Nathan Kleinman is a human rights activist and political organizer. He is noted for undertaking two political fasts and for his role as a top aide to former Congressman Joe Sestak during his 2010 U.S. Senate campaign. He is currently active in the Occupy movement.
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From June 30, 2005 to July 11, 2005, Kleinman maintained a water-only fast outside the White House to raise awareness of the genocide in Darfur. On July 10th he was joined by Jay McGinley, who fasted for a further eight days.
In April 2006, Kleinman participated in the first Sudan Freedom Walk, a three-week march from the United Nations building in New York to the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. organized by Simon Deng, a former child-slave from Southern Sudan. In addition to being a featured speaker at events along the way, Kleinman also organized a large rally outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia (featuring the late Manute Bol).
In December 2006, Kleinman and Deng organized the second Sudan Freedom Walk, from NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, The Netherlands. Deng and Kleinman also co-organized a march and rally with Sudan Sunrise in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 1, 2008.
Kleinman's essay "Something Beautiful in Remote Oaxaca: Real Democracy" is the only English-language account of the election of a former political prisoner (Agustin Sosa Ortega) as mayor of the remote city of Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico. It is also one of the only accounts in any language of the APPO-affiliated struggle for human rights in the Sierra Mazateca.
On October 6, 2009, Kleinman began his second political fast in support of non-violent resisters to the Honduran coup regime of Roberto Micheletti. He joined an international group of fasters coordinated by the National Resistance Front Against the Coup d'Etat in Honduras. After two weeks fasting, Kleinman - and the other hunger strikers - suspended their fast following a change in strategy.
According to a YouTube video, Kleinman had aimed to fast one day for each of those killed by the coup regime, using the latest count at the time from the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras (or COFADEH).[1][2][3]
Kleinman became involved in Honduras after visiting the country with a human rights delegation organized by Witness for Peace in September 2009. The delegation met with some of the most public resisters to the military coup regime including COFADEH founder Bertha Oliva de Nativí, Via Campesina leader Rafael Alegría, and Father José Andrés Tamayo Cortez (who was in hiding at the time).
Kleinman was a volunteer and staff member in Barack Obama's presidential campaign of in Pennsylvania. He was also elected and served as a Delegate to the Democratic National Convention from Pennsylvania's 13th Congressional District, located in eastern Montgomery County and Northeast Philadelphia.
In 2010, Kleinman worked as an aide aide to Joe Sestak during his successful primary campaign against then-Senator Arlen Specter and his unsuccessful general election campaign against Patrick J. Toomey.
He served as a Legislative Assistant to Pennsylvania State Representative Josh Shapiro in 2011.
He is a graduate of Abington Friends School in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania (2000), and a graduate of Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, with a degree in Culture & Politics (2004). He also studied Archaeology and Native American History at Leiden University from 2006 to 2007.
Kleinman is an active board member of the Philadelphia-based Jewish Social Policy Action Network (JSPAN). He also runs the Baederwood Cultural Heritage Garden Project, an all-volunteer effort to preserve rare food plant varieties from around the world, but especially historical cultivars developed in Philadelphia and the mid-Atlantic region.
He is an active participant in the Occupy or General Assembly movement, mainly through Occupy Philly and InterOccupy.org.