After he graduated agronomy in Vienna, Slavko's father returned briefly to Tuzla and, as a convinced Zionist, moved to Mandatory Palestine.

In 1928, with his wife Lea, whom he had met in Palestine, he returned to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia – not in Tuzla with his father, but in Karlovac where he took over the bookshop from his uncle Lisander Reich.

Slavko was born during a trip to Sarajevo, and spent his childhood in Karlovac with his brother Danko (Daniel), where his father was a book dealer.

His brother Danko took his grandfather Aron to Tuzla, while his mother Lea was in jail from July to August, when she was released thanks to some friends.

[6] His mother Lea spent the war in the medical service, and his brother Danko as a courier for the Agitprop of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ).

[8] Apart from his father, Slavko lost a part of the family from Tuzla during the Holocaust, who were killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp and Auschwitz.

[3] He returned to SFR Yugoslavia in the 1950s, and started studying literature and philosophy at the Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, but he never graduated.

He worked at Jadran Film, and in 1952 was a member of the editorial staff of Vjesnika u srijedu, editor at Radio Zagreb, and since 1969 editor-in-chief of the publishing house Stvarnost.

"[3][4] Goldstein also directed five documentary films, and wrote screenplays for several Yugoslav World War II films such as Signal Over the City (Signali nad gradom, 1960), Prometheus of the Island (Prometej s otoka Viševice, 1964; co-written with Vatroslav Mimica and Krunoslav Quien), and Operation Stadium (Akcija stadion, 1977; co-written with Dušan Vukotić).

For Goldstein, Tuđman was a solid personality who did not accept the uprising, that is, he flirted with some Greater Croatia ideas, but not with the Ustaša.

"[18] After the victory of the SDP-led coalition in the 2011 parliamentary elections, Goldstein became a special advisor for culture of the Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanović, as well as President of the Council of the Jasenovac Memorial Center.