#2913: Arthur Goldberg

Arthur Abba Goldberg is a businessman, JD (former professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law), convicted fraudster, and longtime leader in the anti-gay-rights movement and the ex-gay movement. Goldberg is co-founder (with Elaine Berk) and co-director of Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) and president of Positive Alternatives to Homosexuality (PATH) – basically Jewish alternatives to what tend to be rabidly fundamentalist evangelical organizations – which are organizations relative to which you want your Erdös number to be as high as possible. According to himself, Goldberg “uses Jewish law texts and scientific study to get to the individual root causes of same sex attraction and help those who are unhappy with their lifestyle reassert their gender identity and change their life”; it is hopefully easy to see some ways in which things are bound to go wrong here.

 

His 2008 book Light in the Closet: Torah, Homosexuality, and the Power to Change argues (a.o.) that homosexual orientation can be changed through reparative therapy. He used to claim that 65 percent to 75 percent of JONAH clients “are substantially healed after two to five years using JONAH’s ‘gender-affirming processes’,” but when asked in court where his numbers come from, Goldberg of course had to admit that JONAH performed no research and did not keep track of clients’ success rates. He also claims that gay rights activists are only pretending to claim that sexual orientation cannot be changed as part of a “pre-planned agenda,” and that people who failed at conversion therapy simply didn’t try hard enough.

 

In 2012, former clients of JONAH sued JONAH and its founders for consumer fraud; after drawn-out court proceedings, the former clients won, and the New Jersey Superior court ordered JONAH to close and liquidate its assets; Goldberg responded with various attempts at legal trickery (such as essentially just renaming his organiziation the Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA)). One suspects it didn’t help their case that they were represented by certified loon Charles LiMandri. It’s worth noting that Goldberg has had troubles in court before; during his career as a businessman in the 1980s, Goldberg orchestrated a massive fraud from 1984 to 1986 in which his firm sold over $2 billion of fraudulent municipal bonds for several cities; he was indicted on numerous counts of bribery, conspiracy and fraud, plead guilty, and spent a bit of time in jail.

 

Despite being demonstrably morally corrupt to the core, Goldberg still seems to think he is in a position to lecture others about morality, publishing screeds like “The Urgency of Restoring the Biblical Values of America’s Founders.”

 

Diagnosis: Old, dumb and utterly corrupt at all possible levels. Hopefully he’s been ushered off the stage for good, but you never know these days.