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 Read Our Palestinian Statehood Q&A
This morning Yossi Klein Halevi and Hussein Ibish answered questions from Forward and Guardian readers about the Palestinians’ pursuit of UN recognition of statehood. Click here to read all the good questions and the intelligent, thoughtful answers.
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Opinion So Now It’s September…And We Still Have Questions
A few weeks ago in our opinion pages, we ran a symposium asking a group of knowledgeable folks what they thought might happen in September when the Palestinians go to the United Nations seeking recognition of statehood. The answers ran the gamut from total gloom to measured optimism, but in the end there seemed to…
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Opinion Israeli Protests Give Masses a Reason to Speak Out
If you’ve ever been to Tel Aviv’s Kikar Hamedina, the circular public plaza in the north of the city, you’ll know just how utterly large it is. It’s a massive, usually empty expanse ringed by posh stores like Louis Vuitton and Gucci — the epicenter of Israeli capitalism, if you will. And so it was…
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Opinion J Street Opposes Palestinian Statehood Bid
As we get closer to September 20 and the opening of the UN’s General Assembly, all the various voices of the American Jewish universe are beginning to state their opinion about whether the Palestinian push for UN recognition is a wise or foolish step. We’ve actually got an editorial, stating our own position, which will…
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Opinion Is Derfner the Problem, or Are the Israeli People?
There is still much discussion about the firing early last week of Larry Derfner, the lefty Jerusalem Post columnist. Derfner wrote in our pages that he regretted making it seem like he was legitimizing Palestinian terror against Israelis. He intended only to shock his readers into thinking about what some of the reasons behind the…
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Opinion Larry Derfner’s Offending Blog Posts
We’ve now posted a piece by Larry Derfner, who was fired earlier this week from the Jerusalem Post, where he had been a longtime left-leaning columnist. He makes reference to his initial blog post (dated August 21 and now removed from his website, Israel Reconsidered) that lost him his job. With his permission we have…
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Opinion Al Sharpton Winks at Rabbi Heschel
In what is the closest he will probably ever come to an apology, Al Sharpton (onetime firebrand turned soon-to-be MSNBC host) writes in today’s Daily News about his conduct during the Crown Heights riots that “our language and tone sometimes exacerbated tensions and played to the extremists rather than raising the issue of the value…
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Opinion BDS Movement’s Revealing Position on the September UN Vote
We recently ran a symposium on our op-ed pages gathering together various opinions on what will happen in September when the Palestinians ask the United Nations to recognize Palestine as a state. Even though there was quite a range of opinion — from condemnation to encouragement — I was surprised to find that the overall…
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