[1] Nahum Goldmann was born in Vishnevo, Russian Empire, a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement (now Vishnyeva, Belarus), the son of a teaching and writing Litvak family, whose father was an ardent Zionist.

At the age of six, he moved with his parents to Frankfurt, Germany, where his father entertained leading Zionists and intellectuals, and where he attended the Musterschule.

[9] In 1934 he married Alice Gottschalk and they had two sons, Guido, born 1938 in Switzerland, who founded the German Marshall Fund in the United States in 1972, and Michael.

[10] In November 1934, Goldmann petitioned Mussolini's support in relation to the Jews of the Saar, a region about to reunite with what was then Nazi Germany.

[18] He was buried in Jerusalem's Mount Herzl National Cemetery in the section reserved for leaders of the World Zionist Organization.His funeral was not attended by then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and no official statement of grief was issued by the Israeli government.

"[19] Goldmann found Jewish leadership in the U.S. divided, with no cohesive policy in place at a time when unity of "intention and purpose was vital.

But under the stress of wartime conditions, and on the eve of the 1940 American presidential elections, they came to doubt the efficacy of public pressure, preferring quiet diplomacy behind the scenes as the more effective means of pursuing viable goals.

[20] Among other reasons it was this view, shared by Goldmann and Wise, which led them strongly to oppose Hillel Kook's (Peter Bergson)'s energetic, creative and public methods of attempting to rescue the abandoned Jews of Europe.

[21] Consistent in his view that "in exerting political pressure at home, one must always be cautious and tactful or risk incurring the hostility of influential diplomatic figures,"[22] neither Goldmann nor the Jewish leadership around him mounted a public campaign against the American immigration quota system even as European Jewry were seeking refuge from Nazism.

Some American Jews, including Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, did try their hands at quiet diplomacy with some success, such that the quotas were being filled by 1939.

[26] At the May 1943 American Emergency Committee meeting Goldmann, along with Abba Hillel Silver, was an advocate of the rationale that the struggle against the MacDonald White Paper was a step in the establishment of the Jewish commonwealth.

In that year, he convened a meeting in New York City of 23 major national and international Jewish organizations to address the task of negotiating an agreement with the West German government for the reparations to Jews for losses caused by Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

On September 10, 1952, after six months of negotiations, a reparations agreement between the Claims Conference and Konrad Adenauer's government of West Germany was reached.

[25] In that capacity Goldmann was openly critical of the Israeli Government's actions in the abduction of Adolf Eichmann, and urged referring the matter to an international court.

The Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture was founded in 1964 by Goldmann who negotiated reparations with Federal Republic of Germany Chancellor Dr Konrad Adenauer.

[35][36] Goldmann’s vision for the MFJC was to foster a new generation of artists, academics, and Torah scholars to replace those who were decimated in the Holocaust.

[47][48] Attempts to contact PLO leader Yasser Arafat, in 1974, were even seen as high treason, an extreme view Goldmann thought foolish.