Goldberg was born in New York City and raised in Massapequa, Long Island, until age 13, when he moved with his family to Washington, D.C. After graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School he moved to New York City in the winter of 1967, working in a picture-frame factory.
He enrolled in McGill University in 1968, after spending a year on the Habonim Workshop at Kibbutz Urim in the Negev.
At McGill, he was active in the Student Zionist Organization, and was an editor of its weekly campus newspaper, Otherstand.
He has worked in the past as a taxi driver in New York City, a Jewish communal worker in Los Angeles and a construction laborer in Israel.
[citation needed] In 1972 Goldberg was appointed as director of the American Jewish Congress National Commission on Youth.