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 New Restaurant Seal Meets With Approval
The small kosher falafel joint called Soom Soom, on West 72nd Street in Manhattan, was bubbling with activity on a recent afternoon. In the kitchen, glimpsed through an open door, falafel balls were frying and a giant pot of hummus was being stirred, as half a dozen Latino employees fielded orders yelled out from a…
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News Hadassah and Hospital Resolve Rift
A feud between Hadassah and its hospital in Jerusalem has finally been resolved, though the circumstances surrounding the dispute remain mysterious. News of an agreement between Nancy Falchuk, national president of Hadassah Women’s Zionist Organization of America, and the doctors committee of Hadassah Medical Organization in Israel came March 4, after a meeting in New…
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Life At the Oscars, Golda’s Biographer Pulls a Kanye West
In an Oscars ceremony that seemed languid at times and straight up bizarre at others (interpretive breakdancing?!), one moment stood out as one of the more dramatic of the evening. If you were watching, you know what I’m talking about: the woman who pulled a Kanye. Well, it turns out — doesn’t it always —…
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News Embattled Jewish Agency To Promote Identity Over Aliyah
Natan Sharansky knows he’s disturbing the status quo. Days before the most recent meeting of the Board of Governors, the body that oversees the Jewish Agency for Israel, Sharansky, its relatively new chairman, declared that the agency’s traditional mission had outlived its usefulness. “It’s not enough to speak about aliyah,” Sharansky said, talking in front…
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News Why Hillary Clinton Broke Her Elbow and Other Tales From a Jewish Tea Party
Rabbi Mordechai Yitzchok Friedman doesn’t care if his audience is listening or not — or even if it’s sentient. The video camera, perched on a tripod and recording his every paranoid thought, is on. That’s what matters. Once he is wound up, Friedman, who has convened this inaugural meeting of what he describes as the…
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News JCPA Taking Direct Aim at Anti-Israel Boycotters
With anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions efforts gaining visibility, the Jewish community’s main public-policy coordinating body is for the first time confronting the BDS movement as a specific and stated priority. At its recent annual plenum, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs passed a resolution stating that BDS should now “be regarded with the utmost…
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News Israelis Debate Giving Expats a Vote They Don’t Seem To Want
The image of Israelis living outside Zion — the yordim, as they are sometimes derogatorily called — has come a long way since the 1970s, when Yitzhak Rabin referred to them as “fallen weaklings.” To such an extent, in fact, has this stigma faded that a controversial bill proposed in the Knesset in early February…
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News School Teaches Hebrew to a Diverse Class
On a recent Monday morning in southern Brooklyn, 20 kindergarteners sat on a rug, staring up at a photo of President Obama. Their teacher, Nitzan Graham, asked them, in Hebrew, to identify the parts of Obama’s face, and the children were ecstatic, yelling out the Hebrew words for “nose” and “mouth.” When the ruckus had…
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