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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News Rick Sanchez Latest To Be Immediately Fired After Comments Hostile to Jews
By the time Rick Sanchez, now a former CNN anchor, made his remarks about Jews controlling the media, there was a well-established process for how to deal with these types of situations. Within 24 hours, he was summarily fired, with a curt thank-you for his service to the network. Call it crisis management on steroids….
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News In a Time of Terror, Soviet Jews Unfurled Their Courage
This is the second of three excerpts from Forward staff writer Gal Beckerman’s new book, “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle To Save Soviet Jewry,” published on September 23 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. By the late 1970s, a number of refuseniks were so well known to activists in the West…
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News When Violence Overcame a Freedom Struggle
This is the first of three excerpts from Forward staff writer Gal Beckerman’s new book, “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle To Save Soviet Jewry,” published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on September 23. Before Meir Kahane became the right-wing extremist banned by the Israeli Parliament for racism, he was a…
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The Schmooze Leaving Mother Russia
In his last posts, Forward staff writer Gal Beckerman wrote about barbecuing with hijackers and his other baby. His first book, “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry,” will be available September 23. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of…
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The Schmooze My Other Baby
On Monday, Gal Beckerman, a staff writer for the Forward, wrote about barbecuing and hijackers. His first book, “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry,” will be available September 23. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book…
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The Schmooze Barbecuing With Hijackers
Gal Beckerman is a staff writer at the Forward. His first book, “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry,” will be available September 23. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author…
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News And in This Corner, Salita Boxes for Redemption
For nine months now, Dmitriy Salita, the Russian-Jewish welterweight, has been telling anyone who will listen that the reason for his humiliating loss to Amir Khan in England last December was the hostile, jeering, “anti-Semitic” environment in the Newcastle arena. On September 2, Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach was to be the site of his redemption. If…
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News Survey Says Young Jews Do Care About Israel
Peter Beinart’s essay in The New York Review of Books last spring painted a picture of young American Jews as alienated, increasingly disengaged from the Jewish state and what he called the “illiberal” policies of its current government, and “less willing to grant Israel an exemption because its survival seems in peril.” Beinart briefly backed…
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