Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. Author of the book Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror, Goldberg also writes the magazine's advice column. More

Before joining The Atlantic in 2007, Goldberg was a Middle East correspondent, and the Washington correspondent, for The New Yorker. Previously, he served as a correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and New York magazine. He has also written for the Jewish Daily Forward, and was a columnist for The Jerusalem Post.

His book Prisoners was hailed as one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, The Progressive, Washingtonian magazine, and Playboy. Goldberg rthe recipient of the 2003 National Magazine Award for Reporting for his coverage of Islamic terrorism. He is also the winner of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists prize for best international investigative journalist; the Overseas Press Club award for best human-rights reporting; and the Abraham Cahan Prize in Journalism. He is also the recipient of 2005's Anti-Defamation League Daniel Pearl Prize.

In 2001, Goldberg was appointed the Syrkin Fellow in Letters of the Jerusalem Foundation, and in 2002 he became a public-policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

The Schweitzenbasheringen Problem

Global
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

Washington Discovers Christian Persecution

Global
The sour expression on his gray and lined face suggests that His Eminence Lufti Laham, the visiting patriarchal vicar for the Orthodox Melkite Church in Jerusalem, disapproves of Nina Shea--her message, her demeanor, even her presence on the same dais. Shea is a stone-serious conservative Catholic, the religion expert at the human rights group Freedom House and a leader in the fight against the persecution of Christians overseas. Archbishop Laham represents a group of West Bank Christians who are experiencing growing discrimination from their fundamentalist Muslim neighbors. And yet Laham appears physically pained each time Shea mentions the word "persecution." Read more

Syrian Spy Story Finds Its Heroes

Global
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 recent events. General Ya'alon was in America on a damage-control mission, but the damage was not of his own making. The damage was done by the Mossad, the Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, whose special task, it has recently seemed, is to endanger the State of Israel. Read more

Valley of the Molls

Global
It is now officially time to say, "Enough." Or, as Vanessa Redgrave, the most absurd TV Sicilian in the long and storied history of television Sicilians, might say, "Basta." Redgrave mumbles her way through the role of matriarch to a female-dominated Mafia family (it includes Redgrave, Illeana Douglas, Nastassja Kinski, and Jennifer Tilly) in the worst Mafia drama ever made, Bella Mafia, which is brought to us by the increasingly desperate programming executives at CBS, the same people who earlier this year eviscerated Mario Puzo's The Last Don in order to make the second-worst Mafia drama of all time. Read more

Births of a Nation

Global
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 possesses. The mention of kibbutz gave Mr. Museveni pause, and he narrowed his already narrow eyes and asked: "Are you Jewish?" It is my policy never to deny my Jewishness except to tefillin-bearing pubescent Lubavitchers and so I answered yes, even though I worried about the arc of this conversation: Mr. Museveni knew me as a representative of The New York Times Magazine, and Third World intellectuals believe certain things about the leanings of The New York Times. Read more

The Way of All Perps

Global
About 10 minutes into the premiere episode of Steven Bochco's initially thrilling CBS crime series, Brooklyn South, I found myself wishing deeply unpleasant tortures--specifically, tortures involving the nonbusiness end of a toilet plunger--upon the psychopathic black perpetrator who commits the heinous crimes that open the show. This, of course, is what the reactionaries who work on the Bochco police-drama assembly line want me to feel: Nothing like a vicious black perp to get the fear-juice of white America flowing. Read more

From Peace Process To Police Process

Global
The Imam of the sterile, dust-covered west Bank town of Dura is a knife-thin 38-year-old ascetic known to his followers simply as Sheik Nayef. He is a graduate in Sharia (Islamic law) of the University of Jordan, and he is also a leader of Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist movement. Dura, like Hebron, its neighbor to the west, is the sort of place that accords honor to Palestinian men who choose to end their lives--and the lives of as many Jews as technically feasible--by detonating nail-packed bombs strapped to their bodies. Sheik Nayef, whose last name is Rajoub, wears the full beard of the Hamas loyalist, and he carries himself with the aloof serenity associated with that archetype of Islamic fundamentalism, the blind cleric. I met him on Aug. 10, the 11th day of the Israeli Army's closure of the West Bank, 11 days after two men in black suits exploded bombs in the center of the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem, killing 14 civilians, and four weeks before three bombs tore through a pedestrian mall in the city. An offshoot of Hamas, calling itself the "Martyrs for Freeing Prisoners," took responsibility for both attacks. I asked Sheik Nayef to tell me what Sharia has to say about suicide bombing. Read more

Jerusalem Dispatch: Unorthodox Riot

Global
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 the Western Wall Plaza. It is like a Jewish soccer riot. Read more

Cash and Carey: More Trouble with the Teamsters

Global
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 year's tumultuous Teamster election, which pitted incumbent President Ron Carey--the man reputed to have rid the Teamsters of mobsters--against James P. Hoffa--son of the famously corrupt and presumably deceased union boss. Read more

