Goldberg was born in Opatów, Poland, and moved to Warsaw in 1914, attending Poznanski Teachers Seminary.
In 1920 he moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, studying philosophy, German and political science at McMaster University.
[1] He moved to New York City in the late 1920s, and continued teaching Yiddish there as well as in Philadelphia, but left the socialist Workmen's Circle schools for the more radical Arbeter Ordn Shuln.
[2] The education schism, with Goldberg and many schools leaving the Arbeter Ring to form the Ordn network, was part of an exceedingly vituperative break within the leftist Yiddish community between the communists and socialists (who the communists sometimes called "social fascists").
His close associates in Toronto were communists, including his brother-in-law, who shared his revolutionary worldview of social justice.
[1] Also, he described an embedded rebelliousness in those doubly alienated, "suffering and benefiting from 'rejection [and persecution] by the Gentiles, but also their own rejection of the narrowness of the rabbi and merchant dominated shtetl life'".
[8] Shortly after moving to New York City, he became director of the Arbeter Ordn Shuln, and helped set up a nationwide network of these schools, reaching a peak number of 140.
[6] Best described as supplemental schools, they aimed at promoting Yiddish identity, as well as inculcating the concepts of class consciousness and social justice.
[15] When the IWO was about to be liquidated during the Red Scare in 1954 by the Department of Insurance of New York State (IWO was a fiscally sound fraternal benefit insurance company with close 200,000 members in its peak years, 1946–47), Itche withdrew the Yiddish shuls from the JPFO in order to preserve them, creating the independent Service Bureau for Jewish Education so that the schools could continue to function.
[citation needed] Over time he made a transition to democratic socialism, eventually seeing the Soviet Union as an anti-model.
[16] Beginning in 1957 Yiddishe Kultur co-sponsored an annual public remembrance of the 12 August 1952 murders.
[citation needed] In honor of his 100th birthday the Jewish People's Philharmonic Chorus had a concert which included a musical adaptation of I.L.
[18] In another 100th birthday tribute, Jerrold Nadler honored him in the United States House of Representatives by saying, "Mir shatsn op ayer vunderlekhe arbet letoyves der yidisher kultur vos hot baraykhert dem gontsn Yiddishn yishev."
"We honor your wonderful work for the benefit of Yiddish culture, which enriches the entire Jewish community."
In honor of this publication, a commemoration of his life was held on July 25, 2006, sponsored by YIVO and League for Yiddish.
A Josh Waletzky documentary was made of his life at age 101, "Itche Goldberg, A Century Of Yiddish Letters",[20] and was shown at this event.
When I came, at age 21, into the Workmen’s Circle shule in Toronto, I had so much eagerness, energy, and faith in socialism and in Yiddishism.