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Jeffrey Bruce Klein passed away on March 13, 2025 in Menlo Park, CA. Born in Scranton, Jeff was a graduate of Columbia University and he had a distinguished career as an investigative journalist, magazine editor, college professor and novelist. He is survived by his wife Claudia, sons Jacob and Jonah, sister Carol White and brother Ken.
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Mark Nussbaum
Sorry to hear about Jeff's passing. We were close friends thru grade school, Boy Scouts and basketball at the JCC. Lost contact after Central, but heard him on the radio being interviewed several times.
Jeffrey Leventhal
Growing up with Jeff and working with him during summers was the best. He was whip smart, had a great sense of humor, was always full of energy, and was extremely passionate about important social issues. He will truly be missed. My condolences to his family members and friends.
Jeff Leventhal
Mike Lucks
This article about Jeff appeared in the Washington Post on March 19, 2025.
Author: Harrison Smith
Jeffrey Klein, a founder and top editor of Mother Jones, dies at 77
Jeffrey Klein, an investigative journalist who co-founded the muckraking magazine Mother Jones and served as its editor in chief in the 1990s, directing investigations into corporate skulduggery, political corruption and the bonds between big business and elected officials, died March 13 at his home in Menlo Park, California. He was 77.
The cause was complications from an advanced nerve disease, said his sons Jacob and Jonah. Mr. Klein had been diagnosed about 15 years ago with progressive familial neuropathy, they said.
An ambitious, energetic editor with an abiding skepticism toward political orthodoxies — both liberal and conservative -- Mr. Klein was only 28 when Mother Jones published its debut issue in February 1976. Named after Mary Harris Jones, an Irish American labor activist and self-proclaimed “hell-raiser” who died in 1930, the magazine began out of a cramped office above a San Francisco McDonald’s, where it was assembled by a staff of 17. It quickly grew to become a standard-bearer for the American left, with 150,000 subscribers after its first two years and 238,000 at its commercial peak in 1980. The magazine has continued to compete for top journalism awards after merging in 2024 with the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Coming together in the aftermath of Watergate, the anti-Vietnam War movement and the dissolution of Ramparts magazine, a left-wing touchstone that folded in 1975, Mother Jones was initially led by a small group of journalists who worked by committee, taking turns serving as managing editor. Mr. Klein was the second person to hold the job, after Adam Hochschild.
“Like all of us, he wanted it to tackle injustice and talk about concentrations of power,” said Hochschild, a journalist and historian. “He didn’t like being put in pigeonholes. He was always arguing for, ‘Let’s not do anything in lockstep.’”
Mr. Klein showed “immense determination” in recruiting writers to the magazine, said Hochschild, who recalled how the young editor arranged to meet Ted Solotaroff, the well-connected founder of the New American Review, during a trip to New York City. “Now I’m going out to lunch,” Solotaroff told him. “Stay here and copy anything you want from my Rolodex.” His efforts paid off. For the magazine’s first issue, Mr. Klein secured a memoiristic essay by Chinese-born writer Li-li Ch’en, describing her upbringing in Beijing. The piece won a National Magazine Award, a rare honor for a new publication, and helped establish Mother Jones as a destination for stylish writing, not just investigative reporting. Over the next few years, Mr. Klein’s byline appeared frequently in the magazine. He profiled porn kingpin Larry Flynt; traveled to Moscow to report on the plight of Soviet Jews; pressed Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes” on why, in his view,the program didn’t focus enough on corporate misconduct; and helped reveal financial ties between Richard V. Allen, who soon became President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, and investor Robert Vesco, who had fled the country amid allegations of fraud and money laundering.
Mr. Klein left Mother Jones in 1981 to serve as editor in chief of San Francisco magazine. He later ran West, the Sunday magazine of the San Jose Mercury News, where he mentored journalists including Susan Faludi, a future Pulitzer Prize winner. In an email, Faludi described Mr. Klein as “that rare editor whose enthusiasm and energy make all the difference to a young reporter,” adding that his “excitement, championship and generosity” proved crucial as she wrote the stories that formed the basis of her first book, “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.”
In 1992, Mr. Klein returned to Mother Jones as editor in chief. He went on to usher the publication into the digital era — in 1993, it became one of the first general-interest magazines to launch its own website — while introducing new features including the Mother Jones 400, a list of the country’s largest political donors (and a cheeky nod to Forbes magazine’s list of wealthiest Americans).
Mr. Klein wrote and edited headline-making coverage about Senate Majority Leader and 1996 presidential candidate Bob Dole, highlighting the Kansas Republican’s close-knit relationship to the tobacco industry.
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He also oversaw reporting into GOP strategist Don Sipple, whose two ex-wives had accused him of domestic abuse while testifying in a child custody case. Sipple denied the allegations and filed a $12.5 million libel suit,
which was thrown out after a Los Angeles judge found that the story was based on court records.
