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How the CEO of New York’s largest food bank is inspired by Jewish values
(New York Jewish Week) — At the Food Bank for New York City, one of the largest food banks in the country, the holiday season is crucial to ensuring New Yorkers have enough food to be able to live with dignity.
Since its founding in 1983, the organization has provided over one billion meals to New Yorkers in need — as well as offering free SNAP assistance, tax preparation services and financial literacy programs to low-income residents.
“Our central mission is that we feed people for today, but we have made significant investments in programming that truly helps to lift people out of poverty,” president and chief executive officer Leslie Gordon told the New York Jewish Week. “Because the reason why people are food insecure to begin with is a resource problem. It’s an inability to get connected to networks or resources, because of racist systems or policy issues.”
Gordon, who is Jewish, has helmed the organization since 2020, and in some ways, rose to the role in a way that seemed inevitable. As a child, she loved to watch her grandfather sell meat, produce and other goods from the grocery store he owned in Tarrytown, New York, and deliver food donations to the needy. Her mother, who also grew up at the store, was the executive director at the Hunts Point Produce Market, the country’s largest wholesale produce market.
Prior to joining Food Bank for New York, Gordon held leadership roles at Feeding Westchester, a food bank network in Westchester County and City Harvest, which helps make fresh, nutritious food accessible around New York. Starting her job at the beginning of the pandemic, Gordon has overseen a doubling of the Food Bank for New York’s annual food distribution across the city from 70 million pounds to 150 million pounds.
A fourth-generation Tarrytown resident, Gordon has been a member of the Conservative congregation Temple Beth Abraham her entire life. She lives in the same house that she, her grandfather and her mother grew up in, with her wife, two dogs and two cats.
The New York Jewish Week chatted with Gordon about her background, her favorite parts of the job and the Jewish family values that got her here.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for length and clarity.
After leadership roles at two other food banks, Gordon took over the top position at Food Bank for New York City in March 2020. She credits her Jewish family values for helping guide her. (Courtesy)
New York Jewish Week: How have your Jewish values guided you as the CEO of Food Bank for New York?
Leslie Gordon: The thing about my connection to Judaism at the Food Bank is really a personal responsibility around doing tikkun olam. It’s an ever-present, everyday commitment to making the world more just and equal through social action, which is what we do every day at Food Bank — helping New Yorkers across the five boroughs to have the resources they need to be able to have a stable, healthy life where they can thrive and look forward to working on achieving their dreams.
Food is culture. Food is love. Food is history. Food has always been a big part of my personal Jewish experience — whether through holidays or through historical explorations. My grandfather was a butcher. He grew up in a small Jewish enclave in Rockland County called Pot Cheese Hollow [now Spring Valley], which is a sort of a European framing for all things cottage cheese.
You started this job right at the beginning of the pandemic. What was that like, and what was the path that led you to working at Food Bank?
I’ll never forget this: My first day was March 30, 2020. It was a little crazy to be the humble leader of one of the nation’s largest food banks at a time when the need was historically outsized and quickly escalated. It was a little bit of a challenge and, frankly, has been for most of my tenure.
Again, it goes back to my Jewish familial roots. I am carrying on a family legacy of feeding people: My grandfather, Norman Goldberg, was the son of European immigrants. When they came over [to America], and in his growing up years in that enclave in Rockland County, they were really, really poor. One of their biggest assets, believe it or not, was a dairy cow — no running water, no indoor plumbing. He would tell stories as kids that sometimes the only thing he ate in the course of a day was an apple that he picked off a neighboring farmer’s tree.
Fast forward many years into the future, he was a successful businessman, between a grocery store, a butcher store and a wine and liquor store, amongst other pursuits. He never forgot where he came from and he would talk to us about the importance of connecting people with food, and again doing tikkun olam. They would get phone calls from the rabbi at Temple Beth Abraham in Tarrytown, where they lived, because food banks and food pantries didn’t exist back then — the World War II era all the way through the 1950s, ’60s, and even ’70s. They would get a list of people in the community who needed help and [my grandfather] would take my mother by the arm and they would go to the local grocery store and shop. Frequently, as my mom tells it now, they’d end up in a local fourth-floor walk-up apartment building, ring the bell, drop the groceries and go, because you wanted to preserve the dignity of those whom you are helping.
That really made an impression on me. My grandfather was also an avid backyard gardener and was famous for leaving those little brown lunch bags full of excess produce from his backyard garden on people’s stoops.
