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 Backing Away from September
There are those who heard in Obama’s speech on the Middle East an attempt – as Mitt Romney elegantly put it – to throw Israel “under the bus” and those who thought it was just the same old steadfast support for Israeli positions that every American president expresses. Both sides, it’s clear, seem to only…
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News JVP, Harsh Critic Of Israel, Seeks a Seat at the Communal Table
On a recent Wednesday night in New York City, Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that critics label anti-Israel, made the case for her group’s main protest tactic: a targeted campaign of boycott, divestment and sanction — or BDS, as it has become known — against Israel’s occupation of the…
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News Did a Private Meeting Prompt Goldstone To Change His Mind?
When Richard Goldstone returned home to South Africa last May for his grandson’s bar mitzvah — an event that he was almost unable to paticipate in because of protests planned against him — he also attended a separate meeting whose details were kept secret until now. In the wake of Goldstone’s bombshell retraction of a…
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News HRW Founder Charts Another Way To Probe Human Rights
When Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, publicly split last year from the groundbreaking organization he birthed in the late 1970s, most people assumed this was the last they would hear from the 88-year-old publisher-turned-activist. But Bernstein was not finished. It appears that The New York Times op-ed in which he charged HRW with…
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Culture Holocaust Images by Soviet Jewish Photographers
University of Colorado professor David Shneer has come out with a new book, ?Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust,? in which he introduces readers to a group of Jewish photographers whose names might be new to people in the West. These are Soviet Jews who, remarkably, took some of the most compelling…
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News A Catholic Thinker Touched by Jerusalem and Its Mystical and Earthly Power
Jerusalem, a city that lives both in physical space and in the imagination, has always intrigued James Carroll. It is a place rooted in history, the foundation stone for the three monotheistic religions. But it is also an idea, an aspiration to perfection, the original city on the hill. It is this central dichotomy that…
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News For Bangladeshi Garment Workers, It Is Still 1911
The details sound eerily familiar. A fire on the ninth floor of a garment factory. Workers trapped behind exits locked by their employers. Cornered by flames that began raging after a pile of clothes caught on fire. And the horrific choice: jump to their death or be burned alive. The only big difference was the…
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News Congressmen Spark More Heat Than Light in Goldstone Report Debate
A debate about Israel in Greenwich Village, arguably the liberal heartland of the country, can really only end one way: with people screaming at each other. And so it was March 3, at an evening event billed as a “debate” between Brooklyn Congressman Anthony Weiner and former Congressman Brian Baird of Washington State at the…
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