Max Blumenthal

Blumenthal is the son of Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant and adviser to Hillary Clinton.[3] At a 2016 event, Max Blumenthal described himself as a Jewish man from Washington, D.C., who came from an influential, upper-middle-class family. He said this background helped him present anti-Zionist views to other upper-middle-class Jewish Americans.[4]

Blumenthal founded The Grayzone and has served as its editor-in-chief; the Anti-Defamation League describes the publication as far-left.[1][2] The outlet had accumulated more than 360,000 followers on X, 76,000 on Instagram, 32,000 on Facebook, and more than 3,500 Patreon supporters paying between $5 and $50 per month.[1] He has also contributed to MintPress News.[1] Earlier in his career, he wrote for The Nation and blogged for the Huffington Post.[9][10]

Blumenthal's professional associations have drawn significant scrutiny. He has regularly contributed to the Russian state-affiliated outlets RT and Sputnik.[1] He attended a 2015 Moscow gala celebrating RT's tenth anniversary, reportedly as a paid speaker at an event hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and The Grayzone was founded shortly after that trip.[1] He later addressed the United Nations Security Council at Moscow's invitation, at which time he accused the West of “provoking nuclear annihilation.”[1] He attended a 2019 conference in Damascus that was addressed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and a related association's tax returns listed a $20,000 grant to Blumenthal in 2018.[1]

Blumenthal, The Grayzone, and MintPress News were among recipients of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism, alongside figures described as pro-Putin and pro-Assad influencers.[1] The Foundation for Defense of Democracies also described The Grayzone, citing a 2019 Commentary characterization, as “a one-stop propaganda shop, devoted largely to pushing a pro-Assad line on Syria, a pro-regime line on Venezuela, a pro-Putin line on Russia, and a pro-Hamas line on Israel and Palestine.”[8]

At an October 7, 2024 conference in Istanbul, Blumenthal conducted an interview with Osama Hamdan of Hamas's political bureau, which was posted on The Grayzone's YouTube channel.[11] During the exchange, Blumenthal asked whether Muhammad Deif was alive; Hamdan answered that Deif was alive and still leading his troops.[11] The Foundation for Defense of Democracies separately reported that Blumenthal interviewed Hamdan at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs' Fourth International Conference on Palestine in Istanbul.[12]

Earlier in his career, CAMERA reported that Blumenthal appeared on Chicago Public Radio station WBEZ's Worldview program in August 2007, where he used edited excerpts from interviews filmed at a Christians United for Israel conference and portrayed attendees as “unhinged fanatics or manipulators.”[9] In 2009, HonestReporting accused him of drawing a moral equivalence between the killing of Iranian protester Neda Soltan and Israeli military conduct at Gaza fence protests.[10] That same year, he filmed drunken Jewish students discussing President Obama on the eve of Obama's Cairo speech; the Huffington Post removed the video, saying it “had no news value,” and YouTube also removed it.[10]

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, published in 2013 by Nation Books and running to 496 pages, was Blumenthal's major early work.[5] The book takes readers through Israel and the Palestinian territories, beginning with Israel's 2008–09 Gaza war and elections, and covers the post-Oslo period, the political careers of Avigdor Lieberman and Benjamin Netanyahu, civil liberties, state-funded Orthodox rabbis' writings about killing Gentiles, Jewish youth attitudes toward integration with Arabs, violence targeting Palestinians and African asylum seekers, Palestinian protests, and the use of Holocaust history to justify the occupation.[5]

The book provoked intense criticism. The Nation, which had commissioned a review by columnist Eric Alterman, published a piece Alterman titled “The ‘I Hate Israel’ Handbook,” in which he wrote that the book “could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed) without a single word change once it's translated into Arabic.”[13] J.J. Goldberg separately called it “an unpleasant book.”[3] A review in the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism characterized Goliath as a compilation of material from anti-Israel and anti-Zionist websites that depicts Israel as a uniquely evil state that must be eliminated, with approximately 400 pages consisting of 73 chapters presenting what the reviewer called context-free snapshots.[13] The same review alleged that Blumenthal argued that Israel's demise as a Jewish state was “absolutely necessary” and that Israeli Jews unwilling to “become indigenized” should be expelled or subordinated to Arab political, cultural, and social dominance.[13]

