As the Mountain States president of Jewish National Fund-USA, it was a no-brainer that Sam Goldberg would show up at the international convention of JNF in Denver last December.
It was also to be expected that a throng of anti-Israel demonstrators would greet Goldberg and his fellow attendees, carrying signs, chanting and hurling invective, some of which not only slammed Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas but which were clearly anti-Semitic.
Less obvious, perhaps, was Goldberg’s fashion choice for the occasion: He wore a bright blue blazer, adorned with Israeli flags.
It was less an in-your-face statement to the Israel-haters, he told the Intermountain Jewish News, and more of an expression of pride in what he stands for and of who he is.
“I think most of the protesters have a lot to learn about the world,” he said, “and I also think it’s ignorant and naïve for us to think that everyone’s going to love us.
“I mean, not everyone loves Madonna, right, and what did Madonna do to anybody? The point is you can’t expect everyone to like you.
“The reason I wore that jacket is that I wanted to inspire people not to be worried, and the truth is that giving the protesters attention is exactly what they want. They don’t deserve any of our attention. We’re focused on building things and our focus should be on that, not on people that don’t like us for whatever ignorant or hateful reasons. I really don’t care.
“What I do care about is that we focus on being proud of ourselves, making ourselves better, improving and building productive and beautiful things.”
That attitude — a mixture of pride, defiance, confidence and humor — characterizes just about everything Goldberg has to say about anything. He makes no apologies for any of it since, like the Israeli flags on his jacket, “I literally wear my emotions on my sleeve,” Goldberg says with a laugh.
That includes his reaction when demonstrators shouted hateful things in his face last December, including one who screamed: “Hitler would be proud of you.”
Beyond noting the sheer absurdity of the comment itself, Goldberg’s response was illustrative of his overall approach.
“If you don’t think I, or Israel, or my family, or my people, deserve the right to exist . . . ”
Goldberg, 45, has been a donor and partner with JNF since 2006 and was instrumental in setting up its JNFuture young adult arm, serving on its initial national board.
He became a member of its major donor society, the World Chairman’s Council, in 2017 and was named regional president in October, 2022.
He even met his wife, Natalie, at a JNF event.
Providing a thumbnail autobiography, Goldberg notes that he was born in Oakland, “and my house burned down in a huge fire in ’91, a month before my Bar Mitzvah. Then we moved to Ohio, outside Columbus — not the Jewish area — where I went to high school.”
Professionally, he adds, “I guess from a certain perspective, depending on who you ask, you could say I disappointed my parents twice. The first time, I made it halfway through med school before deciding medicine was not my path. Then I left to go to law school and became a patent attorney. After three years of that, I decided I didn’t want to be an attorney anymore.”
He made his first foray into the tech startup world in 2009, “and never looked back.” He brought that expertise to Colorado in 2020 during the height of the pandemic, in what he calls “very much a remote-work-era-enabled move.”
He remains in that professional realm today.
“I’ve founded multiple companies and had multiple exits. Nothing on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, but it’s been an exciting and fruitful career for me.
“At the moment, I’m analyzing what’s next. I had my most recent exit this past summer and am evaluating whether to become a full-time investor on the venture capital side or do another startup.”
In his IJN interview, Goldberg discussed the tech startup world, especially Israel’s leading role in it, his recent trip to the Jewish state, and JNF, not necessarily in that order, all with a strong and infectious aura of positivity.
IJN: Why is JNF so important to you?
Goldberg: I believe that Jewish National Fund-USA is the best American organization delivering on the future of Zionism. What we do on the ground in Israel is a strategic imperative to both enable and further the future of the state.
Things like building science centers and key infrastructure like culinary institutes, aquatic centers in regions along the frontier so there’s strategic diversity away from the center . . . places like the Arava, the Negev in general, or the Israel envelope, what we used to call the Gaza envelope.
There are two major initiatives, parallel initiatives. One is called Go North, and the other is Blueprint Negev.