For years, the magazine focused repeatedly on conservative House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whom Mr. Klein
considered “brilliant and ruthless … the most dangerous man in America.” A 1995 Mother Jones feature
by Glenn Simpson reported on Gingrich’s alleged misuse of tax-exempt money to teach a college course with partisan overtones — allegations that later became part of a congressional probe. In 1997, the House of Representatives voted to reprimand Gingrich and fine him $300,000, making him the first House speaker to be sanctioned for ethics violations.
In a departure from Mother Jones’s traditional political coverage, Mr. Klein devoted almost all of a 1997 issue to coverage of spirituality and religion, arguing that liberals “cannot allow spirituality to be the exclusive preserve of the politically conservative.” (Mr. Klein was a nonobservant Jew.) That same year, he reportedly irritated some of Mother Jones’s board members with an essay he wrote about affirmative action, a policy that he considered a political disaster, chipping away at “liberals’ moral credibility as reformers.”
Mr. Klein resigned from the magazine in 1998, saying he had come under pressure from board members who wanted him “to toe a conventional left-wing line,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “I felt it was part of my mandate to take the magazine to a place where it could be a useful journalistic force in the next century,” he told the newspaper. “To some extent that means accepting places where [the left has] been successful and rejecting places where you’ve been a failure.”
The youngest of three children, Jeffrey Bruce Klein was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Jan. 15, 1948. His father was a doctor who died when Mr. Klein was 12, suffering a heart attack in the middle of a golf game.
Mr. Klein’s widowed mother, already in poor health, was soon confined to her bed, where she remained until her death in 1972. She was officially diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, although Mr. Klein was convinced they shared the same neurological disorder.
At Columbia University, Mr. Klein studied psychology, took a year-long seminar with literary critic Lionel Trilling, wrote for the student humor magazine and became active in the anti-Vietnam War movement. He graduated in 1969, packed his red Volkswagen Beetle and drove cross-country to the Bay Area, where he briefly studied in a training program for teachers and dropped out to start his journalism career.
His first published article, for the quarterly Columbia Forum in 1970, reflected on his experience cutting sugar cane outside Havana with the Venceremos Brigade, an exchange program that brought young people to Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
Years later, at West magazine, Mr. Klein reported on the military’s interest in the technology and space industries,conducting research that informed his 1991 novel “The Black Hole Affair,” a paperback thriller about an “orbital weapon powerful enough to destroy entire nations.”
Mr. Klein had two sons with his first wife, Judith Weinstein, a clinical psychologist he married in 1971. She
died of breast cancer in 1996. His second marriage, to Judi Cohen, ended in divorce. In 2020, he married Claudia Brooks, a lawyer. In addition to his wife and sons, survivors include a sister; a brother, and four grandchildren.
After leaving Mother Jones, Mr. Klein reinvented himself by founding a start-up to develop personalized websites. He also taught journalism and co-produced a 2005 series about China’s rising economy
for the “PBS NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” which won a Gerald Loeb Award for business reporting.
Until his death, he was working on a book about the history of investigative journalism. Mr. Klein concluded that “in almost every great investigative journalist, they had some trauma in their childhood that had steered them on this course,” his son Jonah said.
“He chose investigative journalism, but it almost chose him in a way,” Jonah added, saying that Mr. Klein had developed a profound skepticism — and empathy for the powerless — after losing his father and dealing with adults who were far from forthcoming about his mother’s declining health. “He had a lot of inner pain, and he wanted to channel it in a positive way by taking down people who were corrupt. That was his quest in life.”
David Eisner
I had loss contact with Jeff, but I was in San Francisco for a meeting. I stopped in at Mother Jones. They denied having contact information for him. When I got back to the hotel room there was a message from him. In recent years we exchanged monthly emails and a phone call about every 2-3 months. He was the same Jeff we knew in high school, funny, inquisitive, and analytic. We talked about the good old days, any information on classmates and of course current events. Jeff politically was middle of the road left of center. As an investigative reporter he wanted the truth and as the Post article states he was after corruption. His last published article was on John McCain. He went to Vietnam and talked to his jailer and the man who pulled him out of the water. McCain Annapolis classmates would not talk to him so he had journalism students reach out to them. They talked off the record. He tried twice to get the scoop on Clinton, but could not get the verification he needed. Similarly with a Democratic senator. Jeff wanted the truth and he wanted it verified before he would publish. I will miss our conversations and forever value the friendship I had with him.
Natalie Gelb
Jeff was SO smart, with a mischievous streak.
We stayed in touch throughout our lives. He was a man of great integrity...sensitive, kind, generous, humble and fearless. He left his mark on me and on the world. He was very special.
David Fetzer
I'm not at all surprised that Jeff has been so well-regarded in his trade and admired by his boyhood and lifelong friends. He fulfilled my private observation that he was "going somewhere.". I've never met anyone else who has so thoroughly fulfilled his potential. A whole lot of people are missing him.
Mike Lucks
This article written by Clay Risen appeared in the New York Times on March 20, 2025. If you own a digital subscription to the Times, you may view the full piece by clicking here. Otherwise, the text version is printed below.
