The post offers a rare glimpse into the well-being of the aging political icon who — judging by the lack of in-person coverage — seems to not allow such intimate meetings to be used as fodder for feature stories. 

The Atlantic story that inspired Fidel to arrange the visit was "The Point of No Return," Goldberg's piece on nuclear tension between Iran and Israel that provided the cover for this month's issue. "Fidel to Ahmadinejad" — which is the first of a five-part first-person account of the three-day visit — contains extended discourse from Castro on Iran's anti-Israel policy and, as Goldberg puts it, "the consequences of theological anti-Semitism." Fidel makes no bones about his profound dislike of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denial and couples the views of Iran's president with a story of his own introduction to anti-Semitism as a child.

But the most gripping thing about the post may be the sheer amount of access Goldberg gets. Such an opportunity cannot be afforded to most writers, of course, and Goldberg takes full advantage. Judging by some of the quotes, it turns out Fidel's wit has ripened with age.

His body may be frail, but his mind is acute, his energy level is high, and not only that: the late-stage Fidel Castro turns out to possess something of a self-deprecating sense of humor. When I asked him, over lunch, to answer what I've come to think of as the Christopher Hitchens question — has your illness caused you to change your mind about the existence of God? — he answered, "Sorry, I'm still a dialectical materialist."

Perhaps the biggest revelation comes during a discussion that veered toward the missile crisis, when Fidel admitted to having doubts about telling the Soviets to bomb the U.S. in the event of an American attack on Cuba. Goldberg's asked whether he regretting the advice he gave the Soviets and Castro said, "After I've seen what I've seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn't worth it all." 

James Fallows has a post at The Atlantic that went up later today about this last nugget from the sit-down. And there are sure to be more accounts of "Fidel being Fidel" to come from Goldberg in the next few days, especially judging by the teaser the closes out today's post. Goldberg plans to use a question Fidel asked him as a jumping-off point: "Would you like to go to the aquarium with me to see the dolphin show?"

Hundreds gathered last night under the shimmering saucer dome of the New York Public Library’s Celeste Bartos Forum to remember John Updike. The lights went down at 7 p.m., and a moment later the screen onstage flickered awake to show the late author seated three years ago in the very same room, cheerfully discussing his writing with former New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg.

“I don’t really do much else but write,” Updike said, having established that he'd just published something like his 60th book. 

When the video ended, a photograph in which Updike's features make him appear even friendlier than usual appeared in its place and remained there for the rest of the evening. It was hard to look at anything else, even as the procession of giants on the bill appeared onstage to read from Updike’s work and tell tender stories. 

Knopf chairman Sonny Mehta declared with gratitude at the opening of the program that Updike was “an author with the heart of a publisher,” who “cared about the process and the mechanics of making a book” right down to the fonts, the trim size and the paper stock.

He was a professional writer, Mr. Mehta said: “It was his trade, and he was a master of that trade.”

New Yorker editor David Remnick spoke humbly about what Updike meant to the magazine that published him all his life (“We did little for him—so little needed doing—but he did everything for us”) and warned readers that the poetry he put down on paper in the last weeks of his life contained some of the most “determined, stubborn, beautiful death-bed lines we possess.”

Speaking last (immediately following ZZ Packer's reading of a particularly dark excerpt from Rabbit, Run), Updike’s son David told the audience that his father at the time of his death was reading Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, in an effort, he said, to “catch up on history he was about to miss.”

A montage of photographs followed, ending with a thrilling color shot of Updike standing tall on a patch of bright green grass, a blue sweater peeking out from his collar and his right arm extended theatrically and joyously into the air.

Mr. Purdum writes that Ms. Toner was "the first woman to be the national political correspondent" for the paper:

On his Atlantic-hosted blog, Jeffrey Goldberg offers some memories of his friend, calling her "one of the best reporters in Washington, and also one of the best mothers in Washington... Robin was a genius of reporting, in fact; she almost never got anything wrong, she understood almost everything, and she knew almost everybody."

