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 Who Said Jews Are Leaving Obama?
A new Gallup Poll out today confirms that President Obama’s strong Jewish support has not evaporated following his May 19 speech on the Middle East. In fact, it hasn’t moved a bit. Sixty percent of Jews approved of Obama’s job in June, while 32 percent disapproved. In a poll of the general public, Obama gets…
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Opinion The Futility of Barring Flotilla Coverage
Never thought I would say this, but Benjamin Netanyahu just saved me from banging my head against the wall in desperate frustration. This morning brought news that Israel’s Government Press Office had warned media outlets that any foreign correspondent found aboard the flotilla about to set sail for Gaza would be “denied entry into the…
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Food Shabbat Meals: For the Love of Challah!
My parents grew up in Israel, but they immigrated to the United States in their late teens and had me when they were 20. So they have spent most of their adult lives here and raised me and my two sisters in a place very different than the 1960s Israel where they were brought up…
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Opinion Remembering Yelena Bonner
When I asked Natan Sharansky to explain how Yelena Bonner complemented the work of her husband, Nobel Prize-winning Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, Sharansky said he could do so quite simply. “Let’s take the example of the Carter letter,” he told me. In the first days of 1977, an American visitor to Moscow arrived at Sakharov’s…
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Opinion Allison Benedikt’s Beinart Moment
An essay published by the web-zine, The Awl, has gotten a lot of attention in our little corner of the blogosphere. It’s called, “Life After Zionist Summer Camp,” and the author is Allison Benedikt, film editor at the Village Voice. I should say before I go any further that Allison is a friend and the…
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Opinion More on Haaretz and Nevzlin
The Israeli financial newspaper, Globes, reported some more details on Leonid Nevzlin’s recent purchase of 20% of Haaretz. I wrote about the initial news on Sunday and wondered whether this said something about the political diversity of the Russian Jewish community in Israel. The idea that Nevzlin — even if only a constituency of one…
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Opinion Haaretz’s New Russian Co-Owner
The Israeli paper Haaretz, reported yesterday that Leonid Nevzlin, whom I described last year as the Russian oligarch “who got away,” just purchased 20% of the company’s shares. Its value: 700 million shekels. This leaves the legendary Schocken family, owners of the paper since 1937, with a 60% stake (David Remnick recently had an illuminating…
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Opinion Russell Crowe To Play Foreskin Man
The big studios seem to be running out of superheros for the summer movie season. They must be scraping the bottom of the barrel if the best they can do now is Thor and the Green Lantern. I have a solution: A brand new superhero, minted just last week, and a big, big Hollywood star…
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