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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Opinion Mitt Romney, The Man With No Kishkes
I’d like to make an election year prediction. If Mitt Romney becomes the Republican nominee for president (still the surest bet in this topsy-turvy contest), American Jews will not vote Republican in larger numbers as the right so often prophesizes. Where is this confidence coming from? It’s not because of President Obama’s recent muscularity on…
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Opinion If it Quacks Like a Duck…
Bibi was really just asking for it, wasn’t he? In the esteemed prime minister of Israel’s speech in front of AIPAC, he decided on an unfortunate (not to mention tired) analogy for explaining his surety about Iran’s nuclear intentions. A duck. A nuclear duck. You’ll see what I mean when you watch the video below….
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Opinion Can You Still Say Panetta is Undermining Israel?
In addition to Mitt Romney’s remarks at AIPAC yesterday, arguing that his approach to Iran would be a radical break from Obama’s (though nothing he said indicated how it would be different), one of his high-profile foreign policy advisers, Dan Senor, also had a well-placed op-ed in the Wall Street Journal making similar points but…
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Opinion Democrats Will Not Cede Israel to Republicans
The Democratic National Committee has a new commercial, called “The Facts,” that seems targeted at pro-Israel voters (I didn’t say “Jewish voters” for a reason). It reminds them that they shouldn’t listen to the mud being slung at Obama for supposedly abandoning the Jewish State. Republicans are called out for violating the tradition that holds…
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Opinion Over Jew Creek and Up Jew Mountain
We’ve got a story in this week’s paper about a pond in New Hampshire with a pretty scummy name — thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week! Seriously, the article about Jew Pond, exploring the small body of water that has caused a rift between local residents who want the name changed and…
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Opinion Living Title VI: A UC Santa Cruz Account
A few weeks ago, we ran an op-ed by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz who has filed a Title VI complaint to the government’s office of civil rights. She cites a number of instances in which she believes Jewish students were discriminated against as the targets of anti-Israel advocacy….
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Opinion Seeing Alan Gross in a New Light
I’ve been following the Alan Gross saga for the past two years now and have often felt alone. The story of the seemingly hapless technology expert who found himself jailed in Cuba for trying to help the miniscule Jewish community connect to the internet has never gotten much pickup among American Jews and has elicited…
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Opinion The Revenge of Saul Alinsky
I have to share Dana Milbank’s sentiment in his open love letter to Newt Gingrich this week. It would be a real shame to lose Newt (and he thinks the liberal east coast media elite hates him! Au contraire!). Mostly I would be saddened by the thought that the ghost of Saul Alinsky would then…
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