Jonah Goldberg’s Brother Running for District 6 City Council Seat

Joshua Goldberg, the brother of conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, is running for the Sixth District City Council seat currently held by Gale Brewer. Goldberg, whose candidacy was endorsed by the New York County Republican Party screening committee, has worked as a tour guide, and has also been a fishmonger and worked in the media. He is 42 and has never before run for political office.

Joshua Goldberg

His family has impressive conservative credentials. Joshua’s brother Jonah is one of the country’s best-known conservative columnists, an editor-at-large of National Review Online, and a Fox News contributor. His mother Lucianne Goldberg, a literary agent, was a prominent figure in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, counseling Linda Tripp to tape her conversations with Lewinsky. A New York Times article from 1998 said she had a “a taste for right-wing, tell-all attack books.” She told the Times, however, that she is an independent, not a Republican.

And why exactly does Mr. Goldberg — who apparently has some pretty conservative views himself — think he can be elected on the Upper West Side? Well, he realizes that it’s a stretch.

“I have no illusions about how difficult it is for  a Republican running for office here,” he wrote in a statement posted on his mother’s website, lucianne.com, but says “the demographics of the district have been changing” enough to give him a shot. Goldberg says he is running because the city is “headed for a fiscal disaster.”

“The city is being crushed by labor costs and overly generous policies toward contractors and entitlements,” he wrote.

Jonah Goldberg wrote in a blog post at National Review Online that his brother has a “molecularly slim” chance of winning.

Gale Brewer has already announced she is running again for the seat. Goldberg didn’t immediately respond to an interview request and he hasn’t set up his campaign website yet. A video about his candidacy is posted here. He won’t be accepting campaign matching funds and instead will try to get the word out by “pounding the pavement”. Let the race begin! (photo courtesy Joshua Goldberg)