Background
Klier was born in 1944 in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, United States of America, and his family lived briefly in Washington before settling in Syracuse, New New York His father taught aeronautical engineering at Syracuse University.
Klier was born in 1944 in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, United States of America, and his family lived briefly in Washington before settling in Syracuse, New New York His father taught aeronautical engineering at Syracuse University.
Brought up as a Catholic, John attended Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana for his Bachelor and Master of Arts in history. His Doctor of Philosophy dissertation examined the process by which Tsarist Russia, after the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, absorbed Jews into the Russian state system.
At the end of his career and life, Klier was the Sidney and Elizabeth Corob Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London. He was a historian who challenged scholarly opinion on the Jewish community under the Tsars. He pursued doctoral study at the University of Illinois, which was known for Russian and Soviet history.
In his investigations of pre-revolutionary Russia, he noticed that little research had been conducted on Russian Jewry for most of the 20th century.
His first book, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the Jewish Question in Russia (1986), expanded on the Doctor of Philosophy thesis. In 1991 he was one of the first foreign scholars to undertake in-depth research on the Jews in Soviet archives, and mined resources in the coming years in Kiev, Moscow, Street St. Petersburg and Minsk.
In 1993, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States to prepare surveys of Jewish materials in post-Soviet archives. Scores, if not hundreds, of researchers of East European Jewry have benefited from his insight and guidance.
His second major monograph, "Imperial Russia"s Jewish Question, 1855–1881", appeared in 1995.
Klier headed the Jewish studies department at University College London and was also a regular organiser of trips of Russianists from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies to the theatre and opera. The UCLU club photo from 2005 now sits in his Memorial Library in the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department.