Gal Beckerman

New York

Staff writer at @TheAtlantic, formerly @nytimesbooks, and author, most recently, of "The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas."

Articles

Between Tradition and Modernity Stands One Bumbling Rabbi

5 days ago | theatlantic.com | Gal Beckerman

In recent years, an impressive number of particularly charming actors have played rabbis on TV. Adam Brody, Sarah Sherman, Daveed Diggs, and Kathryn Hahn have all donned a kippah, wrapped themselves in a tallis, and shown how fun loving (even sexy) it can feel to carve a path between the rock of tradition and the hard place of modernity. I’m not sure why progressive rabbis are the clerics to whom pop culture tends to assign this role, as opposed to, say, quirky priests or wacky imams.
Between Tradition and Modernity Stands One Bumbling Rabbi

5 days ago | flipboard.com | Gal Beckerman

4 days agoA close reading of all the rumors about who may or may not be leaving studio 8H before season 51 of SNL. Saturday Night Live’s splashy 50th season has officially come to an end, which means it will likely be the end of the road for some of SNL’s most beloved cast members. The jam-packed season …
Time for a Refresher on What ‘Free Speech’ Means

2 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Gal Beckerman

Free speech is forever a matter of perspective. Unless you are an absolutist—and very few true absolutists exist—everyone draws their red lines somewhere, whether it’s at racist epithets or yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater when nothing is actually burning. But the concept becomes completely meaningless unless it allows for the hearing of ideas that one group or another is bound to find abhorrent.
Shutting Down Salman Rushdie Is Not Going to Help

2 weeks ago | flipboard.com | Gal Beckerman

NowMonday, May 19, 2025 View in browser By Jade Walker Good news, New Jersey! It appears the transit strike may soon be over, and you’ll once again have access to the nation’s third-largest commuter railroad. Negotiators for New Jersey Transit and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen …
Why Do Collaborators Do It?

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Gal Beckerman

Listen1.0x0:0014:08Listen to more stories on hark“I don’t know what I would have done.” When the novelist Daniel Kehlmann hears Germans talk about the Nazi era, that is what many of them say. We were sitting in a Manhattan café at the end of February, discussing his latest book, The Director, about the Austrian filmmaker G. W. Pabst’s collaboration with the Third Reich. Kehlmann, himself born in Germany and raised in Austria, wasn’t about to dispute the truth of the sentiment.
Trump Is Fulfilling Kissinger’s Dream

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Gal Beckerman

Behind closed doors, the late Henry Kissinger left no doubt about how little he valued human rights. Exhibit A is the conversation he had with his boss, President Richard Nixon, on March 1, 1973, which was caught, like so much else, on Nixon’s Oval Office recording device.
When Nazis Enter Your Dreams

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Gal Beckerman

The skull is a thin barrier against totalitarianism. The system is total because the brain itself is recruitable; every intimate space can be touched. Hannah Arendt once recorded the words of a Nazi official to that effect: “The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep.” But this is wrong. Sleep is exactly where the stress of living under such a terrorizing regime could reveal itself—in dreams.
The True Cost of Trump’s Statue Garden

1 month ago | yahoo.com | Gal Beckerman

Pity the documentary filmmaker: A job already replete with near impossibilities—impossible to secure funding, impossible to get distribution, impossible to find an attentive audience—has just become even more difficult. The Trump administration cut funding last week to nearly all of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ current grants—1,200 of them—including one to Yuriko Romer’s decade-in-the-making project.
How R. Crumb Tapped Into America’s Screwy Id

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Gal Beckerman

Certain great artists are synonymous with their kinks. Egon Schiele had his thing for gaunt girls and their undergarments. Robert Mapplethorpe was partial to bulging muscles wrapped in leather. And then there is the legendary cartoonist R. Crumb—lover of solid legs, worshipper of meaty thighs, champion of the ample backside. To truly know his art is to know what turns him on. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
How R. Crumb Tapped Into America’s Screwy Id

1 month ago | flipboard.com | Gal Beckerman

Literary fiction is a notoriously difficult genre to pin down—if we can even call it a genre. It’s more about style, quality of prose…or perhaps …