User:A21sauce/Paul Newell (politician)

Paul Newell is an American Democratic politician in New York City, representing the 65th District which covers Lower East Side and Chinatown areas of Manhattan as district leader. In 2008, he became the first candidate to challenge former Speaker Sheldon Silver since the 1980s, and the subject of Justin Sullivan's documentary, Excuse Me, Mr. Speaker….

He is currently a candidate for NY State Assembly from the 65th District. In that race he has been endorsed by the Stonewall Democrats of New York City.

Background and education
He was born in 1975 in Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and is a lifelong resident of Lower Manhattan. He attended P.S. 41, Manhattan East (now M.S. 224 Manhattan East ), Stuyvesant High School, and City-As-School Manhattan. He graduated from Whitman College in 1997.

From 2001 to 2007 Newell worked as program director for Ubuntu Education Fund, a South African nonprofit focused on HIV and poverty responses in Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, South Africa.

Political career
In 2008 Newell ran for New York State Assembly against then-Speaker Sheldon Silver, highlighting many of the corruption issues that later resulted in Silver’s felony conviction in 2015. The campaign was the subject of an award-winning documentary by New York filmmaker Justin Sullivan, Excuse Me, Mr. Speaker…. In that campaign, Newell was endorsed by The New York Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, Americans for Democratic Action, BlogPAC, Gawker Media and others.

Also, in 2008, Newell was elected as an Obama-pledged delegate to the Democratic National Convention. In September 2009 Newell was elected Democratic District Leader in the same Assembly District with two-thirds of the vote. Newell was reelected to the position in 2011, 2013, and 2015.

As District Leader, Newell has worked as a tenant organizer, leading efforts to extend rent regulation to thousands of apartments in lower Manhattan under the 421g program.

When a controversy arose over the planned Park51 Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan, Newell helped found New York Neighbors for American Values, and was a leading voice defending diversity and religious tolerance in the area. During and after Superstorm Sandy, Newell organized hundreds of volunteers to deliver thousands of food parcels and medical care to homebound seniors and others on the Lower East Side. The operation brought much needed care to vulnerable residents stuck in high-rise buildings with no elevators. Newell also co-founded the Coalition for a New Village Hospital, which campaigned for a full-service hospital on the site of St. Vincent's Hospital in the West Village.

Personal life
Newell is Jewish, and is a fluent speaker of Yiddish. In the late 1990s, he worked as an archivist for YIVO, the world’s largest Yiddish language institution.