Forward.com

Editorial director J.J. Goldberg has been with the Forward since 2000. He has served in the past as U.S. bureau chief of the Israeli newsmagazine The Jerusalem Report, as managing editor of The New York Jewish Week, as a syndicated columnist in Jewish weeklies nationwide, as editor in chief of the monthly Jewish Frontier, as world/national news editor of the daily Home News of New Brunswick, N.J., and as a metro/police-beat reporter for Hamevaker, a Hebrew-language newsweekly published for the Israeli émigré community in Los Angeles.

Goldberg is the author of “Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment,” published in 1996 by Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. of Reading, Mass., which was named by The Philadelphia Inquirer as one of the “100 Most Important Books of 1996” and was described by The New York Times as a book that “can teach even the initiated a thing or two about American Jewish life in the postwar period.” His previous books include “Builders and Dreamers” (Cornwall Books, 1993) and “The Jewish Americans” (Bantam-Doubleday-Dell, 1992). His articles have appeared frequently in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, the Ottawa Citizen and numerous other journals. He appears regularly as a guest on National Public Radio and other broadcast media.

Goldberg’s writing has been honored repeatedly by the Rockower Awards of the American Jewish Press Association, the Better Newspaper Awards of the New York Press Association and the Ippy Awards of the Independent Press Association. In 1987 he won the prestigious Corporation for Public Broadcasting Award and the Ohio State Award for his radio documentary on Jewish popular music, “One People, Many Voices,” which was broadcast nationally on National Public Radio in 1986. He earned a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University in 1985 and a B.A. in Hebrew literature and Islamic studies at McGill University in 1972.

Before entering journalism, Goldberg lived and worked in Israel through much of the 1970s. He served as an education specialist at the World Zionist Organization and was a founding member of Kibbutz Gezer, near Tel Aviv, serving a term as the kibbutz secretary-general. He has worked in the past as a taxi driver in New York City, a community organizer in Los Angeles and a construction laborer in Israel.

He has served as a member of the central committees of the Ihud Kibbutz Federation and of the Israel Labor Party Young Guard, as well as a sharpshooter in the Israel Border Police civil guard. He has been a member of the board of the Foundation for Jewish Journalism and a member of the Pulitzer Prize jury.

Goldberg lives in New York City with Shifra Bronznick, an organizational consultant, and their two children, Emma and Coby.