Gorenberg was born in St. Louis and grew up in California. In 1977, he traveled to Israel to study and ultimately decided to immigrate to the country, becoming an American-Israeli dual citizen.

Gorenberg graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz and earned his M.A. in education from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He currently lives in Jerusalem, Israel with his wife, journalist Myra Noveck, and three children..

For many years Gorenberg served as an associate editor of The Jerusalem Report, an Israeli biweekly news magazine. In 1996, he edited a selected collection of Jerusalem Report essays published under the title "Seventy Facets: A Commentary on the Torah from the Pages from the Jerusalem Report," and co-authored the Jerusalem Report's biography of Yitzhak Rabin, Shalom, Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin. Gorenberg is now a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, an American political monthly.

Gorenberg has contributed features and commentary on politics, religion and aspects of Israeli-American relations to major American newspapers including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.

Also a published author, Gorenberg is best known for his 2006 study on the origins of Israeli settlements in Israeli-occupied territories following the 1967 Six-Day War, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977.In 2000 he published The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount.

Gorenberg blogs at South Jerualem together with Haim Watzman. He is a frequent guest on BloggingHeads.tv, particularly in discussions related to Israel.

Gorenberg was an associate of the now-defunct Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University.