Chapter titles including “Summer Camp of Destruction,” “The Concentration Camp,” “The Night of Broken Glass,” and “How to Kill Goyim and Influence People” drew particular condemnation. The Simon Wiesenthal Center placed Goliath ninth on its 2013 list of “Top Ten Anti-Semitic and Anti-Israel Slurs,” with Rabbi Marvin Hier stating that Blumenthal had “crossed the line into outright anti-Semitism.”[6] The review in the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism also alleged that Blumenthal selectively quoted Reuven Rivlin's 2010 criticism of planned detention facilities for African refugees, omitting Rivlin's clarification that he meant facilities where people were warehoused rather than extermination camps.[13] A companion video produced by Blumenthal and David Sheen titled “Israel's New Racism: The Persecution of African Migrants in the Holy Land” received more than 500,000 views in its first three months.[13]

The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza was published by Nation Books in 2015.[7] The book presented Blumenthal's account of the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas. In February 2016, he spoke about it at a sold-out PEN Canada event in Toronto that drew heavy condemnation from Canada's organized Jewish community.[4]

Blumenthal's work has received sharply polarized assessments. The publisher's description reproduced in the Internet Archive catalog calls Goliath a “brave and unflinching account” and an “unprecedented and compelling work of journalism.”[5] Critics including Eric Alterman and the Simon Wiesenthal Center instead characterized the book as an anti-Israel polemic or antisemitic material.[13][6] Through The Grayzone, Blumenthal has also developed a substantial social-media and subscriber audience for his political reporting and commentary.[1]

Blumenthal's public statements have generated recurring controversy. After Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel died in July 2016, Blumenthal posted a series of tweets opposing public honors for Wiesel, writing: “Elie Wiesel is dead. He spent his last years inciting hatred, defending apartheid & palling around with fascists,” and stating that Wiesel “went from a victim of war crimes to a supporter of those who commit them.”[3] Hillary Clinton's campaign called the comments “offensive, hateful and patently absurd.”[3] Although Sidney Blumenthal had forwarded transcripts and links to his son's articles on Israel and Netanyahu to Clinton, the campaign stated that Max Blumenthal had no connection to it.[3]

Following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, Blumenthal wrote that Israel was responsible for many, if not most, Israeli deaths that day, claiming the Israel Defense Forces had driven up the death toll of its own citizens “with the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons.”[1] The Jerusalem Post disputed his methodology, reporting that he cherry-picked sources, misquoted Israeli media, and largely ignored Hamas crimes.[1] The ADL documented additional statements from this period, including Blumenthal dismissing evidence of weapons found in Gaza's main hospital as possibly planted and inconsequential, and writing: “Israel is projecting its own sick rape culture onto Palestinians to justify its criminal post-10/7 rampage. Its lurid allegations are shameful confessions.”[14] The ADL also highlighted a post in which Blumenthal raised the possibility that Israeli forces had stolen bodies from Shifa Hospital's morgue and speculated about organ theft, which the ADL presented as an example of blood-libel accusations resurfacing after October 7.[15]

The ADL has documented a range of other statements, including Blumenthal writing “We live under a Zionist regime that hates us and which will sacrifice us for its ethnosupremacist agenda”[2] and, following the U.S. killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, replying to a tweet by President Trump displaying the American flag with the words: “You misspelled the Israeli flag.”[16] In an October 2022 Grayzone webinar with Roger Waters, Waters advocated comparing Israel to the Third Reich and called on Israel to “stop imposing your hated, hated apartheid regime on the indigenous people of the Middle East.”[17]

CAMERA has alleged that The New York Times made three corrections to a Blumenthal Opinion contribution, that he misquoted Chaim Weizmann, and that his work has involved factual errors and fabricated quotations—characterizations that reflect CAMERA's evaluations rather than independently established findings.[18]

In July 2026, Customs and Border Protection detained Blumenthal for approximately two and a half hours at Washington Dulles International Airport after his return from Iran, where he had traveled on a press visa to cover the funeral of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the aftermath of U.S.-Israeli strikes.[19] CBP seized two smartphones after he declined to unlock them.[19] He filed an emergency motion for their return on July 16; CBP returned the devices the next day, and the government subsequently told the court that it could not access them, conducted no search, and retained no information.[19] On August 17, 2026, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed a lawsuit on his behalf in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia against the Department of Homeland Security and senior CBP officials, alleging that the government targeted and punished Blumenthal because of his journalism and political views.[19] The government's position was that CBP officers may inspect electronic devices during border inspections.[19] That legal matter had not been judicially resolved at the time of reporting.[19]