Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Mark Goldberg (born September 22, 1965) is an American journalist and editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine.

During his nine years at The Atlantic prior to becoming editor, Goldberg became known for his coverage of foreign affairs.

Goldberg became moderator of the PBS program Washington Week (rebranded as Washington Week with The Atlantic) in August 2023, while continuing as The Atlantic editor.

Goldberg is Jewish and was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Ellen and Daniel Goldberg.

Goldberg has described his parents as "very left-wing."

His grandfather was from the shtetl of Leova, Moldova.

He grew up in suburban Malverne on Long Island, a predominately Catholic neighborhood which he once described as “a wasteland of Irish pogromists." Retroactively, when describing his first trip to Israel as a teen, Goldberg recalled the sense of empowerment he felt Israel embodied.

Goldberg attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he was editor-in-chief of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

While at Penn he worked at the Hillel kitchen serving lunch to students.

He left college to move to Israel, where he served in the Israel Defense Forces during the First Intifada as a prison guard at Ktzi'ot Prison, a prison camp set up to hold arrested Palestinian participants in the uprising.

There he met Rafiq Hijazi, a Palestine Liberation Organization leader, college math teacher, and devout Muslim from a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, whom Goldberg described as "the only Palestinian I could find in Ketziot who understood the moral justification for Zionism".

Goldberg lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Pamela (née Ress) Reeves, and their three children.

Goldberg returned to the United States and began his career as a reporter at The Washington Post, where he worked the police beat.

While in Israel, he worked as a columnist for The Jerusalem Post.

Upon his return to the US, he served as 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.

Goldberg chronicles the Owenses’ attempts to counter the poachers’ activity in Zambia in the 1970s and 80s, which began with creating incentives such as bounty programs for the park's scouts; as the poaching continued, the Owenses' methods turned more confrontational.

The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat praised "The Hunted," noting that “Goldberg builds an extensive, persuasive case that the Owenses' much-lauded environmental activism in the Zambian hinterland led to at least one murder, and maybe more.”

Part I recounts his time in the village of Ras al-Ein, located in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, meeting with Hezbollah officials, including Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, Hezbollah's former spiritual leader, and Hussayn al-Mussawi, founder of the now-defunct pro-Iranian Islamist militia Islamic Amal in 1982.

Part II examines Hezbollah's activities in South America, specifically in the area known as the Triple Frontier, a tri-border area along the junction of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil."

In "The Great Terror", Goldberg investigates the nature of the Iraqi Army's chemical attack on the Kurds in Halabja in 1988.

The article also included allegations of ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

In 2000, Goldberg joined The New Yorker.

In a March 2002 CNN interview, former CIA director, James Woolsey said, "I think Jeff Goldberg's piece is quite remarkable, and he and The New Yorker deserve a lot of credit for it."

In October 2002, Goldberg wrote a two-part examination of Hezbollah, "In the Party of God."

In 2003, "In the Party of God" won the National Magazine Award for reporting.

In 2007, he was hired by David G. Bradley to write for The Atlantic.

Bradley had tried for nearly two years to convince Goldberg to work for The Atlantic, and was finally successful after renting ponies for Goldberg's children.

In April 2010, Goldberg published "The Hunted", a New Yorker article on Mark and Delia Owens, a conservationist couple based in Zambia, who resorted to vigilantism in an effort to stop elephant poachers in North Luangwa National Park.

In September 2010, Goldberg wrote a story for The Atlantic, examining the potential consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Based on his interviews with high level Israeli and American government and military officials, including, Benjamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, Ephraim Sneh, Ben Rhodes, Rahm Emanuel, and Denis McDonough, Goldberg writes, "I have come to believe that the administration knows it is a near-certainty that Israel will act against Iran soon if nothing or no one else stops the nuclear program; and Obama knows—as his aides, and others in the State and Defense departments made clear to me—that a nuclear-armed Iran is a serious threat to the interests of the United States, which include his dream of a world without nuclear weapons."

After reading the article, Fidel Castro invited Goldberg to Cuba to talk about the issue.

In 2011, Goldberg joined Bloomberg View as a columnist.

Goldberg left Bloomberg in 2014.

Goldberg joined The Atlantic and became editor-in-chief of The Atlantic in 2016.

Goldberg wrote principally on foreign affairs, with a focus on the Middle East and Africa.

The New York Times reported that he "shaped" The Atlantic's endorsement of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 United States presidential election, only the third endorsement in the magazine's 160-year history.

In 2019, Goldberg delivered the commencement address to the graduating class of the Johns Hopkins University.

In August 2023, Goldberg became the moderator of the PBS program Washington Week, which added "with The Atlantic" to its title as an editorial partnership between the magazine and the television program was initiated.

Michael Massing, an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, called Goldberg "the most influential journalist/blogger on matters related to Israel," and David Rothkopf, former editor and CEO of the FP Group, called him "one of the most incisive, respected foreign policy journalists around."

He has been described by critics as a liberal, a Zionist and a ”frequent critic of Israel”.