The human stories Gal Beckerman has conveyed, as a journalist and author, have given him insight into the ideas that have brought about societal change. Those stories have also prompted him to delve deeper into how information has been disseminated through the ages.

The American-born son of Israeli parents, Beckerman is now senior editor for books at The Atlantic after a storied career that includes serving in the Peace Corps in Cameroon, positions as editor of The New York Times Book Review and opinion editor at the Forward, and authoring two books.

Beckerman spoke on September 18 at the kickoff event for the 25th anniversary year of Rutgers University’s Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at the Douglass College Center in New Brunswick.

In his remarks before the start of the program Rutgers President Dr. Jonathan Holloway said the center plays a critical role in putting forward “the highest ideals of public research and public education,” and called it “one of the university’s most beloved institutions outside of sports,” drawing laughter when he added he was told to say the last part.

Beckerman often referenced writer Cynthia Ozick’s famous metaphor “If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all; for us, America will have been in vain.”

He cited the push by American Jewry to save the Jews of the former Soviet Union, a movement that coalesced around the most basic level of human rights, what he called “the wide end of the shofar.”

“It was pretty tribal,” said Beckerman, whose book “When They Come for Us We’ll be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry” won the National Jewish Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize and was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker and Washington Post.

It was a movement where “American Jews helped their brothers with the shofar always pressed against their lips, set against the backdrop of the tensions and struggles of the Cold War,” said Beckerman, adding the struggle “in many ways helped bring about the demise of the Soviet Union.”

Researching and learning about the movement taught him “how to be a Jew and an American and how to be a Jew and a journalist.

“It is a false choice to decide between the universal and the particular,” Beckerman said. At the Forward, his daily inbox became a sounding board for issues and opinions spanning the breadth of American Jewry: whether the community was depending on Holocaust for its identity, what it means to be a Zionist, the BDS campaign against Israel, denominational issues and concerns about what it means to be Jewish in America.

“Each gave you a headache like a nonstop family Seder,” said Beckerman, but were revealing in highlighting the importance of telling human stories.

At The New York Times Beckerman found what he thought was the perfect job: reading books all day and assigning people from Woody Allen to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to write about them.

“I spent my days immersed in books and knowledge of all sorts, but I could write about whatever I chose, and what I chose to write about was Jews.”

It helped set the stage for his book “The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas,” which while not explicitly Jewish, comes out of those years telling stories about Jews. The book is collection of stories that prompted social and political change, from petitions that secured the right to vote in Great Britain the 1830s to the letters in the early stages of the scientific revolution in the 17th century to the more recent rise of feminism.

Yet the book also questions why other movements failed. “Why did the Arab Spring start out burning so brightly and then flame out?” Beckerman asked. “To me this is probably a communications problem.”

Much of the problem lies with social media and the lightning speed in which information or disinformation is shared. For answers, “The Quiet Before” looks to stories of the past, when knowledge was slowly shared through such means as letters, to see what worked and didn’t work.

“There is freedom if we embrace personal stories,” he said. “We have much to learn about human nature and how to get some more out of that shofar.”

By Debra Rubin