Ori Goldberg

Ori Goldberg was born in Israel in November 1975. He studied at Tel Aviv University, first in the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Honors Program and the law school, where he wrote a thesis on the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and then as a doctoral student in history. Supervised by David Menashri and David Yerushalmi, he completed a PhD on the role of religious experience in the creation and practice of Iranian Shi'i revolutionary discourse in the second half of the twentieth century. During his studies he was a Fox International Fellow at Yale University.

Goldberg lectured in Middle Eastern history at Tel Aviv University and at the Open University of Israel, and later taught at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, now Reichman University. His courses covered radical Islam, identity and the links between faith and violence.

His dissertation was published by Routledge as Shi'i Theology in Iran: The Challenge of Religious Experience, and with Shaul Mishal he co-wrote Understanding Shiite Leadership: The Art of the Middle Ground in Iran and Lebanon for Cambridge University Press. He also wrote Thinking Shi'a for IDF Radio's Broadcast University series. He was a Dan David postdoctoral fellow, a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and the Mellon Foundation, a senior research fellow at the IDF's Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Thought, a faculty member of the Israeli National Defense College and a research fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya.

In his later years he left university life and worked as an independent analyst and commentator. He wrote opinion pieces for Al Jazeera English and Israel Hayom among others, appeared regularly on Al Jazeera and the BBC, and built a large following on X and Substack. His writing in those years was strongly critical of the Israeli government and of the war in Gaza, which he called a genocide.

Goldberg was a father; his eldest daughter, Avigail, and his eldest son both wrote tributes to him on his X account after his death. Reports noted that he loved reading and photography. In October 2025 he began writing publicly about his illness, explaining that he had metastatic stage four colon cancer and was receiving chemotherapy every two weeks, and he continued to write and comment while undergoing treatment.

Ori Goldberg died on the night of 11 October 2026, aged 50, after a long battle with colon cancer. His eldest daughter, Avigail, announced the death on his X account, writing that he had been the best father in the world. His eldest son added a tribute of his own. The news was reported by the Israeli news site ice and by FilIsrael and Digest. Details of the funeral had not been published at the time of writing.

Goldberg's academic work argued that Iran's revolution and its thinkers had to be understood as religious phenomena on their own terms, rather than only as politics. As a commentator he was known for blunt, independent views that drew both admirers and critics, and the family's thanks after his death were addressed to both groups.