Naomi Klein - Family

Family

Klein was born in Montreal, Quebec, and brought up in a Jewish family with a history of peace activism. Her parents had moved to Montreal from the U.S. in 1967 as war resisters to the Vietnam War. Her mother, documentary film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, is best known for her anti-pornography film Not a Love Story. Her father, Michael Klein, is a physician and a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her brother, Seth Klein, is director of the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Her paternal grandparents were communists who began to turn against the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and had abandoned communism by 1956. In 1942 her grandfather Phil Klein, an animator at Disney, was fired after the Disney animators' strike, and went to work at a shipyard instead. Klein's father grew up surrounded by ideas of social justice and racial equality, but found it "difficult and frightening to be the child of Communists", a so-called red diaper baby.

Klein's husband, Avi Lewis, works as a TV journalist and documentary filmmaker. His parents are the writer and activist Michele Landsberg and politician and diplomat Stephen Lewis, son of David Lewis, one of the founders of the Canadian New Democratic Party, son in turn of Moishe Lewis, born Losz, a Jewish labour activist of "the Bund" who left Central Europe for Canada in 1921. The couple's first child, son Toma, was born on June 13, 2012.