Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

Ed Koch, Proudest of Jews

February 1, 2013 at 4:14 PM UTC

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

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One of the reasons I adored Ed Koch (with eyes open -- I knew that his last term as mayor was a sad one, beset by corruption and hubris, and that he could have tried much harder to create a functional relationship with the city's black community) is that he reviewed movies like my grandmother reviewed movies. People may not remember this, but Koch had a long and illustrious post-Gracie Mansion career as a very bad movie reviewer. (A characteristic teaser Tweet: "Drive, don't run, to see Ryan Gosling in 'Drive.'")

My grandmother, who died several years ago and who also adored Koch -- even though Koch, unlike my grandmother, betrayed the city by living outside of it for parts of his life (my grandmother rarely ever budged from Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn) -- devoured movies, too, and her reviews had Koch's same slashing forthrightness and practical outer-borough sensibility. When I asked her what she thought of "Titanic," she answered, "Enough with the water already."