Naomi Klein

Early life and education

Klein spent much of her teenage years in shopping malls, obsessed with designer labels. As a child and teenager, she found it "very oppressive to have a very public feminist mother", and she rejected politics, instead embracing "full-on consumerism".

She has attributed her change in worldview to two catalysts. One was when she was 17 and preparing for the University of Toronto, her mother had a stroke and became severely disabled. Naomi, her father, and her brother took care of Bonnie through the period in hospital and at home, making educational sacrifices to do so. That year off prevented her "from being such a brat". The next year, after she had begun her studies at the University of Toronto, the second catalyst occurred: the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre of female engineering students, which proved to be a wake-up call to feminism.

Klein's writing career began with contributions to The Varsity, a student newspaper, where she served as editor-in-chief. After her third year at the University of Toronto, she dropped out of university to take a job at The Globe and Mail, followed by an editorship at This Magazine. In 1995, she returned to the University of Toronto with the intention of finishing her degree; however, she left to pursue an internship in journalism before acquiring the final credits required to complete her degree.

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Iraq War criticism

Klein has written about the Iraq War. In "Baghdad Year Zero" (Harper's Magazine, September 2004), Klein argues that, contrary to popular belief, the George W. Bush administration did have a clear plan for post-invasion Iraq: to build a completely unconstrained free market economy. She describes plans to allow foreigners to extract wealth from Iraq and the methods used to achieve those goals. Her "Baghdad Year Zero" was one of the inspirations for the 2008 film War, Inc. Klein's "Bring Najaf to New York" (The Nation, August 2004) argued that Muqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army "represents the overwhelmingly mainstream sentiment in Iraq" and that, if he were elected, "Sadr would try to turn Iraq into a theocracy like Iran", although his immediate demands were for "direct elections and an end to foreign occupation".

Venezuela

Klein signed a 2004 petition titled "We would vote for Hugo Chávez". In 2007, she described Venezuela under the Chávez government as a country where "citizens had renewed their faith in the power of democracy to improve their lives", and described Venezuela as a place sheltered by Chávez's policies from the economic shocks produced by capitalism. Rather, according to Klein, Chávez protected his country from financial crisis by building "a zone of relative economic calm and predictability." The Shock Doctrine was described as consistent with Klein's prior thinking about globalization, and in that book she portrays Chávez's policies as an example of public control of some sectors of the economy as protecting poor people from harm caused by globalization.

According to reviewer Todd Gitlin, who described the overall argument of Klein's book The Shock Doctrine (2007) as "more right than wrong", Klein is "a romantic" with unrealistic expectations [that] the Chávez government would produce a bright future in which worker-controlled co-operatives would run the economy. In 2017, Mark Milke lambasted Klein as a "useful idiot" who overlooked the authoritarian media control and many human rights abuses of the Chávez regime, and journalist James Kirchick criticized Klein, among other prominent Chávez boosters, who were "conspicuous [by their] silence in the face of the Venezuelan calamity" as the nation's economy and infrastructure collapsed during the crisis in Venezuela.

Criticism of Israel

In 2008, Klein was the keynote speaker at the first national conference of the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians (now Independent Jewish Voices). In January 2009, during the Gaza War, Klein supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, arguing that "the best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa."

In 2009, on the occasion of the publication of the Hebrew translation of her book The Shock Doctrine, Klein visited Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, combining the promotion of her book and the BDS campaign. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, she emphasized that it was important "not to boycott Israelis but rather to boycott the normalization of Israel and the conflict." In a speech in Ramallah on June 27, she apologized to Palestinians for not joining the BDS campaign earlier. Her remarks, particularly that "[some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free card", were characterized by Noam Schimmel, an op-ed columnist for The Jerusalem Post, as "violent" and "unethical", and as the "most perverse of aspersions on Jews, an age-old stereotype of Jews as intrinsically evil and malicious."

Klein was a spokesperson for the protest against the spotlight on Tel Aviv at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, which Klein said was a very selective and misleading portrait of Israel. She has also served on the advisory board of the anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace. In 2023, in the context of the Gaza war, she wrote:

For Zionist believers (I'm not one of them), Jew-hatred is the central rationale for why Israel must exist as a nuclear-armed fortress. Within this worldview, antisemitism is cast as a primordial force that cannot be weakened or confronted. The world will always turn away from us in our hour of need, Zionism tells us, just as it did during the Holocaust, which is why force alone is presented as the only conceivable response to any and all threats. The Israeli state's current murderous leveling of Gaza is the latest, unspeakably horrific manifestation of this ideology, and there will be more in the coming days.

At a "Seder in the Streets" event in 2024, held near Senator Chuck Schumer's residence, Klein spoke about the contemporary meaning of Passover and its relation to the war. Using the Exodus story of Israelites worshipping the golden calf as an idol, she drew parallels to what she called "the false idol of Zionism." She said: "It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery, the story of Passover itself, and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide."

Environmentalism

Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels. And together these pillars form an ideological wall that has blocked a serious response to climate change for decades.

— Naomi Klein

By 2009, Klein's attention had turned to environmentalism, with particular focus on climate change, the subject of her book This Changes Everything (2014). According to her website in 2016, the book and its accompanying film (released in 2015) would be about "how the climate crisis can spur economic and political transformation." She served on the board of directors of the non-profit group 350.org from 2011, through the fiscal year ending September 2018, and took part in their "Do the Math" tour in 2013, encouraging a divestment movement.

