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 Eight Votes Between Them
So where are we now that the decidedly low-tech process known as the Iowa caucuses is completed, all the little slips of paper have been counted and Mitt Romney was ahead by just eight votes? I can think of three basic takeaways and they coincide with the three candidates who have emerged last night as…
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Opinion Santorum Joins Gingrich in Not Seeing Palestinians
“All the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis. They are not Palestinians. There are no Palestinians.” — Rick Santorum
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Opinion Ron Paul: Not a Friend of Israel (or Jews?)
For those keeping up with the Republican primary and the incredible dunk tank quality it’s taken on, you know that it is Ron Paul’s turn to get wet (if he isn’t already soaked). On the question of his alleged anti-Semitism and anti-Semitism and anti- lots of other things we were provided some damning insight the…
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Opinion Hanukkah in Santa Monica
We are starting to get in the spirit of the holiday here at the Forward. And who better to help us than the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles (hat tip to Shmuel Rosner for pointing us to this foot-tapper). This makes me love America:
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Opinion ‘I’m Not Ashamed To Say That I’m a Jew…’
We too were taken aback by Rick Perry’s new campaign video — the swagger, the Christian language, the denigration of gays, and America described as feminine with Perry posing as its shining defender. He was, for certain, trying to appeal to evangelical voters, and perhaps he’ll be releasing the Jewish version of the ad in…
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Culture Secrets of Ben-Gurion’s Leadership
Ben-Gurion: A Political Life By Shimon Peres and David Landau Schocken, 240 pages, $25.95 The most revealing conversation that Shimon Peres ever had with his mentor, David Ben-Gurion, was perhaps his first. Peres was a young activist in Ha’Noar Ha’Oved, the Labor Zionist youth movement, when he asked the powerful and charismatic chairman of the…
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Opinion A Piece of Hasbara Aimed at Alienating Me
Usually when another blogger sufficiently channels my own anger about something that has me piqued, I tend to just try and let it go and give them the last word. And that was my first reaction this morning when I read, with increasing agitation, Jeffrey Goldberg’s post about a new Israeli ad campaign targeted at…
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News Time for Prophets and Moral Outrage
To appreciate what a wonderfully reckless Jew Peter Bergson was for his time (or really any time) it?s worth listening to him describe a meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House in the early 1940s. He was bringing his case to her as he had, tirelessly, to anyone who would listen in those years:…
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