Lorem ipsum dolor

Yonah Zeitz

Advocacy Director, New York

As advocacy director, Yonah uses coalition-building, political advocacy, and grassroots communications to build Katal’s base and advance its campaigns. His work includes coalition management, policy analysis, strategic communications, drafting and reviewing bills, coordinating lobbyists, producing written materials (such as reports, fact sheets, and weekly newsletters), leading training sessions, mentoring, and doing movement-building work.

Yonah joined Katal in early 2020, when he first focused on defending New York State’s historic bail reform, as well as developing campaigns to demand that local and state governments in Connecticut and New York act to address the COVID-19 crisis ripping through jails and prisons. Yonah played a critical role in the successful campaign to pass transformative parole reform through the #LessIsMoreNY campaign in 2021 and helped lead efforts to coordinate effective implementation of the law. Yonah co-led Katal’s #ShutRikers campaign and the organization’s push for a federal judge to appoint an independent receiver at the deadly jail complex. In 2024, Yonah developed and co-led Katal’s campaign to overhaul the State Commission of Correction, New York’s independent jail and prison watchdog. In December 2025, Governor Kathy Hochul signed the reforms into law. 

Before joining Katal, Yonah worked as a project associate at The Bronx Freedom Fund, a nonprofit bail fund. He worked to post bail for hundreds of people from the Bronx and Queens who were unjustly incarcerated because of poverty and often their race and ethnicity. He also held investigative internships at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and the Maryland Office of the Public Defender.


Yonah’s work has appeared in a wide range of broadcast, online, and print media, including the New York Daily News, Politico, The Marshall Project, The City,the Queens Daily Eagle, Hellgate, PIX 11 News, New York Amsterdam News, amNY, Spectrum News–NY1,WBAI–99.5 FM, The Capitol Pressroom on WCNY, Filter, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Yonah generated and coauthored the seminal 2025 report Rikers Island and Mental Healthwith the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College.


Amid rising authoritarianism, Yonah’s work has expanded to include pro-democracy organizing and efforts to prevent ICE from operating on Rikers Island. He contributes to and supports a range of other grassroots campaigns and organizing efforts throughout New York City.

Yonah is a 2025–26 Galaxy Leadership Fellow at Galaxy Gives and a 2026 Movement Leader Fellow through the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice Institute at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at City College of New York and the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. In 2019, he was part of the inaugural Advocacy Leadership Accelerator program at the Advocacy Institute. 

Yonah is from Maryland and grew up outside Washington, DC. He 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. He cut his teeth as an organizer by participating in a multiracial organizing collective that worked on campaigns about creating a sanctuary campus, ending exploitative prison labor, and addressing white supremacy on campus.

Now based in Brooklyn, Yonah enjoys spending time in Prospect Park with his partner and dog, playing soccer, listening to vinyl records, biking around the city, and being funcle to his nieces and nephews. 

Select writing by Yonah Zeitz