Mort Klein

Morton Klein has served as President of the Zionist Organization of America since 1993, leading the oldest pro-Israel organization in the United States — founded in 1897 — and establishing a reputation as the most uncompromising, confrontational, and ideologically consistent voice in the American Jewish organizational world. Born October 25, 1947, in the Dachau displaced persons camp in Germany to Holocaust survivor parents who had been incarcerated in Auschwitz, Klein was brought to the United States as an infant and grew up in Philadelphia. He earned his economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania before a career as a biostatistician that preceded his full-time entry into pro-Israel advocacy. His biography — literally born in the shadow of Auschwitz — informs an advocacy style that refuses diplomatic hedging on questions of Jewish security and Israeli sovereignty.

Klein has led the ZOA to positions consistently to the right of AIPAC and the organized American Jewish mainstream: opposing the Oslo Accords when they were signed, opposing American pressure on Israel to restrain settlement construction, opposing any framework that treats the Palestinian Authority as a legitimate peace partner given its continued support for terrorism through the "pay to slay" martyr payments, and opposing what he characterizes as the ADL's and other Jewish organizations' accommodation of anti-Israel progressivism. Where most Jewish organizations calibrated their criticism of the Palestinian Authority, Klein was categorical. Where most organizations attempted to maintain bipartisan relationships by softening positions, Klein was specific about what he viewed as the moral clarity of the Israeli cause.

The ZOA under Klein has been an early and consistent opponent of normalization with the Palestinian Authority without preconditions, a leading voice demanding accountability for campuses where Jewish students face harassment, and a plaintiff in legal actions against universities that Klein argues have created hostile environments for Jewish students. His significance on the Iron 100 is not his organizational size but his function: Klein represents the right boundary of the American Jewish pro-Israel advocacy space, stating positions that other organizations eventually adopt after Klein has made them possible to say. At Rank 40, he is the ideological anchor who holds the line while others calibrate.