Animal Farm

Global
There is a moral that HBO is trying to impart in its new series, Oz, a prison drama that's less an experiment in penal realism than a work of penal pornography. The moral is: Whitey best not drive drunk. If he does, he'll kill a little white girl, end up in the Oswald Maximum Security Prison (the "Oz" of the title), and become "bitch" either to a well-muscled black thug or, because this is television and scrupulous racial balance must be maintained, to a psychopathic Aryan Brotherhood member. Such is the fate of the character Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), a bespectacled white lawyer who cowers and cringes through the first episode, which raises the question: Didn't he ever see Sean Penn in Bad Boys? Didn't he at least see Scared Straight, the proto-gangsta documentary that introduced a generation of sheltered white boys to the idea that you shouldn't show fear in prison unless you enjoy the depredations of men who in less polite times were referred to as "buck Negroes"? Beecher is the stand-in for the mass of Caucasian viewers who have been conditioned by Hollywood to fear the prospect of being anally raped by black convicts. In the Jim Crow era, white men oppressed black men partially out of fear that the blacks would ravish virginal white women. Today, white men fear ravishment themselves. This is progress. Read more

The Mystery of Janet Reno

Global
In may 1993, the Clinton White House sent Janet Reno to the Senate in order to call for the reinstatement of a law, the independent counsel statute, that Reno's predecessor as Attorney General, the Bush appointee William Barr, had tried enthusiastically to kill. The statute, which allows for the appointment of an independent prosecutor in cases of high-level executive-branch wrongdoing, had long been anathema to Republicans, who felt it was used as a nightstick against them during the Reagan and Bush years. The Democrats, of course, had grown quite fond of the statute, which was drawn up in the wake of Watergate, and hoped to revive it. Read more

News You Can't Use

Global
Before we begin delving into the merits and demerits of the approximately 374 new and existing cable TV "news" networks--in particular the old man of the cable box, CNN, and the two upstarts, MSNBC and the Fox News Channel--let me disclose my biases. The first bias is one that favors the news-gathering approach of the C-SPAN network, which won me over when it broadcast a half-hour holiday special consisting entirely of a guy walking through the Capitol with a camera filming the Christmastime decorations in the offices of various congressmen. It even had a voice-over if I remember correctly--a retiring, understated announcer who said things like, "And here we see Representative Maxine Waters' Hanukkah bush, adorning the anteroom of her Longworth Building office." Or maybe that was just the voice-over in my head. Read more

An Offer He Should Have Refused

Global
Here is the moment I realized that CBS had done something genuinely awful to Mario Puzo's The Last Don. This little stretch of dialogue, which occurs in the third, or fourth, or possibly fifth hour of this swamp of a miniseries, takes place between Claudia De Lena, a Hollywood attorney, who is played by Michelle Rene Thomas, and Athena Aquitane, a movie star, who is played by the drippy Daryl Hannah. Aquitane's husband is stalking her, and she's desperate for help: De Lena: I'm going to fly to Las Vegas and see my brother. He knows people. Aquitane: Is he in the Mafia? De Lena: Of course not. Aquitane: Don't knock it. At this point, I could use the Mafia. Read more

Some of Their Best Friends Are Jews

Global
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

Smoke Alarm: Death of Home Rule

Global
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 American University to collect donations for the firehouse: among the items needed are three shower heads, eleven pillows, forty gym lockers, three space heaters, a dishwasher, three wall clocks, five air conditioners and four refrigerators. Read more

Breakthrough

Global
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 other radical AIDS groups then called the "Federal Death Administration." The AIDS activists were angered by the slow pace of drug approval; among patient-advocacy groups they were not alone in this view, but they were louder than the others. Read more

Adventures of a Republican Revolutionary

Global
Mark W. Neumann, a freshman Republican Congressman from Janesville, Wis., is a sometimes-mutinous soldier in the army of Newt Gingrich who believes that extremism in the pursuit of deficit reduction is no vice. He also has a tendency to yell at his constituents, which is inadvisable, considering that he rather desperately needs their votes on Tuesday. This penchant of Neumann's is on display during a recent campaign stop at the Sons of Norway lodge in downtown Janesville, a monochromatic American everywhere of a city an hour and a half west of Milwaukee. Read more

Next Target: Nicotine

Global
The medical reports lying on a table in David Kessler's office include only the thinnest detail about the death of George Korizis, a 24-year-old Tufts University graduate and Greek citizen who died alone in his Boston apartment on April 18. But there is a curious aspect to Korizi's case that has interested Kessler, who is the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and who does not ordinarily pay attention to obscure deaths. Read more

The Latest Uganda Plan

Global
Weeds push through the cracked tarmac at the old Entebbe airport, where, 20 years ago this July 4, a Ugandan soldier fired the shot that launched Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign to be prime minister of Israel. I try to guess the spot where his brother, Jonathan, fell during the Israeli raid on this airport; there are, of course, no markers. The airport is in ruins, closed to visitors and fenced off from the new airport and the new Uganda. Read more

'Swimtime for Hitler' -- A Synchronized Satire

Global
ATLANTA, JULY 20, 1996 (Associated Press) -- Emotions ran high at poolside today during the finals of the synchronized swimming event, as the four remaining teams in this year's competition, dubbed "Mikvahfest '96" by Olympic organizers, tried to outdo each other in their aquatic interpretations of post-exile Jewish history. But the competition was overshadowed at times by the notable absence of the Israeli team, which was eliminated in the first round of competition by what was being termed a "cultural inability to synchronize." Read more

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Jeffrey Goldberg
from the Magazine

Problem: My Neighbor Is Having Shockingly Loud Sex All the Time

Try blasting recordings of chimpanzees. Our advice columnist to the rescue.

There's a War Criminal at My Gym

Our advice columnist to the rescue