My mother became the head of the world’s largest wholesale produce terminal, which is based in the Hunts Point section of South Bronx. I caught the bug on logistics and operations in food and really the romanticism of the food system. I’m still of that generation where I feel very connected to my local food system and farmers. I had a very unique growing up experience, where I got to see train cars full of broccoli or potatoes or other amazing produce that traveled through small towns and cities across the United States to land up in the South Bronx. So, I’ve been in the arena of food banking for about 15 years. I couldn’t have predicted it, I call it a happy accident. Of the 10 food banks in New York State, I’ve had the pleasure and honor of leading three of them.
What type of outreach do you do to New York’s Jewish community?
We’re a city of about 8.4 million people, and 1.6 million of them, give or take, are people who just don’t know where their next meal is coming from or what it will be. Ask yourself: Have you ever been hungry for a long period of time during the day? How do you deal with that? Imagine if that was your every day. That is compounded, potentially, by other struggles that you have. People don’t live single-issue lives. So, typically, when you’re food insecure, there are a lot of other issues that you’re grappling with — could be housing issues, could be mental health issues, could be employment or underemployment issues. There’s just a lot going on in the mix. New York City is a particularly expensive place to live. It’s a tough environment.
We’re the heart of a network of about 800 on-the-ground partners across the five boroughs. On nearly every street in nearly every neighborhood, our partners are food pantries, community kitchens, senior centers, shelters, community-based organizations like New York City Housing Authority or a Boys and Girls Club. In the case of the Jewish community, we have relationships with more than 40 on-the-ground agencies that specifically serve observant Jews. Organizations like Masbia, Alexander Rapoport’s restaurant-style soup kitchen that he’s now famous for.
We’re serving one of the nation’s largest kosher observant populations in the U.S. right here in New York City. We’re committed to making sure that kosher-observing communities in Williamsburg, Midwood, Crown Heights, Coney Island, Lower East Side, etc., have access to good kosher food that they can feel good about. The number of Jews in New York City who struggle is just astounding. We have a very large Jewish population, obviously. And so, you know, it’s something that’s on my mind a lot. I’ve had the opportunity to work with the Jewish community in New York now for over 15 years. Studies tell us that more than 10% of Jewish adults, and Jewish adults with kids in New York are food insecure. It’s serious. You’d be astounded, probably, to learn that more than 20% of adults in Jewish households in New York are at the poverty line.
What is your favorite part of the job?
A job as a food bank leader is very, very unique. In the course of a day, I can work on operations, I can work on marketing and communications, I can meet with donors, I can be on the phone with one of our agencies or food pantries on the ground, or I can be working on policy or advocacy. So it’s a really varied position. The most fun part about my job is the people and the stories. It’s the people who we serve who just have really big hearts and deep and interesting personal stories, and they’re just like you and me — moms and dads and families and kids who are trying to live their best life. We take the opportunity to be able to help them along the way pretty seriously.
For me, it starts internally with our Food Bank family. I take that really seriously. The culture in the organization is really important to me. I want people to feel supported and have all the resources they need to do their job, to be excited and energized about the ability and opportunity they have to impact people’s lives. At the end of the day, it’s always the people.
I’m a bit of a builder, and a fixer. It’s just who I am. Why I’m that way, I have no idea. My mother tells me that I’m my grandfather’s granddaughter. I just have a particular affinity for how things work and systems and processes and making things better and more efficient. It’s just part of my DNA, I guess. That is a skill set that really fits well with what’s required to run a food bank.
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The post How the CEO of New York’s largest food bank is inspired by Jewish values appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Turning Point USA Disaffiliates Woman Who Verbally Attacked Jewish Students: Reports
Kaylee Mahoney, a University of Miami student and conservative influencer who verbally attacked Jewish students on campus on Jan. 27, 2026. Photo: Screenshot.
The Turning Point USA chapter of Miami, Florida, has reportedly fired a right-wing influencer and University of Miami student who upbraided Jewish peers in a tirade in which she denounced them as “disgusting” while accusing rabbis of eating infants.
“Christianity, which says love everyone, meanwhile your Bible says eating someone who is a non-Jew is like eating with an animal. That’s what the Talmud says,” the social media influencer, Kaylee Mahony, yelled at members of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) who had a table at a campus fair held at the University of Miami. “That’s what these people follow.”
She continued, “They think that if you are not a Jew you are an animal. That’s the Talmud. That’s the Talmud.”
The Talmud, a key source of Jewish law, tradition, and theology, is often misrepresented by antisemitic agitators in an effort to malign the Jewish people and their religion.
