Nathan Kleinman

Nathan "Nate" Kleinman is a farmer, plant breeder, human rights activist and political organizer. A Philadelphia native, he was an active participant in the Occupy movement and was a candidate for US Congress in the 13th District of Pennsylvania for the 2012 election.

He is co-founder and co-director of the Experimental Farm Network, a non-profit organization built to facilitate collaborative research in the field of sustainable agriculture, with a focus on using traditional plant breeding to develop carbon-sequestering perennial staple crops. The Experimental Farm Network aims to fight climate change by crowdsourcing new paradigms in farming.

Kleinman was an active participant in the Occupy movement, mainly through Occupy Philly, InterOccupy.net, Occupy Sandy, and Occupy Wall St. He was part of the team that organized the 2012 Occupy National Gathering in Philadelphia. Kleinman was arrested in front of a Bank of America chapter in New York City on September 17, 2012, during protests marking the first anniversary of Occupy Wall St. He helped coordinate Occupy Sandy New Jersey following Superstorm Sandy.

Kleinman is a board member of the progressive Philadelphia-based Jewish Social Policy Action Network (JSPAN) and GMO Free Pennsylvania. He formerly served on the board of the Project for Nuclear Awareness.

US politics

Kleinman was a volunteer and later a staff member on Barack Obama's presidential campaign in Pennsylvania. He was also elected and served as a Delegate to the 2008 Democratic National Convention from Pennsylvania's 13th Congressional District.

In 2010, Kleinman worked as an aide to then-Congressman Joe Sestak during his successful primary campaign against then-Senator Arlen Specter, and his subsequent unsuccessful general election campaign against Patrick J. Toomey.

He served as a legislative assistant to Pennsylvania State Representative Josh Shapiro in 2011.

From late January through April 2012, Kleinman was a candidate for U.S. Congress in Pennsylvania's 13th District, challenging incumbent Congresswoman Allyson Schwartz. Politico called him the "First Occupy Candidate." Kleinman opposed Schwartz because of her controversial votes in favor of the Patriot Act, the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and certain free trade deals. His candidacy challenged the conventional wisdom that Allyson Schwartz has governed as a progressive. During the last two months of the campaign, some supporters of Kleinman and the Occupy movement camped directly in front of Congresswoman Schwartz's district office in Jenkintown, then christened themselves "Occupy Jenkintown" and moved behind her office to the Town Square, which they re-named Benjamin Lay Plaza after the radical Quaker activist who once lived in a cave nearby.

In March 2012, Kleinman withdrew from the ballot following a court challenge and launched a write-in campaign. Schwartz went on to win the Democratic nomination unopposed.

Sudan

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 10 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 City 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 Manute Bol, who used to jokingly refer to the atheist Kleinman as "Rabbi".

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 organized a march and rally with Sudan Sunrise in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 1, 2008, just prior to the 2008 Iowa caucuses.

Honduras

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'État in Honduras. After two weeks of fasting, Kleinman - and the other hunger strikers - suspended their fast following a change in strategy.

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).

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).

Oaxaca

Kleinman got involved with APPO and the peaceful struggle for justice and equality in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, while visiting Oaxaca City and Huautla de Jimenez in early 2007. Kleinman spent many weeks among the indigenous Mazatec communities across the Sierra Mazateca, using Huautla as a base. He met with teachers, students, laborers, activists, union members, and local officials, while attempting to study Mazatec culture and history for a yet-unwritten master's thesis.

Kleinman's essay "Something Beautiful in Remote Oaxaca: Real Democracy" is the only English-language account of the election of former political prisoner (Agustin Sosa Ortega) as mayor of Huautla de Jimenez. When Kleinman interviewed Sosa Ortega in 2007, the Mazatec organizer was on the run from authorities, hiding in a school guarded by young men wielding molotov-cocktails. Kleinman's essay is one of the only accounts in any language of the APPO-affiliated struggle for human rights in the Sierra Mazateca.

Experimental Farm Network

Kleinman founded the Experimental Farm Network Cooperative (EFN) in 2013 with his friend Dusty Hinz. The purpose of EFN is to create a massive citizen-science project capable of driving innovation in sustainable agriculture and ultimately using agriculture to fight climate change. EFN also seeks to preserve and disseminate rare and potentially important seeds, both to other researchers and the general public. A major part of Kleinman's seed-saving work has involved collecting seeds from war-torn countries including Syria, Afghanistan, and South Sudan, along with countries threatened by climate change, economic dislocation, or violence, including the Maldives, Moldova, and Honduras. EFN has been featured in The Guardian, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and "Edible Jersey," among other publications.

Nate Kleinman is a graduate of Abington Friends School in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania (2000), and Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, with a B.S.F.S. degree in culture and politics (2004). Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was one of his professors. He also studied archaeology and Native American history at Leiden University in the Netherlands from 2006 to 2007.