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 Group Paying IDF Soldiers To Refuse Duty May Be in Violation of U.S. Tax Law
An Israeli organization handing out cash to soldiers for disobeying orders has been collecting tax-exempt donations from American donors in apparent disregard of United States tax law. The far right-wing group SOS-Israel and its leader, Shalom Dov Wolpe, a rabbi associated with the messianic wing of Chabad-Lubavitch, were in the news in November for rewarding…
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News Russians Now Big Players in American Jewish Philanthropy
When hundreds of thousands of Jews began leaving the Soviet Union 20 years ago, American Jews looked at them the way a father beams at his children. Here was a large part of the tribe, almost lost to forced assimilation, now taking their first steps into a Jewish future. That paternalistic feeling only grew, as…
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News Hadassah Changing the Way It Does Business
A persistent stereotype attaches itself to Hadassah: sweet, elderly ladies holding tea socials and collecting money in tin boxes for Israel. But it takes no more than five minutes with Nancy Falchuk, the organization’s national president, to dispel this image. Her Hadassah sounds like it has been processed through the meat grinder of business consultants….
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Culture Was It Pushed Or Did It Fall?
Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment By Stephen Kotkin, with a contribution by Jan T. Gross Modern Library, 197 pages, $24 There is no Freedom Without Bread: 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism By Constantine Pleshakow Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 289 pages, $26 In the cascade of nostalgic…
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News G.A.’s Savior Is the Russian Oligarch ‘Who Got Away’
In his lively introduction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the recent General Assembly in Washington, Leonid Nevzlin reminded the audience just how unexpected and unusual a role this was for him. “There was a time not so long ago when I couldn’t even imagine standing here in this place, in this country, only blocks…
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News The Life, Death and Judaica of a Russian Oligarch
Like everything else about his colorful life — which ended abruptly and violently in a hail of bullets on a Moscow street in early November — Shabtai von Kalmanovic’s large collection of Judaica has been both shrouded in mystery and subject to exaggeration. There is no quick and easy way to describe Kalmanovic’s bizarre existence….
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News In Mayoral Race, N.Y. Jews Back Bloomberg
New York’s Jews overwhelmingly voted to re-elect Michael Bloomberg to a third term in the citywide elections for mayor on Tuesday. According to exit polls, 75% of Jews voted for Bloomberg, a Republican-endorsed Independent candidate, while only 22% chose his Democratic opponent, City Comptroller Bill Thompson. Bloomberg achieved the same level of support during his…
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News HIAS Still Aids Immigrants, but Most Don’t Resemble Sergey Brin
When Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google and now the 26th richest man in the world, left the Soviet Union as a 6-year-old Jewish refugee in 1979, it was the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that secured American visas for him and for his family and settled everyone into a new home. What HIAS did for Brin,…
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