A post on Pentagram's blog reveals all: The Atlantic's new advice column will be called "What's Your Problem?" and be written by Jeffrey Goldberg. (Pentagram link comes via Kottke.)

The first edition will run on the back page in the Pentagram-redesigned magazine in November, has a letter that reads:

Mr. Goldberg answers by poking some fun at his former publication: "Dear James, I would suggest holding a cartoon-caption-writing contest."

As you may have already read elsewhere, Ms. Greenberg created controversy by posting unflattering and grotesquely retouched outtakes from her John McCain cover shoot for The Atlantic on her site, The Manipulator. Among the retouched photos is one showing the Republican Presidential nominee with bloody shark teeth beneath the headline "I Am A Bloodthirsty Warmonger" and another showing a primate defecating on Mr. McCain's head. (As far as choice of target and sharpness of message goes, Ms. Greenberg's photos were far from Heartfield-level attacks on the candidate.)

Ms. Greenberg also boasted to Photo District News' PDN Pulse blog that she tricked Mr. McCain into posing above a strobe light that created a horror movie shadow effect and served to dramatically emphasize his age. (Ms. Greenberg's images can be found here.)

James Bennet, The Atlantic's editor, has issued a statement that reads in part, "We stand by the respectful image of John McCain that we used on our cover, and we expect to be judged by it. We were not aware of the manipulated and dishonest images Jill Greenberg had taken until this past Friday." Mr. Bennet also told Fox News' Election HQ blog that the magazine will not be paying her for the photo it used on the cover.

Ms. Greenberg's highly stylized photos have appeared in magazines like New York (this week, she shot The Office's Ed Helms), Portfolio, Time, Wired, and numerous other publications and ad campaigns.

Mr. Goldberg, whose profile of John McCain the cover was meant to illustrate, has been one of Ms. Greenberg's strongest critics. In a post on Sunday, he said he was "appalled" by her actions and that the photographer "is quite obviously an indecent person who should not be working in magazine journalism." He also lamented "the blithe way in which she has tried to hurt this magazine."

Yesterday, Mr. Goldberg's Atlantic colleague Andrew Sullivan called Ms. Greenberg "eccentric in an unpleasant way" but asserted that "it's a free country and she can post whatever she wants on her own blog."

His first entry, which features an endearingly retro Public Enemy reference as its title, begins with the self-effacing words, "This is almost certainly a mistake." Well, it can't be as big a mistake as championing the invasion of Iraq relying (according to Harper's Ken Silverstein), "heavily on administration sources and war hawks (and in at least one crucial case, a fabricator)."

In March, Goldberg offered a mea culpa on Slate:

For the most part, his inaugural post is long on jokes ("I joined the Atlantic last year, from the New Yorker. Before writing for the New Yorker, I wrote for the New York Times Magazine, and before that, for New York Magazine. I have nearly run out of magazines. I will undoubtedly be ending my career at Cat Fancy...") and backslaps to colleagues like Andrew Sullivan ("himself, responsible for twenty-seven percent of all blog entries ever posted on the Worldwide Web") and James Fallows ("my clear role model... He also seems to be blessedly free of the urge to over-post").

His Atlantic blog is not Mr. Goldberg's first foray into the Web. He has long participated in Slate's TV Club discussions of The Sopranos and The Wire and he is a co-founder of Jews Rock, a Web site devoted to Jewish rock stars from The Beastie Boys to Yo La Tengo.

Update, April 30, 2008: Brothers Gonna Work It Out: Jeffrey Goldberg's latest.

Where academics fear to tread, the blogosphere doesn't. I think it's a legitimate issue. But how to talk about it?

