Hillel Goldberg


Rabbi Hillel Goldberg is an American newspaper publisher, Jewish thinker and author. He is editor and publisher of the Intermountain Jewish News in Denver, Colorado, and an ordained rabbi.

Early life and education

Goldberg was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. He later reflected on the independent streak of Jews in the West, including Denver, that shaped him. Goldberg began his journalism career as a student at George Washington High School, where he published Tempo magazine with Richard Gould. Tempo was featured in Time.

Higher education

Goldberg attended University of California Berkeley, where he tutored minority children in music in Oakland, 1964-1965, and wrote on the Free Speech Movement for Frontier magazine. He completed his undergraduate degree at Yeshiva University, where he was a leading student activist, founding the university's chapter of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in 1965; tutoring for Head Start in Harlem 1965-1966; co-leading the effort to save the books at Jewish Theological Seminary after a fire in 1966; co-organizing the effort to send volunteers to Israel on the eve of the Six Day War in late May and early June 1967; and founding an underground student newspaper, Pulse, in 1968. Goldberg earned a PhD in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. Goldberg is considered an expert on the Musar movement, having published books on Rabbi Israel Salanter and other aspects of the movement.

Journalism

Goldberg became editor and publisher of the Intermountain Jewish News in 2017. He had previously served as executive editor. His mother Miriam Goldberg and father Max Goldberg published the newspaper before him. Goldberg’s weekly column “” is the longest-running column in Jewish journalism.
Goldberg has worked for the Intermountain Jewish News since 1966. From 1972-1975 he was its Jerusalem correspondent, then from 1975 to 1983 its Israel correspondent. Throughout, he wrote a weekly column, "The View from Jerusalem", for the Intermountain Jewish News, and reviewed books for the Jerusalem Post.
David K. Shipler, The New York Times correspondent in Israel at the time, later wrote of Goldberg in Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land: "I sat over these questions with my friend Hillel Goldberg, a young lecturer at Hebrew University in Jewish ethics and intellectual history. He was a religious man with a graceful, fine precision of compassion in his reasoning, and our long discussion brought a valuable clarity to my own thinking."
Goldberg is an associate editor of Tradition magazine and contributing editor to Jewish Action.

Jewish thought and community life

In addition to his books on Musar, Goldberg has authored English-language books on Jewish transition figures from Eastern Europe and Shabbat, as well as a Hebrew-language book on the Halachot of mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath.
In 1986, he co-founded an Orthodox Jewish community within a Reform temple in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Selected bibliography

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