Judith S. Goldstein received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1962 with a concentration on European and American history. As a Woodrow Wilson Scholar at Columbia University, she received a master's degree in European history, and wrote her thesis on the “Mouvement Republicain Populaire and the Franco-Vietnamese War, 1946-1954.” In 1972, Goldstein completed her doctoral studies at Columbia University after writing her dissertation on “The Politics of Ethnic Pressure: The American Jewish Committee Fight Against Immigration Restriction: 1906-1917.” This thesis was published as a book by Routledge in 1990 and republished in 2020, as the beginning of a sustained concentration on immigration and diversity in America and Europe. She worked at Columbia University for 10 years, focused on an oral history project on ethnic groups and American foreign policy. In the late 1980s, she started a book about the integration of Jewish immigrants in Maine. In 1992, William Morrow published Crossing Lines: Histories of Jews and Gentiles in Three Communities. In 2006, Rutgers University Press published Inventing Great Neck: Jewish Identity and American Dreams.