Jeffrey Bruce Klein, a Founder and Editor of Mother Jones, Dies at 77
Jeffrey Bruce Klein, one of four journalists who in 1976 founded the magazine Mother Jones, rooting it in the crusading left-wing politics of the 1960s, and who returned in 1992 as editor in chief to rebrand it for younger, more digital readers, died on March 13 at his home in Menlo Park, Calif. He was 77.
His sons, Jacob and Jonah, said the cause was complications of a nerve disease.
Mr. Klein was an East Coast transplant to the Bay Area, drawn in the midst of 1960s counterculture by the possibility that the era’s anti-establishment character could continue to drive the region’s lively left-wing journalism.
In 1974 he joined Adam Hochschild, Paul Jacobs and Richard Parker, all editors at the progressive magazine Ramparts, to plan a publication that would expand the left’s focus on government malfeasance to include corporate muckraking and the role of money in politics.
They called it Mother Jones, in honor of the fiery labor leader Mary Harris Jones. Working from a cramped office above a McDonald’s in San Francisco, they produced their first issue in 1976.
Mr. Klein was officially the magazine’s literary editor, though in practice he commissioned writers of all kinds.
“He energetically barraged every writer he could think of with phone calls and letters,” Mr. Hochschild said in an interview.
Among his first finds was a short memoir by the Chinese writer Li-Li Ch’en, which ran in the inaugural issue and won a National Magazine Award in 1977.
In 1981, Mr. Klein left to become the editor in chief of San Francisco magazine. A few years later he founded West, the Sunday magazine of The San Jose Mercury News, where he cultivated an army of young journalists.
“He had this unlimited enthusiasm about whatever we wanted to work on,” one of those journalists, Susan Faludi, said in an interview. She added that he commissioned her to write stories that became the basis of her first book, “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” (1991).
By the early 1990s, Mother Jones was sagging, having fallen, in the eyes of many readers, into the rut of predictably left-leaning diatribes. It had once had as many as 238,000 subscriptions; that number had dropped by half.
Mother Jones was the first general-interest magazine to have a substantial website. In 1994, Mr. Klein published an online database of corporate political donors, cross-referenced with their recipients.
His criticism was bipartisan: Though he took glee in going after Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999, he was almost as savage in his attacks on Bill Clinton, whom he described as a “stunningly disappointing president.”
With an eye toward attracting new readers, Mr. Klein also ran articles that pushed against liberal orthodoxies, like one that was critical of affirmative action, and on matters outside the magazine’s core interests, like spirituality.
Such articles caused a rift between Mr. Klein and several members of the Mother Jones board, who wanted to hew closer to the progressive line. He resigned in 1998.
Jeffrey Bruce Klein was born on Jan. 15, 1948, in Scranton, Pa. His father, Harold, was a doctor, and his mother, Helen (Blum) Klein, managed the home.
He studied psychology at Columbia University and graduated in 1969; despite his left-wing politics, he did not participate in the protests that rocked the school while he was there.
He did, however, study under the famed literary scholar Lionel Trilling, an experience he later cited as critical to his decision to become a writer.
After graduating, like countless idealistic young people at the time, he packed up his Volkswagen Beetle and drove to California. He would live there for the rest of his life.
He married Claudia Brooks in 2020. Along with his sons, both from his first marriage, she survives him, as do four grandchildren; his sister, Carol White; and his brother, Ken.
After leaving Mother Jones in 1998, Mr. Klein taught journalism at Stanford and worked as a producer for “PBS NewsHour” with Jim Lehrer. One of his “NewsHour” programs, on the Chinese economy, won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2006.
In between editing investigative journalism, he wrote a science fiction thriller, “The Black Hole Affair” (1991).
And while his pragmatism irked some of his friends on the left, he saw politics differently.
“There is obviously a left and right dimension, but I think the more critical dimension is outsider and insider,” he told The New York Times in 1993. “I think that is where the real political battles are.”
Donald Kintzer
Very sorry to learn of Jeff's passing. What a smart and gifted guy ! Jeff sat behind me in homeroom for 4 years. Thoughts and prayers to his family.
Robert Davidow
Jeff was one of my closest friends, the first 18 years of my life.
Starting in grade school, I would stop by his house every morning, and we'd walk to and from James Madison every day. We continued this practice, walking to Central High. I think his first car was a Mustang convertible, in which I had innumerable rides.
I spent countless hours in his basement, playing pool, and we shared a tent at Goose Pond Boy Scout Camp, for several summers.
After High School, we went our separate ways, but I visited with him at Columbia, with his first wife in Berkley, and last saw him at his home in San Francisco, several years ago.
Jeff was very bright and determined, and I can only assume that he succeeded at most of what he set out to achieve in life. He's one of the few of our classmates to achieve national prominence, and his was a life well and fully lived.
He'll be missed, but will live on in the memories of those whose lives he touched, including mine.
Mike Lucks
Jeffrey's son Jacob has notified us that a Celebration of Life for his father will held on Saturday May 24, 2025 in San Bruno, CA. Jeff's childhood friends from Scranton are welcome to attend. If you're interested, please email Jacob at jacobaaronklein@gmail.com to request an invitation with details.