Joe Stork is an American political activist and Deputy Director for Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch. He holds an M.A. in International Affairs/Middle East Studies from Columbia University.

Before joining Human Rights Watch in 1996, Stork co-founded the Middle East Research & Information Project MERIP and was editor of the Middle East Report. Stork served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Turkey. He presently serves as Chair of the Middle East Studies Association's Committee on Academic Freedom and sits on the advisory committees of the American Friends Service Committee, Foreign Policy in Focus and the Iraq Revenue Watch project of the Open Society Institute

According to Tablet Magazine, Ben-Dror Yemini, a columnist for Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, accused Stork of attending a 1976 anti-Israel conference organized by Saddam Hussein and of writing anti-Zionist "screeds". Stork denied the charges and replied that he had written exposes against Hussein in the 1970s and did not espouse the anti-Zionist views attributed to him.