Jeffrey Goldberg “Maintains The Dignity” Of Pre-Iraq War Reporting
Jewish Journal’s Danielle Berrin’s profile of Jeffrey Goldberg is well worth a read for those who want to do a little armchair psychology on Goldberg. It provides no shortage of material for analyzing his views with nuggets like this: 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. Jim has written an excellent blog post on the role of humiliation in forming the neocon psyche which, when read in the context of the description of Goldberg’s “Jewish identity,” offers some insights into how Goldberg may have gained his hawkish instincts. But the points from Berrin’s article which deserve special attention regard Goldberg’s role in the hyping of an Iraq-al-Qaeda link in a 2002 New Yorker article an...