Ezra Klein. Bless his heart, the poor guy.
Earlier this week, the New York Times columnist and Democratic Party thought leader tried to express solidarity with pro-Hamas activists who disrupted his event at Sarah Lawrence—a mid-to-bottom-tier liberal arts college in New York. He was not successful.
In a video taken at the event—a conversation between Klein and Sarah Lawrence president Cristle [sic] Collins Judd—a keffiyeh-clad agitator berated Klein while a group of masked students held a banner denouncing the Jewish journalist as a "Nazi normalizer." Judd sat silently throughout.
The disruption did not come as a surprise. The day before Klein arrived on campus, which happened to be Holocaust Remembrance Day, pro-Hamas activists decorated the campus with graffiti blasting Klein as a "Zionist pig" and "genocide denier." They had even organized a faculty-sponsored counter-event to protest the platforming of a "liberal Zionist mouthpiece."
The student agitator accused Klein of enabling Israel's so-called genocide in Gaza. The columnist, whose speaking fees typically run from $40,000 to $70,000, sought to assure the shrieking activist that he also despised Israel, which he said was tormenting Palestinians through "apartheid and subjugation." The activist kept ranting about fascism, so Klein pleaded for his attention. "Buddy, buddy, talk to me," he said. "I am right here." They didn't care.
The anti-Israel agitators made their way to exit, chanting as they went. "Ezra Klein, you're a liar, you set Palestine on fire," they shouted. "Every time Ezra lies, a neighborhood in Gaza dies." They soon joined other protesters outside the venue, clapping along to more chants about how Sarah Lawrence was inviting fascists and protecting Zionism.
"Welcome to Sarah Lawrence," Judd quipped. Klein thanked her for the courtesy.
Klein appeared somewhat surprised when the activists refused to engage with him. "Why do you think I deny what's going on in Gaza?" he asked the terrorist sympathizer. "I don't think you know what I think."
It's safe to assume the student activists didn't know much about anything. Klein has not shied away from criticizing Israel, which he has argued is on the verge of becoming a "pariah state." He voted for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.) and said he didn't think there was "anything anti-Semitic about him at all." He has described "anti-Zionists" of the left as promoting universal human rights, even if they occasionally hold "dumb signs at protest rallies." In Klein's view, it's the right-wing anti-Semites who are motivated by racial animus.
At the Times, Klein has interviewed "genocide scholars." He has platformed Hamas apologists such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protest organizer who has repeatedly refused to condemn the terrorist group. Klein nodded along as Khalil justified the Oct. 7, 2023, attack as something "we couldn't avoid" and said that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu "thrives on the killing of Palestinians."
Klein gently pushed back at one point to ask Khalil if Hamas bore any responsibility for starting a war with Israel and inviting the devastating consequences that followed, but Khalil's answer didn't change. "It's a desperate attempt to tell the world that Palestinians are here, that Palestinians are part of the equation," Khalil said. "That was my interpretation of why Hamas did the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel." Klein changed the subject by asking Khalil about how he got involved with the protests at Columbia.
These are Klein's ideological allies, but it didn't stop the activists from shouting him down at Sarah Lawrence. In addition to being Jewish, Klein has also described the October 7 attack as "one of the true acts of barbarism in modern history." Maybe that's what upset them. Or maybe they're just passionate about human rights.