The question has come up lately in the Jimmy Carter brouhaha. Critics of Israel are justifiably upset that Amazon.com is not being evenhanded in its listing for Carter's book: in its "Editorial Reviews" heading for the book—"a space normally used either for the publisher's own description of a book, or for short, even-handed summaries from listing services such as Booklist and Publishers Weekly"—Amazon offered only the full text of a sharply-critical Washington Post review by the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg, accusing Carter of being unChristian in his approach to Israel/Palestine. (Amazon.com would seem to have amended the heading, to include a PW review alongside Goldberg's.) The critics point to Goldberg's background—that he "is a citizen of Israel as well as the United States, and that he volunteered to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, for which he worked as a guard at a prison for Palestinian detainees." The critics are saying, You should say where Goldberg's coming from.

(Goldberg doesn't mention citizenship on his website bio. Henry Norr, who wrote the petition to Amazon, tells me, "Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post, in a review of [Goldberg's book] "Prisoners," includes the following in his summary of Goldberg's personal story: "Like all new citizens below a certain age, he enters the Israel Defense Forces...")

The issue is a long-held concern among Jewish critics of Zionism. In 1970, a leading Jewish anti-Zionist, Rabbi Elmer Berger, learned that several Jewish Americans had served in the Israeli Defense Forces, having gained automatic citizenship in Israel.

Berger worried about Jewish identity. He feared that American Jews would be called upon to define their religious identity in terms of identification with a neo-colonialist "theocratic" state that was dehumanizing Arabs. (He was right!) And he feared that American Jews would be torn in allegiance, or be seen to be torn in allegiance.

I called one of the leading experts on dual loyalty, John Fonte, of the neoconservative Hudson Institute. Fonte doesn't write about Jews and Israel (probably a Career-Limiting Move at Hudson!), he writes about Mexico. He is concerned that in granting Mexicans in the U.S. a right to vote in Mexican elections, Mexico is making those citizens "supra-citizens," with more rights than other citizens—and also slowing the process of American assimilation.

That's his word: assimilation. This neocon scholar says that assimilation is a democratic value in America: for immigrants or their children, or grandchildren, to take on Americanness.

"I don't think it's a good idea" for American citizens to fight for or vote in other countries, Fonte said. Before America entered World War II, some Americans went over to fly with the RAF, and neocon Fonte thinks Americans joining the Israeli army are in the same category, taking part in a war that's in America's interests. Still he thinks that the State Department should sign off on this kind of thing on a "case by case basis."

"I don't think Israel's interests and ours overlap completely," I said.

"There's never a complete overlap of interests," Fonte said. "Even Britain and the U.S. differed on the Grenada invasion."

You used to forfeit your citizenship by voting in another country or fighting for one. The law on forfeiting citizenship ended in the late 60s on a 5-4 Supreme Court vote in a—you guessed it—Israel-based case, where a Jewish-American artist who had voted in Israel wanted to move back here. Thus a 200-year precedent crumbled.

I told Fonte that the revolving door between Israel and the U.S. disturbed me. One of my relatives just came back from his "birthright" trip to Israel ("Israel is about Jews. It is about saving Jews...") and showed me photos of American kids proudly holding guns and serving in the IDF—serving the apartheid-like Occupation. My relative's commemorative t-shirt for the trip was IDF olive-green, to show solidarity with an army that helps to deprive Palestinians of their rights. On campuses here, Jewish students are told to wear blue and white in solidarity with Israel, something that would have horrified Elmer Berger.

"I find this confusing," I said.

"Definitely there's confusion," Fonte agreed. "Right now you can do anything."

He pointed out that after one of his articles on Mexico, fellow Hudson Institute hawk Max Singer told him that he was going to stop voting in U.S. elections, just in Israeli ones.

So a big neocon was voting in both countries? I called Singer in Israel.

"Correct," Singer said. "I felt I should vote in one country or another but not both."

"John Fonte said you came to that realization not that long ago."

"Yes."

Singer says the dual loyalty issue in his case did not arise from his being Jewish but from being a citizen of both countries. (Which he could be because he's Jewish). He even served in the U.S. Army reserve, according to Hudson's website. But he's decided to be "politically active in Israel."

