He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he was editor-in-chief of The Daily Pennsylvanian. While at Penn he worked at the Hillel kitchen serving lunch to students. He left college to move to Israel, where he served in the Israel Defense Forces during the First Intifada as a prison guard at Ktzi'ot Prison, a prison camp set up to hold arrested Palestinian participants in the uprising. There he met Rafiq Hijazi, a Palestine Liberation Organization leader, college math teacher, and devout Muslim from a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, whom Goldberg describes as "the only Palestinian I could find in Ketziot who understood the moral justification for Zionism".
