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Yonah Zeitz
Advocacy Director, New York
Yonah Zeitz is the New York Director of Advocacy with the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice. Through advocacy, communications, policy work, digital and community organizing, and coalition building, Yonah works to strengthen grassroots movements and build people power. His work focuses on building leadership and organizing capacity to transform the criminal legal system and create community-led solutions that focus on resources and healing, not cages.
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For over five years at Katal, Yonah has worked on and co-led campaigns to #ShutRikers, increase jail and prison oversight, advance transformative parole reform through the #LessIsMoreNY campaign, defend bail reform, address the COVID-19 crisis behind bars in Connecticut and New York, and more. He also plays an active role in contributing to and supporting a range of other grassroots campaigns and organizing efforts throughout New York City.
Yonah’s work has appeared in a wide range of broadcast, online, and print media, including The New York Daily News, POLITICO, Queens Daily Eagle, Amsterdam News, AMNY, Spectrum News 1, WBAI Radio, The Capitol Pressroom, Filter Magazine, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Before joining Katal, Yonah worked as a project associate at The Bronx Freedom Fund, a nonprofit bail fund operating in the Bronx and Queens. He worked to post bail for hundreds of people unjustly incarcerated because of their race or ethnicity and poverty. He also held investigative internships at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and the Maryland Office of the Public Defender.
Yonah is originally from Maryland and is a graduate of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the state’s public honors college. He has a Bachelor of Arts in political science and public policy, with minors in economics and democracy studies.
During college, Yonah was the legislation liaison in Annapolis for the college, where he worked to increase funding to public universities and improve benefits for college workers. He cut his teeth in organizing as a part of a multi-racial organizing collective that worked on campaigns around sanctuary campuses, ending exploitative prison labor, and addressing white supremacy on campus.
Now based in Brooklyn, Yonah enjoys spending time in Prospect Park, playing soccer, writing about music, collecting vinyl records, and biking around the city.
Selected writing:
NYS must boost its prison watchdog
We Don’t Need a ‘Plan B,’ Mayor Adams; New York City Needs You to Shut Rikers Down.