Of course, he's politically active here, too, helping to shape our foreign policy. Hudson describes him as "Senior Fellow, Board Member, Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C. Headquarters. Areas of Expertise: Middle East..."

I guess I'm still confused.

Most readers, especially those familiar with Mr. Goldberg’s riveting New Yorker dispatches from the Middle East, will assume that the charge is absurd, but it turns out to be slightly less far-fetched than it at first appears. “We know you were in Ketziot,” Mr. Goldberg’s interrogator says. It’s not immediately clear what Ketziot is, but Mr. Goldberg writes: “My face gave away the game. My double life in Gaza had just come to an end.”

Ketziot, we soon learn, was a desert prison used during the first Intifada, “a city of barbed wire, moldy tents, machine gun towers, armored personnel carriers, black oil smoke, sullen Arabs, and embittered Israeli soldiers.” One of those embittered soldiers was the author, and his experience there is the fulcrum of Prisoners.

A rich, large-hearted and melancholy political bildungsroman, the book tells the story of Jeffrey Goldberg’s evolution from “the Moshe Dayan of the Howard T. Herber Middle School,” an alienated American boy besotted with dreams of Sabra strength, to a worldly, somewhat disillusioned journalist drawn to chronicle Israel’s fiercest enemies. At the center of Mr. Goldberg’s tale is his unlikely friendship with a Palestinian he guarded at Ketziot, a relationship that endures but also, inevitably, lets him down, mirroring the Jewish left’s growing despair about the Palestinians they hope to make peace with.

The book takes us into a vertiginous moral universe in which victims and oppressors keep switching places and liberal universalism collides with tribal loyalties. It’s a fascinating tour through recent Israeli history—Mr. Goldberg has interviewed everyone, and most of the region’s big players, including Arafat, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak and Hamas co-founder Abdel Aziz Rantisi, make appearances. The author has a novelistic gift for conjuring the optimism of the Oslo era, which makes the nihilistic nosedive of the second Intifada even more searing. But while Prisoners is a story of multiple disenchantments, there’s a defiant hopefulness about it—a faith, despite too much evidence to the contrary, that individual human understanding can transcend historic hatreds.

Were Prisoners a novel, Ketziot might seem too obvious a symbol of brute absurdity. Mr. Goldberg writes of a Passover Seder there: “Here we were, celebrating Jewish freedom in a prison filled with our Arab captives! We had built a prison and planted it right along the pathway of Jewish freedom, and we had filled its cages with Palestinians who were demanding only what Jews themselves demanded, in the time of the Exodus and today: freedom.” He immediately reproached himself for thinking this way, but the reader can sense his pure Zionist faith curdling.

The son of liberal New York Jews, Mr. Goldberg began his adult life in defiant flight from the humanistic, self-interrogating culture of the Diaspora. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the role of Muslim humiliation in fueling the miseries of the Middle East. The part played by traumatized Jewish pride gets rather less attention, though as Prisoners suggests, it’s essential to understanding Israel’s lionization of strength and power. As a young man, Mr. Goldberg saw Diaspora Jews as emasculated, gelded by history. He embraced Israeli militarism with a zeal born, at least in part, of self-hatred. “I was determined to be an Israeli man, not an American Jew,” he writes. To his credit, though, Mr. Goldberg was never able to shake off the values he was raised with. He remained a yafei nefesh, a derisive Israeli phrase that means “beautiful soul,” or bleeding heart. He hated the petty cruelties of Ketziot, writing at one point, “All my life I wanted to be a Freedom Rider. Now I felt like Bull Connor.”

