The first time Jeffrey Goldberg showed up at the Forward, I could tell right away that he had the slouch of a newspaperman. He was seated in the office of my colleague, Jonathan Rosen. When I walked in to interview him for a reporting job, he made no motion to stand, though he deigned to shake my hand. I was preparing to make short shrift of the encounter, when it emerged that Mr. Goldberg had quit the University of Pennsylvania to join the Israeli army and that he had since taken up writing, for the Jerusalem Post, a humor column.

Humor is, by my lights, one of the acid tests of a writer, and when I got into Mr. Goldberg’s clips I could see that he had a magnificent sense of irony, timing, and surprise. He turned out to have an uncanny nose for news, too. In short order, he broke for the Forward two of the most important Jewish stories of the 1990s: the import of the National Jewish Population Survey that put the demographic crisis of American Jewry into sharp relief and the secret negotiations to settle billions of dollars in Jewish World War II claims in Europe.

Since then, Mr. Goldberg has emerged, at the New York Times magazine and then the New Yorker, where he is now the Washington correspondent, as one of the finest journalists of his generation. He hired anti-aircraft gunners to escort him into Kurdistan, whence he filed the dispatch that Vice President Cheney held up on television to underscore the case for invading Iraq. Alone, by car and on foot, he nosed around the most dangerous of the Hezbollah-occupied zones in Lebanon. A dispatch he sent the Times from Africa so impressed the chairman of Dow Jones & Company, Peter Kann, himself a Pulitzer-prize winning foreign correspondent and master stylist, that he telephoned me to ask, “Who is this guy?”

I couldn’t tell him much, for it turns out that Mr. Goldberg has rarely opened up about himself. He’d sometimes mention that he came from the Five Towns on Long Island, that when he was in the IDF he’d guarded Palestinian Arab prisoners, and that he was the child of divorce. But of his personal journey, of its emblematic nature, we — or at least I — never got more than a glimpse. Which is one of the things that makes his first book, “Prisoners: A Muslim & a Jew Across the Middle East Divide” (Knopf, 336 pages, $25), such a wonderful memoir. It is being blurbed as offering a ray of hope in the gloom of the Middle East. But its real thrill is for the story it tells of an American Jewish life, all the more remarkable for the fact that it’s not yet half finished.

And what a piece of writing. “On the morning of the fine spring day, full of sunshine, that ended with my arrest in Gaza,” Mr. Goldberg begins, “I woke early from an uneven sleep, dressed, and pushed back to its proper place the desk meant to barricade the door of my hotel room. I unknotted the bedsheets I had tied together into an emergency escape ladder. Then I hid the knife I kept under my pillow, cleaned the dust from my shoes, and carefully unbolted the door. I searched the hall. There were no signs of imminent peril. Most people wouldn’t be so cautions, but I had my reasons, and not all of them were rooted in self-flattering paranoia.”

Later in the day he was, while waiting in a restaurant, seized by one of the Palestinian Arab security services and dragged in for what turned out to be an ominous interrogation in which he was wrongly accused of working for the Israeli internal security agency known as Shabak. Mr. Goldberg tried to insist on the truth, that he was but a reporter. The cat and mouse game went on for some time, until Mr. Goldberg’s interlocutor paused. “We know you were in Ketziot,” his interrogator says. “He let this last word hang in the air,” Mr. Goldberg says. “My face gave away the game. My double life in Gaza had just come to an end.”

Ketziot was a desert prison in which Israel held Palestinian Arabs and in which Mr. Goldberg, during his days in the IDF, had served as a military policeman. Mr. Goldberg’s description of this prison is worthy of Kafka and will no doubt end up on a shelf where classics of the genre are kept. At one point he was celebrating Passover at the prison compound, which was in the Sinai. He found himself reading from Exodus: “I am the Lord your God, who has led you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.”

“The house of bondage?” Mr. Goldberg writes. “Here we were, celebrating Jewish freedom in a prison filled with our Arab captives! We had built a prison and planted it right along the pathway of Jewish freedom, and we had filled its cages with Palestinians who were demanding only what Jews themselves demanded, in the time of the Exodus and today: freedom. No! I would not think this way. This was not the house of bondage. Israel was not Egypt. These Palestinians were not slaves. A seder in prison? What was I thinking?”

It was in Ketziot that he established an unlikely friendship with a Palestinian Arab prisoner named Rafiq Hijazi. Their acquaintance began with a conversation Mr. Goldberg describes as giving him a feeling of “connection” that was “strange and traitorous,” though it was never even remotely traitorous in the true sense of adhering to an enemy. Mr. Goldberg says Rafiq Hijazi was the only Palestinian he could find in Ketziot who “understood the moral justification for Zionism.” He was not, however, a collaborator.

Though forged in an unlikely setting, their friendship endured, and a few years later, when Mr. Goldberg returned to Israel as a foreign correspondent, the reporter sought out his former prisoner, who had been released from prison. They had a reunion first in Gaza and later, with their wives, near American University in Washington, where Rafiq Hijazi was a student of statistics and resided only blocks from the home where Mr. Goldberg and his wife were raising their children.

The story of their friendship is related with all sorts of asides and flashbacks, in which Mr. Goldberg tells of his meetings with various terrorist leaders and ordinary Arabs and other Muslims in the territories administered by Israel. It was on one of his forays to Gaza that he was arrested in the incident described in the opening paragraphs; he was held but a short time and released. His adventures took him to Pakistan and Egypt. One of the remarkable things about Mr. Goldberg is his ability to cross lines, meeting with the enemy one minute and with prime ministers of Israel the next.

The best parts of this book, however, are those in which Mr. Goldberg tells his own story, starting with his youth on Long Island, where by the age of 14 he had become a supporter of the Zionist visionary Vladimir Jabotinsky, only to shift while still in high school to the socialist Zionists. Israel had become what he calls the “polestar” of his existence, and he had come to feel that “I was an American only because of some terrible, cosmic accident of birth. I’d been born too late, and in the wrong place. I was a victim of existential dislocation. …”

There is a chapter called “The Hill of Jewish Bones” about a mission Mr. Goldberg undertook, for the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, to Latvia, to help the few Jews remaining there, whose communal memory the Soviets had been trying to obliterate. It was on that trip that he exhibited early signs of the kind of daring for which he would become famous as a newspaperman. He and a comrade were captured by communist secret police and thrown out of the country.

The liberation, the empowerment that the young Mr. Goldberg felt on reaching the Jewish state is something that millions have shared but few have written about with a more engaging combination of eloquence and humor. The determination with which he explored the Palestinian territories and made friends there has been less widely shared. In some ways the book is a classic coming-of-age story about a young man who makes friends on the wrong side of the tracks. Such friendships are typically elusive and difficult to sustain, yet engender hopes out of which it is painful to grow. There are moments in the book when Mr. Goldberg struck me as a kind of Hebrew Huck Finn, though the analogy would be imperfect on both sides.

Mr. Goldberg eventually settled with his family in Washington, DC. In the wake of the outbreak, on September 11, 2001, of the world war, Rafiq Hijazi turned more deeply to religion and eventually relocated to Abu Dhabi, where Mr. Goldberg paid him a visit and they had the concluding conversations of this book. It would be too harsh to say that the pursuit of the kinds of friendships that Mr. Goldberg narrates in this book is a fool’s errand. But it would be too much to suggest that he has solved the riddle of peace. What Mr. Goldberg has done is establish his reputation as one of the most eloquent narrators of the struggle in which new leaders arise in every generation.