Nathan Kleinman

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Nathan Kleinman is an activist involved primarily in working against the genocide in Darfur, a region of western Sudan. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 31st, 1982.

From June 30th, 2005 to July 11th, 2005, he undertook a solo hunger strike outside the White House to raise awareness of the situation in Sudan. On July 10th he was joined by another hunger striker, Jay McGinley, who fasted for eight days.

Kleinman has since been involved in the April 2006 Sudan Freedom Walk, a three-week march from the United Nations in New York to the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. organized by Simon Deng, a former child slave from Southern Sudan. In December 2006, he and Deng organized a Second Sudan Freedom Walk, from NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, The Netherlands. The day after the Walk, the ICC announced for the first time that it would indict members of the Sudanese government for crimes against humanity.

Kleinman is the founder of The International Aurora, a news-blog focused on international news, usually from often ignored places like Sudan and Oaxaca. His new Aurora takes its name from the Aurora General Advertiser newspaper, a Philadelphia daily first published in 1790 by Benjamin Franklin Bache (journalist), the grandson of Ben Franklin. The blog seems to have suffered lately, as Kleinman has been devoting most of his time to volunteering in the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. He was elected to be a Delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Pennsylvania's 13th Congressional District, pledged to Senator Obama.

Kleinman graduated in 2004 from Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, with a degree in Culture & Politics. At Georgetown he studied under Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, former US Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, and the late Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, former US Ambassador to the UN. His faculty mentor at Georgetown was the environmental historian J.R. McNeill.