Goldberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Malverne, New York in a communist home.He 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 Israeli Defense Forces as a prison guard during the First Intifada. He later returned to the United States to continue his journalism career, and now lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and three children.

Goldberg began his career at The Washington Post, where he was a police reporter. While in Israel, he worked as a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, and upon his return to the US 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.

The New Yorker

In October 2000, Goldberg joined The New Yorker. Two of his articles for the magazine have won awards.

His 2002 article "The Great Terror" won the Overseas Press Club's Joe & Laurie Dine Award for international human rights reporting. "The Overseas Press Club stated: "A former CIA director, James Woolsey, called the story 'a blockbuster.'" Goldberg's article has been criticized, however, as "a J-school nightmare: bad sources, compromised sources, unacknowledged uncertainties, and the whole text spun through with an alarmist rhetoric that is now either laughable or nauseating, depending on your mood." Critics also charge that the article boosted the Bush administration's argument for the invasion of Iraq by emphasizing Saddam Hussein's use of weapons of mass destruction.

In 2003 Goldberg's two-part examination of Hezbollah, "In the Party of God," won the National Magazine Award for reporting.

The Atlantic

In 2007, he was hired by David G. Bradley to write for The Atlantic. Bradley had tried to convince Goldberg to come work for The Atlantic for nearly two years, and was finally successful after renting ponies for Goldberg's children.

Slate

Jeffrey Goldberg has also written sporadically for Slate. In the late 1990s he wrote the magazine's "Shopping Avenger" column. In 2004 he was a member of the Sopranos "TV Club." Four years later he contributed to the "TV Club" once again, this time for the dialogues on The Wire.

Goldberg's book, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide (New York: Knopf, 2006), describes his experiences in Israel working at the Ketziot military prison camp as well as his dialogue with Rafiq, a prisoner whom Goldberg would later befriend in Washington, DC.American critics received the book positively as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times all named it one of the best books of 2006.

Iraq

In "The Great Terror", the article that Goldberg wrote for the New Yorker in 2002 during the run-up to the Iraq war, Goldberg argues that the threat posed to America by Saddam Hussein is significant. The article opens with a vivid description of Hussein's Al-Anfal Campaign, including his regime's use of poison gas at Halabja. Goldberg goes on to relate detailed allegations of a close relationship between Hussein and Al Qaeda, which Goldberg claims he "later checked with experts on the region." Goldberg argues that: "If these charges are true, it would mean that the relationship between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda is far closer than previously thought." Goldberg concludes his article with allegations about Hussein's supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction:

Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power ...There is some debate among arms-control experts about exactly when Saddam will have nuclear capabilities. But there is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them soon ...There is little doubt what Saddam might do with an atomic bomb or with his stocks of biological and chemical weapons.

In a late 2002 debate in Slate, Goldberg described Hussein as "uniquely evil" and advocated an invasion on a moral basis:

There is consensus belief now that Saddam could have an atomic bomb within months of acquiring fissile material. ... The administration is planning today to launch what many people would undoubtedly call a short-sighted and inexcusable act of aggression. In five years, however, I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.

Books by Jeffrey Goldberg

• Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide. New York: Knopf, 2006. ISBN 0-375-41234-4 (10). ISBN 978-03754-1234-9 (13).

Reviews of publications by Jeffrey Goldberg

• Elena Lappin. "My Friend, My Enemy", New York Times Book Review, November 12, 2006.
• Watzman, Haim. "The Hope: A Middle East Correspondent's Troubled Friendship with the Palestinian He Once Kept Locked Up." Washington Post, October 29, 2006.
• Jaffee, Robert David. "Tools to Fight Terror: Big Dreams, Good Friends." The Jewish Journal, October 13, 2006.
• Finkelstein, Norman. "Pre-Packaged Opinions on Israel and Palestine: Jeffrey Goldberg's Prison" Book rev. of Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide." October 7, 2007