Ady Barkan

Ady Barkan (Hebrew: עדי ברקן; born December 18, 1983) is an American lawyer and liberal activist. He is a co-founder of the Be a Hero PAC and is an organizer for the Center for Popular Democracy, where he led the Fed Up campaign. Barkan confronted Senator Jeff Flake on a plane in 2017, asking him to "be a hero" and vote no on a tax bill.

Barkan, who was diagnosed with the terminal neurodegenerative disease ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease) in 2016, shortly after the birth of his son, has been called "the most powerful activist in America" in a headline from 2019 in Politico Magazine. In 2020, he was included on Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Ady Barkan was born on December 18, 1983, to immigrant parents from Romania and Israel. Barkan grew up in what he describes as a "secular Jewish household" and held dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship. He attended high school in Claremont, California, where he took an early interest in progressive activism, like the fight against anti-gay rights legislation. Barkan next attended Columbia College, taking courses taught by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs and graduating cum laude in 2006. He went on to Yale Law School, where he earned his J.D. degree in 2010.

Between college and law school, Barkan worked on the campaign of Democrat Victoria Wells Wulsin, serving as communications director for Wulsin's longshot and ultimately unsuccessful effort to win a congressional seat in a strongly Republican area of Cincinnati. Following law school, Barkan lived in New York, where he worked on immigrant legal rights, then clerked for Judge Shira Scheindlin on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Barkan works for the Center for Popular Democracy. Beginning in 2012, he developed the Fed Up campaign to advocate with the Federal Reserve for the impact of monetary policy on low-income people. Organizing protests at the Federal Reserve's annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Fed Up sought to slow the rise of interest rates and, more broadly, change the governance structure of the Federal Reserve; by 2014, the group was included in the annual meeting's agenda.