Joel Klein
Image by getty images
One year ago, Joel Klein had the most thankless job in New York City. He’s since moved on to what may be the most thankless job in the world. In January, Klein, 65, ended nearly a decade as New York City Schools Chancellor. Despite gains in graduation rates and college enrollments, Klein was known as a brawler as chancellor: He clashed with the powerful teachers unions and with parents groups, most of whose members disagreed with his vision and disliked him personally.
When Klein announced he would move on to a position developing education business ventures at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, it sounded as though he was landing a plush gig outside the public eye. Then, the long-bubbling scandal over phone hacking at one of News Corp’s British tabloids, the News of the World, exploded, and Murdoch dispatched Klein to clean up the mess. Murdoch tasked his new aide with leading the internal investigation, putting Klein on the front lines of one of the largest media scandals in recent memory.
In a year that saw hundreds of rabbis sign an advertisement chastising two prominent News Corp. employees for their abuse of Holocaust rhetoric, Klein’s elevation may serve to soothe tensions between the company and the Jewish community. But Murdoch likely chose Klein for a different reason: A former U.S. Justice Department attorney who led the prosecution of the landmark 1998 Microsoft anti-trust suit, Klein is the epitome of the brilliant Jewish lawyer.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