Mr. Goldberg sought a sort of redemption in friendship with a prisoner, Rafiq Hijazi, a pious but open-minded member of Fatah. “I had consoling thoughts about Rafiq—thoughts about the thickening possibilities of peace, a peace that could be made first by two inconsequential soldiers. If Rafiq Hijazi could somehow extend the border of his compassion to take in Jeffrey Goldberg, then why should peace be impossible?” The two men’s fraught relationship is the heart of the book, even though it often seems too fragile a connection to hold all of the hopes the author piles onto it. Though he doesn’t write it, and maybe doesn’t even think it, Mr. Goldberg appears to have wanted expiation from Mr. Hijazi for the sins of the occupation. He also desperately wanted evidence that there are Palestinian activists who can accept coexistence with Israel, a precondition for peace.

Prisoners, of course, comes at a time when such evidence is rare, and the book is full of disappointment, even heartbreak. When the Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti first appears in the book, he’s introduced as “mercilessly self-critical in a very un-Palestinian way … a favorite of the Israeli left, a prized interlocutor of liberal Knesset members.” He appears in the story again a few years later, during the height of the second Intifada, shouting of martyrdom and working in a residential building where families with children serve as human shields from Israeli assassination attempts. Similarly, Mr. Hijazi is not quite the exemplar of Palestinian moderation that Mr. Goldberg longed to find. At one point we learn that he took part in a Gaza demonstration against suicide bombing, but during a heated argument after Sept. 11, he says, “I wouldn’t go to that rally today.” Mr. Hijazi ended up moving to the U.S. to study statistics at American University, but his encounter with our louche mores only served to strengthen his commitment to conservative Islam. By the end of the book, Mr. Hijazi’s wife—whom Mr. Goldberg had previously befriended—is veiled and either won’t or can’t talk to him.

But the friendship somehow carries on despite all of this, and it remains a source of optimism for writer and reader alike. “If this could be done between a million different people, then the situation would be a lot different,” Mr. Hijazi says during their last meeting in Prisoners. “People would at least know what the other person thinks.” Jeffrey Goldberg is too sophisticated to believe that friendships like theirs can, on their own, save the world. “An irreducible truth remained: The maximum Israel could give did not match the minimum the Palestinians would accept,” he writes. Nevertheless, the image of the former guard and his onetime captive having an affectionate political argument in an Abu Dhabi Starbucks offers some hope in the face of desolation.

Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton) was published in May.

Most readers, especially those familiar with Mr. Goldberg’s riveting New Yorker dispatches from the Middle East, will assume that the charge is absurd, but it turns out to be slightly less far-fetched than it at first appears. “We know you were in Ketziot,” Mr. Goldberg’s interrogator says. It’s not immediately clear what Ketziot is, but Mr. Goldberg writes: “My face gave away the game. My double life in Gaza had just come to an end.”

Ketziot, we soon learn, was a desert prison used during the first Intifada, “a city of barbed wire, moldy tents, machine gun towers, armored personnel carriers, black oil smoke, sullen Arabs, and embittered Israeli soldiers.” One of those embittered soldiers was the author, and his experience there is the fulcrum of Prisoners.

A rich, large-hearted and melancholy political bildungsroman, the book tells the story of Jeffrey Goldberg’s evolution from “the Moshe Dayan of the Howard T. Herber Middle School,” an alienated American boy besotted with dreams of Sabra strength, to a worldly, somewhat disillusioned journalist drawn to chronicle Israel’s fiercest enemies. At the center of Mr. Goldberg’s tale is his unlikely friendship with a Palestinian he guarded at Ketziot, a relationship that endures but also, inevitably, lets him down, mirroring the Jewish left’s growing despair about the Palestinians they hope to make peace with.

The book takes us into a vertiginous moral universe in which victims and oppressors keep switching places and liberal universalism collides with tribal loyalties. It’s a fascinating tour through recent Israeli history—Mr. Goldberg has interviewed everyone, and most of the region’s big players, including Arafat, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak and Hamas co-founder Abdel Aziz Rantisi, make appearances. The author has a novelistic gift for conjuring the optimism of the Oslo era, which makes the nihilistic nosedive of the second Intifada even more searing. But while Prisoners is a story of multiple disenchantments, there’s a defiant hopefulness about it—a faith, despite too much evidence to the contrary, that individual human understanding can transcend historic hatreds.