Mahony can also be heard in video of the incident, which took place on Tuesday, responding to one of the SSI members, saying, “Because you’re disgusting. It’s disgusting.”
Students told The Miami Hurricane newspaper that she further charged that “rabbis eat babies” during the altercation.
Mahony, who has more than 125,000 followers on TikTok, was the head of public relations for the university’s College Republicans club and the head of social media for Turning Point USA’s Miami chapter, according to her LinkedIn.
However, The Miami Hurricane reported that College Republicans terminated Mahony’s membership in the club. And now it appears that Turning Point (TPUSA) has taken a similar step.
According to StopAntisemitism, a nonprofit which tracks antisemitic incidents across the world, Mahony is “no longer affiliated” with the organization and is now being investigated by the university to determine whether her comments violated its code of conduct.
Laura Loomer, a conservative activist and self-described investigative journalist also reported that Mahony was “fired” by TPUSA.
After Tuesday’s incident, Mahony took to social media, where she posted, “Of course the most evil (((country))) in the world is filled with (((people))) who hate Jesus [sic].”
The “((()))” is used by neo-Nazis as a substitute for calling out Jews by name, which, given the context in which they discuss the Jewish people, could draw the intervention of a content moderator.
The confrontation highlights a growing divide within TPUSA over Israel and antisemitism in the aftermath of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who started the political advocacy organization.
Kirk was avidly pro-Israel and counseled conservative youth to avoid neo-Nazis and antisemitism, but a core of TPUSA’s demographic has embraced figures such as Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, both of whom have reprised medieval conspiracy theories about Jewish influence, perfidy, and libertinism.
Far-right activists have attempted to distort Kirk’s legacy since his death, with figures such as Tucker Carlson implying that he was murdered by “guys sitting around eating hummus” in Jerusalem and Owens suggesting Israel was behind his death. Meanwhile, Owens has suggested that Kirk’s widow, Erika, was a co-conspirator in her husband’s killing.
There has been no evidence to support such claims. Tyler Robinson, 22, has been charged for murdering Kirk and potentially faces the death penalty. He was romantically involved with his transgender roommate, and prosecutors have reportedly argued that Kirk’s anti-trans rhetoric was a key factor that allegedly led him to shoot the Turning Point USA founder.
Experts have argued that far-right efforts to distort Kirk’s stance on Israel and antisemitism are part of an effort to undermine not only the US-Israel alliance but Washington’s leadership in the world more broadly.
“It’s antisemitism for the purpose of undermining Americans’ confidence in ourselves and in our post-World War II role in the world,” Hudson Institute scholar Rebeccah Heinrichs said during a conference on antisemitism held in Washington, DC in December. “That is very dangerous because we can’t come to consensus on anything else we need from a grand strategy perspective if Americans scapegoat our problems to the Jews and if they believe that Israel is no longer an ally but it never was, and in fact that we were on the wrong side of World War II, which is now the narrative being pushed.”
Meanwhile, antisemitism is surging across the US.
Earlier this month, a 19-year-old suspect, Stephen Pittman, was arrested for allegedly igniting a catastrophic fire which decimated the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi. According to court filings, he told US federal investigators that he targeted the building over its “Jewish ties.” Prior to that, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published statistics showing an atmosphere of hate not experienced in the nearly 50 years since the organization began tracking such data in 1979.
The FBI has disclosed similar numbers, showing that even as hate crimes across the US decrease overall, those perpetrated against Jews continue to rise to record numbers. Jewish American groups have noted that this surge in antisemitic hate crimes, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population.
Amid these convulsions in the US, as well as across the Western world, Jewish communities around the world continued to remember Kirk as a friend of both Israel and the Jewish people.
Last week, the State of Israel posthumously honored Kirk for his efforts to combat antisemitism at the 2026 International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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When Catherine O’Hara delivered the perfect Purim spiel
Catherine O’Hara, the SCTV star who rose to international fame in Home Alone and had a late career renaissance on Schitt’s Creek and on Apple TV+’s The Studio, has died at 71. The cause of death was not clear at press time.
O’Hara was an actor known for her versatility, convincing millions she could forget her son as she left for vacation (twice) and going on to play a series of eccentrics, like Moira Rose, the self-involved, delusional ex-soap opera star and mother of an interfaith on Schitt’s Creek, opposite her regular collaborator of decades, Eugene Levy.
While O’Hara may be best remembered for that show, for which she won a Golden Globe and an Emmy, or in the improvised mockumentaries of Christopher Guest, it was in a rare scripted film by Guest where she gave perhaps the most indelible Purimspiel in cinema history.