The foundational purposes of both are the same, which is to encourage citizens of the center of Israel to move to the north or to the south, the south almost exclusively being the Negev.
So the old days of JNF Blue Boxes and planting trees is history?
You’re mostly correct. The Blue Boxes still technically exist, and planting trees is still something that we are not quite done with. I mean, it’s a great deal we have with trees, right? They exhale oxygen. That’s what we inhale. We exhale CO2. That’s what they inhale. So, the more trees the better and that’s still an initiative.
But we’ve expanded dramatically from there to incorporate thinking about ecology in general and why it’s so important for Israel, for example, wo work on water technologies and solve Israel’s water scarcity problem.
And if you have water, you have food — food security.
How do you get a place like the Arava to generate such a high percentage of Israel’s produce, so much so that they even now export from the Arava? That’s the desert south of the Dead Sea. The coldest I’ve ever seen there was 90 degrees.
With initiatives like Go North and Blueprint Negev we’ve also started to think about the fact that living in an area is more than just water and food. Of course, it’s about things to do. It’s opportunities, it’s work, so we’ve opened up employment centers.
We’ve invested in areas like how do we give a life of dignity to those most disabled among us. It’s about rehabilitative hospitals and a fully functioning town designed for the most severely disabled, and programs like Special in Uniform.
That was initiated by JNF-USA and financed by a retired colonel, Tiran Atia.
Joining the army is part of the fabric of Israeli society and the army is designed for one thing — defense.
But many people in Israel are not accepted by the army because they’re severely autistic or have some other disability that prevents them from having a readily available role. Special in Uniform opens that door and gives these people real roles, providing bona fide value for those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to serve.
As Mountain States president are you a fundraiser, an information source, a PR guy?
If you look at it from a tactical perspective, all of those things are true.
However, I think it’s more accurate to say that we are living in a special time in history; that hundreds of years from now, the Jews of that time will look at our time and say, this was the beginning of the golden era of Jewish history.
As the president of the Mountain States, I believe that I’m sharing the opportunity to be a part of this special time in history and to help shape the future of the Jewish people, and frankly, the world.
I believe that the prophecy is accurate that Israel will be a light unto the nations. When I was a child, I thought that would be like, literally handing the Torah to people, but as an adult I’ve come to realize that perhaps that light is, at least in significant part, innovation.
Through the innovation that’s emanating from Israel, including things like solving water scarcity and food insecurity, we are being that light unto the nations.
Most people would gain great meaning, personal meaning, from being a part of that.
One might say that in the wake of Oct. 7, it doesn’t feel like the beginning of a golden age.
Perhaps reasonable minds could disagree. Sometimes it’s darkest before dawn.
Our strategic victory, of course, must be on the battlefield, but I’m a student of history — I love Jewish history, military history and have been reading these topics my whole life — and our strategic victory is also dependent on something that JNF-USA has been organizing since the middle of October, literally a week after the tragedies and atrocities of Oct. 7.
That victory is predicated on us not only rebuilding the areas that were ravaged on Oct. 7, but rebuilding them better and bigger, so much so that they serve as a deterrent.
They [Hamas] will know that hitting us, damaging us, will only give us the impetus to make things 10 times better.
You were recently in Israel on a tech exec solidarity mission.
It was in mid-December and was the first of its kind, Its purpose was exactly as you said, to show solidarity.
There were 65 American technology executives and venture capitalists, mostly Jewish and two who were not Jewish.
We met with government officials, tech executives and investors, and the purpose was, yes, to show solidarity, but also to explore how we might support and otherwise bolster the tech industry in Israel which is such a significant part of its GDP.
What was your impression of the mood in Israel?
Morale is high. All of us were motivated to go on the trip to help boost the morale in Israel, but I’m not sure whose morale was boosted more, theirs or ours.
I say that because the Israelis were so positive, confident and committed to getting through this difficult time.
I use the word positive not in a happy sense, but in a determined sense — you know, we will persevere.
