Gal Beckerman's 6 favorite books about political movements

Gal Beckerman is the opinion editor at The Forward. He was a longtime editor and staff writer at the Columbia Journalism Review and has also written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He was a Fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin and the recipient of a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. His first book, When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone, a history of the Soviet Jewry movement, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in September 2010. It was named was one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and the Washington Post, as well as winning the 2010 National Jewish Book Award.

One of his six favorite books about political movements, as told to The Week magazine:

Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch

The first volume of Branch's mammoth, brilliant biography of Martin Luther King Jr. does much, much more than tell us about the man. Branch manages to draw in every significant 1960s character and bit of zeitgeist, placing King in the full context of his times. Any book on a social movement needs to measure itself against Branch's achievement.

Read about another book on Beckerman's list.

--Marshal Zeringue