Ady Barkan

Ady Barkan was born in 1983 in Boston

Barkan was born in Boston on December 18, 1983, to immigrant parents from Romania and Israel. His mother taught the history of science at Caltech and his father taught international affairs at Columbia University. He grew up in Cambridge, Claremont and Pasadena in a secular Jewish home and held U.S. and Israeli citizenship.

He graduated from Columbia College in 2006. He earned his law degree at Yale Law School in 2010.

After law school he worked on immigrant legal rights in New York and clerked for Judge Shira Scheindlin. At the Center for Popular Democracy he organized local officials and helped win paid sick leave in New York City in 2013 and a $15 minimum wage in Seattle in 2014. From 2012 he led the Fed Up campaign, which pressed the Federal Reserve on how its policy affects low-income people.

In 2016 he was diagnosed with ALS. In December 2017 he confronted Senator Jeff Flake on a flight, urging him to vote against tax cuts that threatened Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Flake voted for the cuts, and Barkan then co-founded a political action committee backing progressive causes and candidates.

In 2020 Time magazine included him in its list of 100 influential people. He died on November 1, 2023.