Interviews

Goldberg on Israel

The cover of this month’s Atlantic Monthly asks, “Is Israel Finished?” But Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote the magazine’s lead article, says he’s proud of the Jewish state and brings his kids there almost every year. Hear his full interview with JTA here.
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Conflict in the Bone

Interview with Jeffrey Goldberg

Rare is the book that keeps me thinking long after I've finished the last page, especially when the book is not a ponderous philosophical tome but a vivid page turner. I was well aware of Jeffrey Goldberg's narrative tricks in his memoir Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide from the first line which sucked me in with intimations of a kidnapping then dropped me just before the climax into a leisurely narrative of his childhood. Okay, fine, he can tell a story.

But what kept revolving around my head long after I'd worked out the plot (it's a memoir, so, you know, he survives) was just how close to the surface his emotions are from start to finish. Which is not to say that he's scared. Goldberg styles himself a tough guy (he shrugs off his captivity with a boast about having once talked his way past a hostile check point in the Congo), so we don't see a lot of fear here. What's on display, in fact, is an emotion much less acceptable in polite circles: his yearning for physical power, summed up in the worldview of his thirteen-year-old self as "Jews with guns."
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Brave Heart: Jeffrey Goldberg

Most of us try to avoid people who'd like to wipe us out. Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg goes right up to them and introduces himself. In his new book, Prisoners: A Muslim & a Jew Across the Middle East Divide, he writes about an unusual friendship that he struck up when he was a guard in the Israeli Army with a devout prisoner named Rafiq. Goldberg talked with Boris Kachka.

You started writing this before the Oslo process broke down in 2000. You must have been planning quite a different book.
I actually thought that I was racing against time--that when the book came out everybody would say, "Sure it's possible to make peace; we already have it." The second intifada was profoundly depressing for me, and I did lay it aside for a while.
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Across the Great Divide

In the late 1980s, Jeffrey Goldberg moved to Israel because he was committed to the idea of being part of the Jewish homeland. That meant, of course, going into the army, and before long, Jeffrey was working as a military policeman at a prison in the Negev desert. This was just around the time that the first Intifada was heating up, and Jeffrey was guarding Palestinians.

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A Writer's Notes and Comments on the Mideast

Melissa Block, host: New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg has just returned from a reporting trip to the Middle East. He was in northern Israel and Gaza. On previous trips he spent a good deal of time in southern Lebanon, meeting with the leaders and members of Hezbollah. I asked him if he hears anything different in Hezbollah's rhetoric during this conflict.

Jeffrey Goldberg: What they're getting better at is adjusting their rhetoric for Western ears so as not to sound anti-Semitic. And they've been more careful, I've noticed lately. Maybe people aren't asking them these questions but even when they're asked, as you did, you know he's using now a traditional Palestinian rejection as formulation about Israel. I'm not going to say I recognize Israel's right to exist. I'm going to acknowledge that it exists, which of course is not the same thing. And it's not exactly a recipe for long term calm and peace in the region.
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