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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Culture Seeing Red
My China Eye: Memoirs of a Jew and a Journalist By Israel Epstein Long River Press, 360 pages, $24.95. * * *| When the Chinese Communist Revolution finally came to eat one of its most devoted and passionate children, Israel Epstein, on a spring night in Beijing in 1968, the transplanted Russian Jew and prolific…
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News The ‘Answer’ Question Poses Difficult Choices for Liberals
For many Jewish activists the main problem with the coalition Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, or Answer, is the organization’s fiercely anti-Israel stance. But for some observers and activists, there is a more fundamental question: whether the decision of liberal groups to work with Answer — an organization that represents the most…
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Culture Who Is That Bearded Man?
Have Israelis forgotten Herzl? Has the man been eclipsed by his famous black beard? Become a kind of George Washington, known but not appreciated? Little more than a street name? Just a mysterious, scowling figure whose image, plastered to the side of a water tank, young sabras pass on their way to the beach at…
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News Israelis Search for New Consensus, Vision
TEL AVIV — Two billboards dominate the Israeli street in these final weeks leading up to the disengagement. One, in the ubiquitous construction cone orange that has become the brand of the anti-disengagement forces, reads, “Jews do not expel Jews.” The other, in the patriotic blue and white that the pro-disengagement groups have chosen as…
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Culture An Army of One Ponders His Hunt for Israeli Oil
Oil: Israel’s Covert Efforts To Secure Oil Supplies By Zvi Alexander Gefen Books, 296 pages, $19.95. * * *| For most of his life, Zvi Alexander, a man with the guts of a gambler, was engaged in that most characteristic of Israeli pursuits: creating facts on the ground. Except in his case, these facts were…
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Culture Counting the Gray Lady’s Sins
‘Photos don’t normally appear on this page. But it’s time for us to look squarely at the victims of our indifference.” And with that, Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times and its op-ed page’s most morally indignant voice, used his semi-weekly space this past February 23 to hold up before our eyes the…
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Culture The Cold War’s Strangest Bedfellows How Romania Sold Its Jews to Israel, and What It Got in Return
The Ransom of the Jews: The Story of The Extraordinary Secret Bargain Between Romania and Israel By Radu Ioanid Ivan R. Dee, 254 pages, $26. * * *| Surely the Cold War never produced stranger bedfellows than Shaike Dan and General Ghe- orghe Marcu. Dan, a Jew from Bessarabia, parachuted into Romania at the close…
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Culture Love for the Fatherland, Tragically Unrequited
Impossible Love: Ascher Levy’s Longing for Germany By Roman Frister Phoenix Press, 359 pages, $15.95. * * *| My grandfather, a native of Dresden, adored Strauss waltzes, bratwurst and the opera “Die Fledermaus.” After the war, though he refused to buy a BMW, he always spoke with admiration of and largely embodied that distinct Germanic…
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