Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

Is Your Name Jewish Enough to Oppose New Iran Sanctions?

Mark A.R. Kleiman became quite emotional earlier this week about a subject far afield from the one he usually studies: The new Iran sanctions bill percolating in the U.S. Senate.

January 17, 2014 at 12:30 PM EST

By Jeffrey Goldberg

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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Mark A.R. Kleiman, a drug policy expert at the University of California at Los Angeles, whom I respect for the cold clarity of his analysis, became quite emotional earlier this week about a subject far afield from the one he usually studies: The new Iran sanctions bill percolating in the U.S. Senate.

The bill's main sponsors, New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez and Illinois Republican Mark Kirk, believe that the threat of additional sanctions will help concentrate the attention of the Iranian regime as it heads into a new round of nuclear negotiations in Geneva. At this moment, passage of the bill, might actually derail negotiations and weaken the sanctions program already in place. (I wrote about my objections here.) Still, I understand the impetus behind such a bill: Additional sanctions might soon prove to be necessary during these negotiations, if the Iranians resist the demands of Western interlocutors to dismantle important components of their nuclear program.

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