Were Prisoners a novel, Ketziot might seem too obvious a symbol of brute absurdity. Mr. Goldberg writes of a Passover Seder there: “Here we were, celebrating Jewish freedom in a prison filled with our Arab captives! We had built a prison and planted it right along the pathway of Jewish freedom, and we had filled its cages with Palestinians who were demanding only what Jews themselves demanded, in the time of the Exodus and today: freedom.” He immediately reproached himself for thinking this way, but the reader can sense his pure Zionist faith curdling.

The son of liberal New York Jews, Mr. Goldberg began his adult life in defiant flight from the humanistic, self-interrogating culture of the Diaspora. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the role of Muslim humiliation in fueling the miseries of the Middle East. The part played by traumatized Jewish pride gets rather less attention, though as Prisoners suggests, it’s essential to understanding Israel’s lionization of strength and power. As a young man, Mr. Goldberg saw Diaspora Jews as emasculated, gelded by history. He embraced Israeli militarism with a zeal born, at least in part, of self-hatred. “I was determined to be an Israeli man, not an American Jew,” he writes. To his credit, though, Mr. Goldberg was never able to shake off the values he was raised with. He remained a yafei nefesh, a derisive Israeli phrase that means “beautiful soul,” or bleeding heart. He hated the petty cruelties of Ketziot, writing at one point, “All my life I wanted to be a Freedom Rider. Now I felt like Bull Connor.”

Mr. Goldberg sought a sort of redemption in friendship with a prisoner, Rafiq Hijazi, a pious but open-minded member of Fatah. “I had consoling thoughts about Rafiq—thoughts about the thickening possibilities of peace, a peace that could be made first by two inconsequential soldiers. If Rafiq Hijazi could somehow extend the border of his compassion to take in Jeffrey Goldberg, then why should peace be impossible?” The two men’s fraught relationship is the heart of the book, even though it often seems too fragile a connection to hold all of the hopes the author piles onto it. Though he doesn’t write it, and maybe doesn’t even think it, Mr. Goldberg appears to have wanted expiation from Mr. Hijazi for the sins of the occupation. He also desperately wanted evidence that there are Palestinian activists who can accept coexistence with Israel, a precondition for peace.

Prisoners, of course, comes at a time when such evidence is rare, and the book is full of disappointment, even heartbreak. When the Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti first appears in the book, he’s introduced as “mercilessly self-critical in a very un-Palestinian way … a favorite of the Israeli left, a prized interlocutor of liberal Knesset members.” He appears in the story again a few years later, during the height of the second Intifada, shouting of martyrdom and working in a residential building where families with children serve as human shields from Israeli assassination attempts. Similarly, Mr. Hijazi is not quite the exemplar of Palestinian moderation that Mr. Goldberg longed to find. At one point we learn that he took part in a Gaza demonstration against suicide bombing, but during a heated argument after Sept. 11, he says, “I wouldn’t go to that rally today.” Mr. Hijazi ended up moving to the U.S. to study statistics at American University, but his encounter with our louche mores only served to strengthen his commitment to conservative Islam. By the end of the book, Mr. Hijazi’s wife—whom Mr. Goldberg had previously befriended—is veiled and either won’t or can’t talk to him.

But the friendship somehow carries on despite all of this, and it remains a source of optimism for writer and reader alike. “If this could be done between a million different people, then the situation would be a lot different,” Mr. Hijazi says during their last meeting in Prisoners. “People would at least know what the other person thinks.” Jeffrey Goldberg is too sophisticated to believe that friendships like theirs can, on their own, save the world. “An irreducible truth remained: The maximum Israel could give did not match the minimum the Palestinians would accept,” he writes. Nevertheless, the image of the former guard and his onetime captive having an affectionate political argument in an Abu Dhabi Starbucks offers some hope in the face of desolation.

Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton) was published in May.