There was also a grave disappointment in the government, but . . . there was a general sense that the people of Israel are rising to the occasion and responding to make sure that the efforts of Hamas to destroy all of us on Oct. 7 will fail miserably.
But also that the people who were the victims will not have died and suffered in vain.
I didn’t mention that I was also in Israel from April to mid-August with my family. We were there during a time of — I think it’s fair to say — disharmony, when there was a great deal of social unrest.
If you witnessed any of the protests on either side, you know, there were thousands upon thousands of people who would show up peacefully, but energetically, to express their discontent with the other side.
Being there again in December, I saw the difference and the difference was stark. Unity amongst the people is extremely strong. That was a beautiful thing to see and be a part of.
It’s kind of remarkable if you think about it. Our story tells us these things, right? Tisha b’Av is probably the most acute example of how things fall apart when we’re not united. Perhaps this was our modern Tisha b’Av moment, as horrible as it was, to tell us that we can’t allow that disunity to be part of our future moving forward.
Would you elaborate on a couple of quotes you’ve made? ‘Zionism is evolving’ and a reference to Israel as a ‘global laboratory?’
They’re intimately connected.
Global laboratory refers to the innovations coming out of Israel today, which are solving global problems.
These are not limited to Israel. The problems that exist, like water scarcity and food security, are global problems.
One of the amazing things about Israel’s startup industry is that Israeli entrepreneurs are often innovators.
I separate entrepreneur from innovator in this way: An innovator often will have lived a problem and figured out a way to solve it. An entrepreneur takes a solution, an innovation, and turns that into a business.
Israel’s innovations are solving global problems. That’s what I mean by a global laboratory, an incubator, if you will.
“Zionism is evolving” because Israel is a success. Israel is by many metrics a world power. It’s not great in numbers population wise, certainly, but it is substantially great in impact economically, innovation-wise, healthcare-wise, social innovations, etc.
In turn, how we think about Israel also needs to evolve.
One of the great tragedies of the American Jewish experience is that many of us have been brought up to believe that Israel is perfect and beyond reproach. But every place is imperfect. The US is imperfect and Israel is imperfect too, but it’s also doing so many positive things for the world that we don’t need to preach that Israel is perfect.
What Israel is doing is incredible. Zionism is incredible. I get why this happened historically. Between 1948 and probably even till the early nineties, Israel had many times of economic struggle and was often on precarious footing politically and internationally.
But that has evolved. We are in a much more powerful position today.
If you ask what are the top 10 countries, there’s a very strong chance that Israel is going to show up on that list. We have so many positive contributions and such growth.
The fact that there are American Jews who aren’t overwhelmingly proud to be part of that peoplehood is something I simply don’t understand.
We have so much to celebrate and be proud of.
It’s my strong preference that we focus on those things.
Why do you think Israel is so good at innovation and entrepreneurship?
I think there are two fundamental things going for Israel in this category.
One is part of the Jewish tradition of asking questions, of challenging truth. How do you know something is true unless it holds up to challenge? That’s like the definition of science. The reason something works is because every time you do an experiment, the same result happens. Then it becomes science.
The other thing is that Israel has had so many challenges historically. Let’s go back to, say, 1900, the pre-state days, all the, way through to the early- to mid-’90s. Israel faced so many challenges at the same time that having to figure them out became a part of the foundation, the nervous system, of Israel as a society.
There certainly was no switch that we just turned on and said, “OK, let’s pump money into high-tech education” or something like that. It was culturally ingrained for us to say, “There’s a problem, so we’ll solve it.”
As you’re looking for something to invest in, or start up with, will Israel be a part of it?
Israel is part of my beat. No matter what happens in my future, Israel is going to be an important part of that future, in the same way that Israel is an important part of the global future.
It’s all intertwined and inextricable. You can’t remove it from me. It’s ingrained in my DNA as I believe it’s ingrained in the world’s DNA.
Chris Leppek may be reached at IJNEWS@aol.com.
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