Jeffrey Klein, 77, Mother Jones co-founder, saw ‘through line’ between investigative journalism and fighting antisemitism
Klein died on March 13 at 77
Jeffrey Klein leading the seder in 1990. (Courtesy of Klein Family)
(JTA) — When Jeffrey Klein traveled to the Soviet Union to report a long feature on Jewish refuseniks, his first stop was a sparsely attended synagogue in Moscow. Before he left, he wanted to make a donation.
“I ask in Yiddish, then in Hebrew, where the synagogue’s charity box is,” he wrote in the July 1978 issue of Mother Jones magazine. “‘Tzedaka,’ I repeat. ‘Rubles for poor families.’”
When Klein, the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, the progressive magazine, died on March 13 at 77, the most prominent obituaries made scant mention of his Judaism. He rarely wrote about his own Jewish identity.
But his sons Jacob and Jonah said Jewish values underlay his journalism. And, as in the article on Jews who were refused permission to leave the Soviet Union, Judaism occasionally surfaced in his articles.
“He really saw, I think, a through line between our history of being oppressed by corrupt rulers, and his desire to investigate and take down corruption in corporate America and in Washington,” Jacob Klein said. Jonah Klein said, “I think it was, you know, just deep in his bones to question authority, to look out for the powerless and to be skeptical of authority.”
Klein was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1948 to the descendants of Hungarian Jews. After graduating Columbia University, he moved to the Bay Area, where he co-founded Mother Jones in 1976, when he was 28.
About two years later, he traveled to Moscow for his deeply reported story on the plight of the refuseniks. Anatoly Shcharansky, a prominent refusenik, had recently been arrested and charged with treason, drawing unprecedented attention to the fight for Soviet Jewry. (Shcharansky was released in 1986 and moved to Israel, where he changed his name to Natan Sharansky.)
Klein’s article documents the refuseniks’ campaign, the ways in which Soviet authorities persecuted them and the fear of espionage that pervaded their ranks. It also describes Moscow, explores Soviet antisemitism and repression, and ruminates on why American leftists were hesitant to criticize the Soviet regime.
At one point, Klein describes how he nearly threw up upon listening to someone he identifies as a Soviet “liberal” spouting antisemitic claims.
At another point, he depicts a group of refusenik scientists acting “ungrateful” when he gives them a calculator he smuggled into the country. He relates that “just yesterday they were the Soviet Union’s top scientists. As throughout Jewish history, the refuseniks’ appeal to their cousins in better circumstances is based not on charity but on morality: ‘It is your duty to help us.’”
The article led Soviet authorities to confiscate copies of Mother Jones when another staff member brought them to the USSR in 1979. It ended with a plea to advocate for the refuseniks, and a sidebar suggested places to donate.
“He encouraged us to think a lot about how difficult it was for the refuseniks, and encouraged me to donate my bar mitzvah proceeds, actually, to the organization that was bringing Soviet Jews to Israel,” Jacob Klein said.
More than a decade later, in the 1990s, Jeffrey Klein wrote articles arguing for separation of church and state. In general, the pioneering magazine sought to expand on the left’s focus into corporate injustice and malpractice as well as the role of money in politics.
“Like all of us, he wanted it to tackle injustice and talk about concentrations of power,” fellow Mother Jones co-founder Adam Hochschild told The Washington Post. “He didn’t like being put in pigeonholes. He was always arguing for, ‘Let’s not do anything in lockstep.’”
Klein left Mother Jones in the 1980s and led other Bay Area magazines. He returned to Mother Jones in 1992 as the editor-in-chief, when he played an instrumental role in bringing the magazine into the digital age; it was one of the first to launch a website. Klein resigned from Mother Jones in 1998.
Judaism was also present in his family life. Klein married his first wife Judith Weinstein Klein, an influential Berkeley psychologist who studied Jewish ethnic identity and self esteem, in 1971 and they had two sons together. She died in 1996 of breast cancer.
“She loved her Jewish community,” Klein told the Bay Area’s J. Weekly upon his wife’s death in 1996. “She was an active member of [Berkeley’s] Congregation Beth El, and she read the Jewish Bulletin every week, cover to cover.”
His second marriage to Judi Cohen ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife Claudia Brooks, whom he married in 2020; Jonah and Jacob; a sister; a brother; and four grandchildren.
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