Jeffrey Goldberg

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Jeffrey Mark Goldberg (born September, 1965) is an American journalist. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and an author. Goldberg has written extensively on foreign affairs, with a focus on the Middle East and Africa.^[1]

1 Background
2 Journalism career
- 2.1 Award-winning New Yorker articles
- 2.2 Review of Jimmy Carter's book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid
3 Controversy
4 References
5 Bibliography
6 External links

[edit] Background

Goldberg was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Malverne, New York.^[2] He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he was editor-in-chief of The Daily Pennsylvanian.^[3] While still in college, he moved to Israel and served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a prison guard during the First Intifada.^{[citations needed]} Goldberg's book, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide (New York: Knopf, 2006), describes his experiences working at the Ketziot military prison camp as well as his dialogue with Rafiq, a prisoner whom Goldberg would later meet again in Washington, D.C.^{[citations needed]} Goldberg is married and the father of three children.^[4]

[edit] Journalism career

Goldberg began his journalism career at The Washington Post, where he was a police reporter. He then served as a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, the New York bureau chief of The Forward, a contributing editor at New York magazine, and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine.

[edit] Award-winning New Yorker articles

In October 2000, Goldberg joined The New Yorker. Two of his articles for the magazine have won awards.

His 2002 article "The Great Terror" won The Joe & Laurie Dine Award for "Best international reporting in a print medium dealing with human rights" from the Overseas Press Club (OPC), which in its online citation lauds this "exposé of the crimes of the Iraqi regime," in which "Goldberg described Saddam Hussein's horrifying gas attacks against Kurdish villages, investigated ties between Iraq and al Qaeda terrorists and explored the scope of Iraq's chemical weapons arsenal" for which Goldberg "spent six months on this assignment, often from places that were off limits to western journalists."^[5] The OPC citation notes also that "A former CIA director, James Woolsey, called the story 'a blockbuster.'"^[6] "The Great Terror" has been criticized, however, as putting undue weight on the claim that Saddam Hussein gassed Kurds in Halabja, as opposed to Iran.^[7]

In 2003 Goldberg's two-part examination of Hezbollah, "In the Party of God," won the National Magazine Award for Reporting.^[8]

[edit] Review of Jimmy Carter's book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid

See main article: Palestine Peace Not Apartheid

In January 2007 Goldberg's book review of Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, by Jimmy Carter, published in The Washington Post on December 10, 2006, was featured among "Editorial Reviews" in the listing of the book by Amazon.com.^[9] That led to a petition campaign threatening to boycott the online retailer unless it altered the presentation of Goldberg's review on its website:

"The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD)...opened a campaign to censor on-line retailer Amazon.com following the posting of a critical review of former US president Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

The group said the article, written by a customer [Jeffrey Goldberg] was "hostile" to Carter's viewpoint and had been placed in the wrong section of the Web page on the book" and asked that the problem be corrected by January 22, 2007.^[10]

The online petition eventually listed "18604 Total Signatures."^[11] Subsequently, by the given deadline, Amazon.com added "An Interview with President Jimmy Carter" to its presentation of the book's "editorial reviews," which also features the substantial "Summary" excerpt from Chapter 17 of the book, and the petition drive closed.^[12]

[edit] Controversy

Goldberg has come under criticism for two of his pieces that appeared in The New Yorker in the days leading up to the war in Iraq, which, some critics say, reiterated the government line in maintaining ties between the September 11 attacks and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. "The Great Terror"[1] appeared in the March 25, 2002 issue of the magazine and was based largely on testimony of Mohammed Mansour Shahab, a prisoner, who was subsequently discredited by Jason Burke in the London Observer. It can still be found on his website. The second piece, "The Unknown,"[2] has been criticized by Alexander Cockburn in Counterpunch as being a "6,000 word screed [that has] no pretensions to being anything other than a servile rendition of Donald Rumsfeld's theory of intelligence."[3] Ken Silverstein has also written about the controversy for Harper's Bazaar[4] as has Daniel Lazare in The Nation[5].To date, neither Goldberg nor The New Yorker has issued an apology.