Kleinberg entered the PhD program in the Department of History at UCLA where he worked with Robert Wohl, Samuel Weber, Saul Friedländer, and David N. Myers.
Kleinberg trained as a European intellectual historian with a focus on continental philosophy arriving soon after the conference on the Holocaust at UCLA that led to the volume edited by Saul Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation.
In 1996, he awarded a UC Humanities Research Institute Scholars in Residence Fellowship to participate in a faculty working group organized by Tyler Stovall, George van den Abbeele, and Emily Apter on the theme “French Civilization and It’s Discontents.” This led to one of his first publications, “Kojève and Fanon: the fact of blackness and the desire for recognition.” In 1997 Kleinberg was awarded a UCLA Department of History Dissertation Writing Stipend.
In 2018 Kleinberg was Professeur Invité at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne and later that year named the Class of 1958 Distinguished Professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan University.
Kleinberg explains the appeal of Heidegger's philosophy to French thinkers, as well as the ways they incorporated and expanded on it in their own work through the interwar, Second World War, and early postwar periods.
In so doing, Kleinberg offers insights into intellectual figures whose influence on modern French philosophy has been enormous, including some whose thought remains under-explored outside France.
Among Kleinberg's "generation existential" are Jean Beaufret, the only member of the group whom one could characterize as "a Heideggerian"; Maurice Blanchot; Alexandre Kojéve; Emmanuel Levinas; and Jean-Paul Sartre.
In showing how each of these figures engaged with Heidegger, Kleinberg helps us to understand how the philosophy of this right-wing thinker had such a profound influence on intellectuals of the left.
Furthermore, Kleinberg maintains that our view of Heidegger's influence on contemporary thought is contingent on our comprehension of the ways in which his philosophy was initially understood, translated, and incorporated into the French philosophical canon by this earlier generation.
To do so, Kleinberg explores the legacy and impact of deconstruction on American historical work; the fetishization of lived experience, materialism, and the "real;" new trends in philosophy of history; and the persistence of ontological realism as the dominant mode of thought for conventional historians.
Kleinberg argues for a hauntological understanding of the past and throughout the book he relies on the figure of the ghost because of the ways it represents the liminal in-between of absent presences and present absences.