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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Culture Love in the Time of Technology
Super Sad True Love Story By Gary Shteyngart Random House, 352 pages, $26 In his first two novels — his blini-wrapped Bildungsroman, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” and his highly absurdist “Absurdistan” — Gary Shteyngart coaxed his darkest humor out of imagined settings, alternate universes only one step removed from our own. It’s the satirist’s smartest…
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News Brandeis U. Picks Legal Scholar for President
Brandeis University has chosen Frederick M. Lawrence, an expert in civil and human rights laws and author of a book on hate crime, to be its new president. Lawrence has served as dean of George Washington University’s law school since 2005. For 10 years, he was also one of the five lay members on the…
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News Should Birthright Visit Hebron? U.S., Israeli Leaders Disagree
A Taglit-Birthright tour visiting Israel in early July made a stop in a city that most of these groups have studiously avoided: Hebron. And this stop has raised questions about whether Birthright can travel beyond the so-called Green Line into the Israeli-occupied West Bank, with differing answers from American and Israeli Birthright officials. The visit…
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News New Study Finds That It’s Not a Lack of Welcome That’s Keeping the Intermarrieds Away
Since at least the 1990s, one of the chief concerns of the American Jewish community has been the problem of intermarriage. With the perception that an increasing number of American Jews are marrying outside the faith, the problem of how to stop the attrition has been a major preoccupation. But a fairly simple strategy has…
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News On the Hudson River, Hoenlein Launches a ‘Flotilla’ for Gilad Shalit
Of all the things I never expected I’d hear coming out of the mouth of Malcolm Hoenlein, the powerful executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, “It’s time to set sail!” was certainly near the top of the list. But there he was, jacket and tie removed, a blue…
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News Rubashkin’s Jail Sentence Denounced by Angry Haredim
A wave of outrage rippled through New York’s Haredi community, crossing the usual ultra-Orthodox divisions, in response to the June 21 announcement that Agriprocessors executive Sholom Rubashkin would be sent to a federal jail for 27 years for bank fraud, with no possibility of parole. The heated emotions were in evidence on the night of…
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News Report: Rubashkin Will Receive 27-Year Sentence
Sholom Rubashkin won’t officially receive his sentence until tomorrow, but according to the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, he will be receiving 27 years in a federal penitentiary without parole. That is two years more than federal prosecutors requested. The sentence was revealed in an order filed today by U.S. District Court Judge Linda Reade. She wrote…
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News Israel’s Flotilla Raid Commission Is Criticized for Its Scope and Its Members
As Israel attempts to stave off international pressure to put in place a United Nations investigation of its deadly flotilla raid, the credibility and transparency of its efforts have been called into question. The centerpiece of Israel’s strategy to avoid a U.N. Security Council–sponsored probe has been the creation of what the Israelis are calling…
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