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 Writer Takes Controversial Look at Israel-South Africa Ties
When Random House chose this summer for the publication of Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s new book documenting, for the first time, the extent of Israel’s “secret relationship” with apartheid South Africa, it had the World Cup in mind. The sporting event would put South Africa in the spotlight and the book might benefit from the attention. They…
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News Reactions to Raid on Flotilla A Rorschach Test for Jews
As the sun rose on the day following the so-called Freedom Flotilla’s attempt to breach the Israeli blockade of Gaza, the American Jewish Committee had already sent out an e-mail blast touting its narrative of the bloody denouement that took place. An hour later came talking points from the Jewish Federations of North America. A…
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News Israel Studies: Scholarly Pursuit or Public Diplomacy?
At the annual conference of the Association for Israel Studies, which took place in Toronto in early May, one of the first sessions was titled “State-Minority Relations.” Two of the panelists presenting papers on the topic were Ilan Peleg, a professor of government and law at Lafayette College, and Dov Waxman, a young associate professor…
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News JDC, JAFI Step Back From the Brink
A confrontation between the Jewish Agency for Israel and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee has been averted, though no one is exactly saying how or why. For weeks, the JDC was threatening to opt out of the current overseas funding structure, in which it gets 25% of funds collected by The Jewish Federations of…
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News Israel Studies: A Venue for Politics by Other Means
Is it inevitable and altogether obvious that a scholarly conference devoted to Israel studies should be laden with politics? Academia, in its most classical Platonic ideal, confines itself to description and analysis, not to the prescriptive and hypothetical. And yet here, in Toronto, where the annual gathering of the Association for Israel Studies is taking…
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Fast Forward Israel Studies Confab in Toronto: A Venue for Politics by Other Means
Is it inevitable and altogether obvious that a scholarly conference devoted to Israel studies should be laden with politics? Academia, in its most classical Platonic ideal, confines itself to description and analysis, not to the prescriptive and hypothetical. And yet here, in Toronto, where the annual gathering of the Association for Israel Studies is taking…
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News Campaign for Rubashkin Paints Another View of Kosher Meat Scandal
The viral video defending Sholom Rubashkin is a sleekly produced three minutes. A young, clean-shaven actor sits in a chair, facing a camera. A dramatic score plays under his monologue, which relates a reasonable narrative. “Rubashkin’s gamble with the law is a no-no, and he should get punished,” the man says after describing how the…
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News Who Are the Jews Behind Palin in 2012?
When Sarah Palin was asked by Barbara Walters late last year whether she supported a freeze on settlement growth in the West Bank, Palin issued an emphatic no. But her reasoning confounded many: “More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think…
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