Jeffrey Goldberg

Janis Lipke lived and died in a squalid and freezing hut by a river in Riga, Latvia. He and his wife, Johanna, lived there without money and without honor. Many of their countrymen saw them as traitors. When I met the Lipkes in their hut in the winter of 1986, there were even rumors afoot in Riga that they were part-Jewish. How else to explain their inexplicable behavior during World War II, when they rescued Jews from the Riga Ghetto, a ghetto maintained -- and… More »

On a wind-whipped fall day, a creaking, leaking motor home angles into the parking lot of the V.F.W. hall in Brick Township, N.J., and releases into a knot of waiting teamsters the scion and heir-presumptive of the most notorious labor leader in American history. "Welcome to Brick, Jimmy!" shouts a barrel-bellied man, and James Phillip Hoffa shouts back, "Thanks, buddy!" and then the cluster of teamsters moves inside the hall, and Jimmy smiles wide, and a wave of… More »

How I learned to stop worrying and love The Nanny. More »

The current state of denial in Jerusalem, New York and Washington: BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: The denier's denier, refusing to recognize that handing over Hebron, which betrayed his father's vision of a Greater Israel, left him looking like a man without principles who might as well just give Yasser Arafat the rest of what he wants. THE LIKUD PARTY: Israel's ruling party has not yet realized that, with the Netanyahu era over, Yitzhak Mordechai should be anointed the new… More »

It is now time to remember a fundamental fact in the never-ending controversy over Swiss bank accounts and Nazi gold: It isn't all that important. This might be an inopportune moment to be saying this -- we (by "we" I mean we Jews and our King, H.R.H. Edgar of Seagram's) have got the Alpine skinflints right where we want them, which is...I don't know where, exactly. Read more More »

A year ago, it was barely on the public agenda. Now, an unlikely coalition of advocates has turned the human rights of Christians worldwide into this year's cause - and a wedge issue that could divide the Republican Party. More »

WASHINGTON -- Major General Moshe Ya'alon, the chief of the military intelligence branch of the Israel Defense Forces, paid last week a hushed-up visit to the Virginia side of the Potomac River. There, he shared with his friends at the Pentagon and CIA the rather distressing news that much of the inside intelligence on Syria that Israel had supplied to the Americans over the past several years has been -- how to put this diplomatically? -- rendered inoperative by… More »

The latest in an occasional series on truly terrible TV. More »

We were an hour into a discussion about the war in Rwanda and the future of Africa when the President of Uganda, the dome-headed capitalist Yoweri Museveni, invited me to sit with him under an acacia tree and talk cow-talk. Mr. Museveni is the owner of a stupendous herd of Ankole cattle, and in the course of conversation I couldn't help but mention my own kibbutz-acquired calf-birthing skills -- one of the only real practical skills this Diaspora Jew… More »

If you believe Steven Bochco, they really deserve to die. More »

Israeli-Palestinian relations depend ever more on meaningful joint security. But with the decay of diplomacy, Jibril Rajoub, Arafat's top cop, is left embittered and volatile, like much of the West Bank that his agency polices. More »

The border policeman gives me a hard push to the chest and then answers my question. "Of course I'm Jewish," he says. He has pushed me into an old woman, who loses her Hebrew prayer book and her balance. Beside me, a reporter falls to the ground and is stepped on by the police. It is the evening of Tishah b'Av at the Western Wall, and Jewish policemen, by order of the Jewish government of Benjamin Netanyahu, are shoving and beating a group of Conservative Jews off… More »

One day this past January, in a closet-sized room in a Washington office building, an obscure Teamster named John Murphy stumbled upon a startling document. The document revealed the existence of an organization called Teamsters for a Corruption-Free Union--an organization that, in the fullness of time, would be shown to count no Teamsters as members and to be unfree of corruption itself. The document had been filed with federal officials in the waning days of last… More »

Those sexy brutes of HBO's new prison series, Oz. More »

What Is Janet Reno Thinking? More »

Yakking away on MSNBC and the Fox News Channel. More »

Mario Puzo discusses The Last Don. More »

The Rev. O.S. Hawkins is promising me eternal damnation, and we haven't even ordered lunch yet. It's not his choice: all he can do is lay out my options, and until I accept Jesus, there are no options. He wishes it were otherwise. "I know how this sounds to your people," he says, "but literally some of my best friends are Jewish." Read more More »

I am reading an open letter slipped under my door by our neighborhood commissioner, a woman named Beth Kravetz. In the letter she reports on the local fire station at Tenley Circle on Wisconsin Avenue. The station is home to a pumper and a hook-and-ladder truck that cover a good stretch of predominantly white, mostly affluent Northwest Washington, D.C. She writes that "true to the spirit of self-reliance," a group is forming in the virtual suburb surrounding… More »

IMPURE SCIENCE AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. By Steven Epstein. 466 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press. $29.95. At the battleship-sized headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration, Oct. 11, 1988, is still remembered as the day Act Up scaled the walls. More than 1,000 demonstrators, many in Washington to view a display of the AIDS quilt, marched on the building in suburban Rockville, Md., to protest the policies of what Act Up and… More »