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 Human Rights Watch Debates Its Mission With a Founding Critic
When Human Rights Watch’s founder took to the op-ed page of The New York Times to denounce his own organization’s record on Israel, he provided powerful validation to critics who have been stepping up their attacks on the human rights group over the past year. “I must do something that I never anticipated: I must…
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News Birthright Leads to Jewish Marriages, Study Says
The donors who have sent more than 200,000 young Jews on free trips to Israel over the last decade have been rewarded with a bit of reassuring news: Those returning from the trips are more likely than their peers to marry other Jews. According to a new study about the long-term effects of the Taglit-Birthright…
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News With New York Picking a Mayor, the ‘Jewish Vote’ Is on the Wane
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has never worn his Jewish identity on his sleeve, but that doesn’t seem to have hurt him among New York City’s Jewish voters. In his successful 2005 re-election bid, he captured upward of 70% of the Jewish vote, according to exit polls, up from a little more than half of the Jewish…
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News Goldstone: ‘If This Was a Court Of Law, There Would Have Been Nothing Proven.’
The incident detailed in paragraphs 713 through 716 of the Goldstone Report, if accurate, was a moment of indiscriminate terror. A hundred members of the extended al-Samouni family are gathered together in one house, ordered there by Israeli soldiers patrolling their Gaza neighborhood of Zeytoun as part of Operation Cast Lead. Five men step out…
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News A Virtual Home for Poland’s Vanished Jews
In the Virtual Shtetl, there is no Tevye the Milkman. Gimpel the Fool doesn’t live there, either. And you won’t find Marc Chagall’s floating goats and violins. There is no nostalgia to speak of — just facts. Google maps, detailed photos of dilapidated tombstones poking through the earth of forgotten cemeteries, scanned birth certificates, sepia-toned…
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News Shul Resists Eviction by Charter School
The 18 men praying together early on a recent Friday morning, wrapped in tefillin and tallitot, didn’t exactly look like squatters. Their Orthodox synagogue, in the Mill Basin section of Brooklyn, also seemed fairly permanent. A hulking, wooden ark sat against one wall. Bookshelves filled with religious texts covered another. A blue velvet clothwith the…
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News Conservative Synagogue Chief Issues Apology
The new head of Conservative Judaism’s congregational arm has asked his fellow rabbis to forgive him in a Sept. 17 letter apologizing for a recent interview with the Forward in which he said Conservative rabbis lack “missionary zeal,” and work instead “to get paid.” “I talked before I thought,” wrote Rabbi Steven Wernick, the United…
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News Palestinian-Led Movement To Boycott Israel Is Gaining Support
Uzbekistan-born diamond mogul Lev Leviev announced late in August that his company, Africa-Israel, was drowning in debt of more than $5.5 billion that it could not repay. Over the next two days, shares in the company’s stock plummeted by more than one-third. It was relentless bad news for one of the world’s richest men. His…
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