The leader of a right-wing pro-Israel advocacy group that was founded in the 19th century is facing a lawsuit alleging racist and sexist behavior, as well as bullying, The Daily Beast reports.
Morton Klein, president of right-wing pro-Israel Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), is being sued along with the group and former Trump lawyer and ZOA board member David Schoen.
The plaintiff, 62-year-old John Rosen, who formerly served as ZOA’s executive vice-president, is seeking $1.2 million in damages
Rosen claims he faced retaliation after filing a whistleblower complaint detailing the allegations against Klein in Feb 2022.
He further alleges that Klein ran the nonprofit as his “personal fiefdom” and that the 76-year-old created a “toxic work environment” and that leadership was “rife with dysfunction and impropriety.”
Klein is described in the lawsuit as having a “volatile temper, mixed with wildly inappropriate comments—smacking of racism and misogyny.”
ZOA was founded in 1897 as a right-wing pro-Israel advocacy group that backed Donald Trump in 2016 and has hosted far-right figures including Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka.
Klein last year called Trump the “best friend Israel ever had in the White House,” the report said. He awarded the former president the Theodor Herzl Medallion, the group's highest honor.
Gorka served as a White House advisor to Trump while he was an active member of a far-right Hungarian group deemed by the U.S. State Department to having been “under the direction of the Nazi Government of Germany” during World War II, The Forward reported in 2017.
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