Jeffrey Goldberg may be one of the last journalists the Trump administration would want to inadvertently include on a private text thread discussing war plans. But according to Mr. Goldberg’s stunning revelation on Monday, that is exactly what happened.
Mr. Goldberg, 59, was a well-known national security reporter before he took over as editor in chief of The Atlantic in 2016. He was born in Brooklyn and studied at the University of Pennsylvania before dropping out and moving to Israel to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. He wrote about his time as a prison guard in 1990, during the First Intifada, for a 2006 book, “Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide.” He also began a career in journalism while in Israel as a columnist for The Jerusalem Post.
Mr. Goldberg returned to the United States and worked as a police reporter at The Washington Post. He wrote for New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine, and became the New York bureau chief of the Jewish newspaper The Forward. In 2000, The New Yorker hired him as its Middle East correspondent, a role he held for five years before becoming the Washington correspondent.
In 2007, he was lured to The Atlantic after its owner, David Bradley, sent ponies to Mr. Goldberg’s Washington home for his three young children. He took over as its editor in chief nine years later.
Under Mr. Goldberg’s editorship, The Atlantic won its first Pulitzer Prize, in 2021, and also won one in 2022 and another in 2023. The magazine won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2022 and 2023. Mr. Goldberg is also the moderator of PBS’s “Washington Week With The Atlantic.”
The magazine has been controlled by the Emerson Collective, an organization run by Laurene Powell Jobs, since it acquired a majority stake in 2017. Last year, The Atlantic announced that it was profitable and had more than one million subscriptions. It increased the number of print magazines it publishes to 12 a year, up from 10.
Recently, Mr. Goldberg has been beefing up political coverage at The Atlantic, hiring several top journalists from The Washington Post. The Atlantic also announced that the MSNBC “Morning Joe” co-host Jonathan Lemire and the programmer Alex Reisner would be contributing writers.
Mr. Goldberg has frequently been an antagonist to President Trump. In 2020, he reported that Mr. Trump had disparaged American military members who died during service as “losers.” In 2024, he wrote that Mr. Trump continued to have disdain for the U.S. military and had said he needed “the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
