Goldberg, Jeffrey 1965-

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Goldberg, Jeffrey 1965-

PERSONAL:

Born 1965, in Brooklyn, NY; married; children: three.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Washington, DC. Office—New Yorker, 4 Times Sq., New York, NY 10036. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Washington Post, former police reporter; Forward, New York, NY, former bureau chief; New Yorker, New York, NY, staff writer, 2000—. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, public policy scholar, 2002.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Syrkin Fellow in Letters, Jerusalem Foundation, 2001; National Magazine Award for Reporting, 2003, for coverage of Islamic terrorism; Anti-Defamation League Daniel Pearl Prize, 2005; International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Prize, for best international investigative journalist; Overseas Press Club Award for best human rights reporting, for coverage of the crimes of Saddam Hussein; Abraham Cahan Prize in journalism.

WRITINGS:

Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew across the Middle East Divide, Knopf (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times Magazine and New York Magazine. Former columnist, the Jerusalem Post.

SIDELIGHTS:

As a young Jewish man, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg became attracted to the concepts of Zionism. He immigrated to Israel in 1987 to immerse himself in a world of Judaism, seeking to embrace a religion that corresponded to his youthful ideals. He served in the Israeli military as a member of the military police. While working as a guard at Ketziot, a Palestinian prison camp in Israel, Goldberg met Rafiq Hijazi, a Palestinian insurgent and prisoner. While Rafiq was his ideological opposite, and was in most ways considered an enemy, a deep, respectful friendship developed between the two intelligent, educated men, a relationship that would help to define their intellectual and religious lives for the next fifteen years. In Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew across the Middle East Divide, Goldberg recounts the story of his fifteen-year friendship with Rafiq. "Like the warring nationalisms it presents, his book is complex and deeply affecting," remarked a Publishers Weekly reviewer. The author "provides disturbing insights into the abyss separating Arab and Jew, East and West—if not a clash of civilizations, Goldberg suggests, then a perhaps unbridgeable gulf of empathy and understanding," observed Joshua Hammer in Washington Monthly.

Goldberg describes how he considered Rafiq an "appealing and unusual adversary," and how "they exchanged views through prison fencing and developed what Mr. Goldberg desperately hoped was a friendship that had some larger meaning," noted Ethan Bronner in the New York Times. Even as their friendship deepens, it is underscored by the volatile knowledge that they are both still enemies, and that "the Palestinian would, in the right circumstances, kill him without hesitation—although, Hijazi assures him, ‘it wouldn't be personal,’" Hammer related. Rafiq is eventually released at the beginning of the peace process in the 1990s, and both he and Goldberg go to the United States where they remain friends. Eventually, Rafiq returns to the violent and politically charged world in Gaza, where the two friends have a final, poignant encounter. "For the bittersweet complexity of that moment, offered in the context of all that has preceded it, this is a genuinely admirable book," Bronner concluded.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 2006, Jay Freeman, review of Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew across the Middle East Divide, p. 7.

New York Times, October 28, 2006, Ethan Bronner, "Israel and Palestine Explored in an Unlikely Friendship," review of Prisoners, p. B17.

O, The Oprah Magazine, October, 2006, Francine Prose, "Sentenced to Friendship: A Jew, A Muslim: Allies? Prisoners Chronicles an Extraordinary Relationship Forged behind Bars," review of Prisoners, p. 240.

Publishers Weekly, June 26, 2006, review of Prisoners, p. 40.

Sarasota Herald Tribune, November 19, 2006, Susan L. Rife, "Prisoners; Jeffrey Goldberg Writes of Friendship amid Middle East Conflict," p. G4.

Washington Monthly, December, 2006, Joshua Hammer, "Stuck in the Middle East with You: Lessons from an Improbable Friendship," review of Prisoners, p. 39.