In an interview by Graeme Greene in New Internationalist, Klein rejected criticism that This Changes Everything politicized the climate issue and that the issue should be apolitical, asserting that such criticism reflected "how blind so many within the mainstream climate discussion are to the fact that they themselves are fully immersed within the confines of neoliberalism; ... It's a fantasy that you could fundamentally shift the building blocks of your economy without engaging with politics."

She encouraged the Occupy movement to join forces with the environmental movement, saying the financial crisis and the climate crisis are similarly rooted in unrestrained corporate greed. She gave a speech at Occupy Wall Street where she described the world as "upside down", where people act as if "there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions", and as if there are "limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need."

She has been a particularly vocal critic of the Athabasca oil sands development in Alberta, describing it in a TED Talk as a form of "terrestrial skinning." On September 2, 2011, she attended the demonstration against the Keystone Pipeline outside the White House and was arrested. Klein celebrated Obama's decision to postpone a decision on the Keystone pipeline until 2013 pending an environmental review as a victory for the environmental movement.

She attended the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. She put the blame for the failure of Copenhagen on President Barack Obama, and described her own country, Canada, as a "climate criminal". She presented the Angry Mermaid Award (a satirical award designed to recognize the corporations who have best sabotaged the climate negotiations) to Monsanto. Writing in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, she warned that the climate crisis constitutes a massive opportunity for disaster capitalists and corporations seeking to profit from crisis. But equally, the climate crisis "can be a historic moment to usher in the next great wave of progressive change", or a "People's Shock".

In 2016, following the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, Klein called for an international campaign to impose economic sanctions on the United States if his administration refused to abide by the terms of the Paris Agreement. In October 2022, Klein published an article on The Intercept that addressed the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference and the repression of the Egyptian government; the conference took place in Egypt, a country widely seen as repressive and autocratic. She goes on to state "Sisi's Egypt is making a big show of solar panels and biodegradable straws ... but in reality, the regime imprisons activists and bans research. The climate movement should not play along", calling it greenwashing. In an interview with Democracy Now!, she says "what is not welcome would be pointing out this enormous lucrative network of deals that the military itself is engaged in that are linked to fossil fuels, that are linked to destroying remaining green space in cities like Cairo". Klein also stressed the release of prominent political prisoner and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, and wrote a foreword to You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021), his collected writings translated by an anonymous collective.

Other activities

Klein contributes to The Nation, In These Times, The Globe and Mail, This Magazine, Harper's Magazine, and The Guardian, and is a senior contributor for The Intercept. She is a former Miliband Fellow and lectured at the London School of Economics on the anti-globalization movement. Her appointment as the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick began in October 2018 and ran for 3 years.

Klein ranked 11th in an internet poll of the top global intellectuals of 2005, a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals compiled by the Prospect magazine in conjunction with Foreign Policy magazine. On Google Scholar which tracks academic articles, Klein has an overall h-index of 53 and her publications have been cited in the scholarly literature over 49,000 times as of May 2023. She was involved in 2010 G-20 Toronto summit protests, condemning police force and brutality. She spoke to a rally seeking the release of protesters in front of police headquarters on June 28, 2010.

In October 2011, she visited Occupy Wall Street and gave a speech declaring the protest movement "the most important thing in the world". On November 10, 2011, she participated in a panel discussion about the future of Occupy Wall Street with four other panelists, including Michael Moore, William Greider, and Rinku Sen, in which she stressed the crucial nature of the evolving movement. Klein also made an appearance in the British radio show Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 in 2017.

Klein was a key instigator of the Leap Manifesto, a political manifesto issued in the context of the 2015 Canadian federal election focused on addressing the climate crisis through restructuring the Canadian economy and dealing with issues of income and wealth inequality, racism, and colonialism. The manifesto has been noted as an influence in the development of the Green New Deal and eventually led to the establishment of The Leap, an organization that works to promote the realization of the principles behind the original manifesto.

In 2019, along with other public figures, Klein signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn describing him as "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world" and endorsed him in the 2019 UK general election. In 2025, Klein actively participated in New York canvassing for Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. She also supported her husband Avi Lewis's campaign for leader of the New Democratic Party in 2026.

Honours and awards

• 2009: Warwick Prize for Writing, for The Shock Doctrine
• 2011: Honorary doctorate, Saint Thomas University
• 2011: Time magazine's list of Top 100 Non-Fiction books published since 1923, No Logo
• 2014: Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction for This Changes Everything
• 2014: The Observer 'Book of the Year', This Changes Everything
• 2014: The Guardian Readers' 10 best books of 2014, for This Changes Everything
• 2016: Sydney Peace Prize
• 2017: No Logo – Included in The Guardian's list of the Top 100 Non Fiction books of all-time
• 2019: Honorary doctorate, University of Amsterdam
• 2021: The Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Media Ecology Association
• 2023: The Guardian's Best Ideas Books of 2023, Doppelganger
• 2024: Women's Prize for Non-Fiction for Doppelganger

Nominations

• 2017: National Book Award for Nonfiction for No Is Not Enough