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 Why JDub Mattered to a Younger Generation of American Jews
The following is by one of our intrepid interns, Pnina Kessler, who has put together her thoughts on the demise of JDub (which we recently covered in our pages). It’s an insightful commentary on how much more needs to be done to appeal to young American Jews on a cultural level. As a seventeen year…
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Opinion Israel’s Foreign Ministry Borrows From the Settlers for Its Propaganda
Israel’s deputy foreign minister and Twitter warrior, Danny Ayalon, recently released a video over YouTube that is doing quite well — posted on July 11, it now has nearly 180,000 hits. In it, Ayalon tries to explain why he thinks the West Bank should not be referred to as “occupied” and that settlements are not…
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Opinion Instead of Israeli vs. Palestinian, Think Modern vs. Medieval
I give Hussien Ibish — a contributor to our pages — a lot of credit for even agreeing to get into the ring with someone like David Ha’ivri, an “extremist settler” (Ibish’s words, with which I concur) that he recently debated. Ibish recounts the encounter here. In many ways, this type of interaction can only…
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Opinion Peoplehood, Debated
We’ve gotten a lot of response to Daniel Septimus’ op-ed, taking on Misha Galperin and his “peoplehood agenda.” Because there seems to be interest in this debate — one that has high stakes for, at the very least, the future of the Jewish Agency if not the Jewish community as a whole — I’ve just…
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Opinion How Israel Harms Itself When It Legitimizes The Delegitimizers
One of the people I follow these days on Twitter is Danny Ayalon. He’s the deputy foreign minister of Israel but it’s hard to tell from his Twitter feed that he does anything besides man the virtual barricades of the state. Hardly an hour goes by when Ayalon doesn’t end up engaging in tweet-to-tweet combat…
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Opinion What We Talk About When We Talk About Peoplehood
I’ve received some interesting responses to an op-ed we ran recently in the paper. The piece was written by Misha Galperin, a top official at the Jewish Agency, who has overseen that quasi-governmental body’s shift from focusing on immigration to Israel, which was its mission for many decades, to something called “peoplehood” promotion. Galperin will…
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Opinion A Levelheaded Israeli Calls Anti-Boycott Law ‘Fascism’
I’m still reeling from the news yesterday that the Knesset passed the anti-boycott law. It’s reassuring to know that it’s not just Israelis on the left that are outraged by this. In this morning’s Maariv, Ben Caspit, one of Israel’s most prominent and influential columnists, tears into the new law, expressing much anguish — you…
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Opinion Why You Should Care About the Anti-Boycott Law (UPDATED)
Even if you don’t agree with the aims of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, there is great reason to be concerned about what is transpiring in the Israeli parliament at this moment (for Hebrew speakers, live proceedings can be seen here). Debate is underway over a bill that would impose harsh punishment and financial…
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