in response to the attack on France’s satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, which has left 12 dead, including many of this generation’s greatest cartoonists. I’m raging at the brutality of the act and find myself utterly incapable of getting anywhere near an understanding of a worldview so insecure…
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Opinion How David Grossman Grieves
This past year saw the publication in English of the renowned Israeli author David Grossman’s latest book, “Falling Out of Time.” It’s a sustained meditation on grief told as an allegory and mostly in verse — a book filled with the raw emotion that Grossman feels every day over the loss of his son, Uri,…
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Culture For David Bezmozgis, Fiction Must Go Far Beneath the Surface
The first thing I noticed about the writer David Bezmozgis when I sat down to breakfast with him in Brooklyn in late September was the tattoo on his forearm — a blue cursive Cyrillic D framed by a diamond. I first met Bezmozgis in 2010, and we’ve since become friends, and I’ve never shaken the…
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Opinion Taking the Banality Out of Evil
The idea that evil could be “banal” still shocks us. It’s much scarier to consider that genocide could be carried out unthinkingly by the most vacuous of bureaucrats and not by intrinsically bad people acting with bad intent. This new moral category was Hannah Arendt’s now infamous reaction to witnessing the 1961 trial of Adolf…
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Yiddish לכּבֿוד יום-הזכּרון זאָל דער געדענק־פּלאַקאַט פֿון קיבוץ בארי נישט לאָזן פֿאַרגעסןOn Yom Hazikaron, may the memorial poster from Kibbutz Be’eri keep us from forgetting
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Fast Forward Israel’s Eden Golan places fifth at the Eurovision Song Contest