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 Government Gaza Report Cites International Law To Defend Actions
Israel’s formal response to the onslaught of criticism it has absorbed over its winter military campaign in Gaza finally arrived late last month. And though the report is exhaustive, its reply to the hail of human rights and war crimes charges has essentially boiled down to one crucial point: Intent. The 160-page Israeli analysis dismisses…
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Culture An Israeli, a German and a Palestinian Walk Into a Theater…
A strange three-act drama is played out here in Germany with unsettling regularity. Some public figure — usually a politician — will make a comparison between the present-day and Nazi Germany. I’ll grab the first example that comes to mind. Last year, a week before the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a well-known German economist from…
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Culture Will of Iron, Heart of Stone: Book Shines Light on Golda Meir’s Harder Side
Golda By Elinor Burkett HarperCollins, 496 pages, $27.95. My moment of eye-openng disillusion with Golda Meir came early on in Elinor Burkett’s new biography of the female premier, titled simply “Golda.” The year was 1950, and Golda Meyerson, as she was then known, was nearing 60 and had just returned from her stint as Israel’s…
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Culture Hostage to History
Terror in Black September: The First Eyewitness Account of the Infamous 1970 Hijackings By David Raab Palgrave Macmillan, 288 pages, $24.95. The Palestinian fedayeen who hijacked David Raab’s plane on September 6, 1970, surely thought they had hit the jackpot. Seventeen-year-old, baby-faced Raab was still so excited from his summer vacation in Israel that he…
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Culture Kissinger, Unearthed
Henry Kissinger and the American Century By Jeremi Suri Belknap Press, 368 pages, $27.95. Henry Kissinger is probably going to regret the day in 1979 when he said this: “The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.” It’s not…
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Culture Six Days, 40 Years of Controversy
The weeks following the Six Day War found Israelis not sure if they were awake or dreaming. Everyone spoke of miracles, of the supernatural forces that had guided the Jewish army to such overwhelming victory. The names of the generals — Rabin, Hod, Sharon, Peled — resounded like the names of gods. The people once…
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Culture One Man’s Persistent Empathy
Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life By Sari Nusseibeh, with Anthony David Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 560 pages, $27.50. One day, at the end of 1987, Sari Nusseibeh was walking out of a lecture hall at Birzeit University, just having taught his students John Locke’s concepts of liberalism and tolerance, when he was set…
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Culture A Historian-Soldier Bridges His Identities
Sitting on a stage in a mahogany-paneled study of the townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that contains the venerable Council on Foreign Relations, Michael Oren, the historian, was getting frustrated with the questions the standing room-only audience was lobbing at him. He had come to talk about his new book, a history of America’s…
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