The Jewish Journal’s Danielle Berrin interviews the most powerful Jewish journalist in America. Nay, the world! First the bullying excerpt, then the excerpt where he bullies the world. Emphases mine. Commenters will supply the subtext:
Goldberg was raised in an assimilated middle-class home in a mixed neighborhood on Long Island. Both of his parents were teachers and union loyalists, inculcating their son with left-leaning liberal politics but not much in the way of a religious education. Instead, Goldberg forged his Jewish identity in response to some schoolyard anti-Semitism whose traumas left him longing for the so-called muscle Judaism represented by Zionism. As a teenager, he voraciously consumed Zionist literature by Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau and Vladimir Jabotinsky, and chose to go to a socialist Zionist camp in the Catskills, where summer games like “Warsaw Ghetto Uprising” and “Siege of Jerusalem” were imbued with historic seriousness.
Following his parents’ divorce and an aimless year at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldberg moved to Israel, where he remained for the next several years, living on a kibbutz and serving in the army. Guarding Palestinian prisoners — many of whom were terrorists or would-be terrorists — might have bolstered his hawkish side….
…a 2002 piece he wrote for The New Yorker, in which he claimed to have found evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda…. was widely interpreted as an endorsement for the Iraq war, which, on some level, Goldberg regrets. He now admits having been wrong about Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction “like everybody else…”
Thanks to Jeff Blankfort. P.S. When will the New Yorker express its regrets for delivering the slop? Don’t hold your breath. P.P.S. I went to public schools in gritty sections of Baltimore a few years before Goldberg in middle-class L.I. I experienced some schoolyard anti-Semitism. Remind me– some day I must show you the scars and relate the traumas.