In 2006’s For Your Consideration, O’Hara plays veteran actress Marilyn Hack, cast in an awards-baity picture called Home for Purim. We get a glimpse of the film, a weepy melodrama set in the American South and starring Hack as a terminally ill matriarch.
Together the family joins with groggers to sing a tune that speaks of Achashverosh telling Esther “don’t farbrent” and rhymes it with “shep naches later in my tent.”
Of course the comedy here is that this film could have wide commercial appeal, and the premise that one would travel great distances to come home to observe Purim with the family as if it were Christmas (it’s later changed to Home for Thanksgiving).
After the family finishes singing the song, Hack in character, sounding like a Tennessee Williams matron, coughs ominously on cue into a napkin to signal her time is near.
“My time is short and I will not leave the Purim table,” Hack says as the hacking mother.
On request from her daughter — played by O’Hara’s frequent co-star Parker Posey — she then explains the significance of Purim to her brood.
“I’m an Esther, like the queen,” she says, wearing a glittering diadem. “She was a woman who came from the worst of times to the best. To a palace where she had everything she wanted. Comfort, riches, power. And she risked it all, including her life to serve a higher purpose, commit a selfless act to save a nation.”
O’Hara plays this to the just-believable-hilt, scored by an Itzhak Perlman-esque violin strain. When she asserts that “my selfless act was to protect my family from all the Hamans,” her kin spin their groggers and she loses it as only she could.
“I don’t have much time! Put your toys down!”
She then flips the story, realizing the irony that the Haman she was trying to protect her daughter from, turned out to be her. In what would have been the Oscar clip, the children dispute this: “You’re no Haman, Mama. You’re Queen Esther.”
Played for laughs, the scene — and indeed the premise of the film-within-a-film — was in some ways prescient, as Evangelicals increasingly look to Esther’s example.
A proof of O’Hara’s range is that, while making her mark in a Christmas film franchise, she could contribute perhaps the highest profile instance of Purim to the canon. That it wasn’t believable was the point, but the fact that she could so effortlessly embody an actor acting badly makes you think she could have sold the real thing.
The post When Catherine O’Hara delivered the perfect Purim spiel appeared first on The Forward.
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Iranian Jews caught between frustration and hope as US debates intervention
Over the past several weeks, Iranian American Jews have watched a historic uprising unfold in Iran. For many in the diaspora, the protests feel like a potential watershed moment for revolution in Iran. But alongside that hope is concern that the American conversation around Iran has been subsumed in domestic debates about American power abroad.
For Iranian Jews, this moment is sharpened by history. Most fled Iran during and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when social and political instability became widespread, Sharia law was imposed, and life for religious minorities fundamentally changed. The Jewish population, once estimated at around 100,000, has since dwindled to between 8,000 and 10,000. As Iranian Jewish human rights activist Marjan Keypour told the Forward, “the Jews in Iran were given a one-way ticket right out of the country.”
These protests have unlocked long dormant possibility that Jews might one day return to Iran — if not to live, then at least to visit on their own terms.
“Every Persian kid is asking their parents, ‘Where would you go first? If we go back to Iran, where will you take me?’” said Moji Pourmoradi, former assistant director of the High School at Temple Israel of Great Neck, a community that is home to one of the largest Persian Jewish populations in the country. “People haven’t asked those questions since they left. They were not allowed that hope.”
America First?
That newfound optimism makes the stakes of the uprising profound for Iranian Jews. “When I’m with my family, we talk about Iran every day,” said Tyler Moshfegh, a 21-year-old Iranian Jew from Los Angeles who still has relatives in the country. Recently, he said, those conversations have been marked by frustration over how many other anti-regime protest movements in Iran since 1979 have been crushed.
“Every time, the U.S. government says they’re going to support the people of Iran,” Moshfegh said, “and then it just gets thrown under the rug after a week.”
Iranian Jews had initially been buoyed by comments from President Donald Trump, who said in a Jan. 14 Truth Social post addressed to Iranian protesters, “KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” The U.S. moved major military assets to the Middle East this week, and threatened the use of force unless Iran agreed to a nuclear deal.
But in the time between the message and the military movement, thousands of protesters were reportedly killed by Iranian regime forces, giving some the impression that Trump’s shifting rhetoric had left the protesters defenseless. For them, allowing the regime to evade accountability for the mass killing of demonstrators in exchange for a nuclear deal does not go far enough.
“There are many people who are like, ‘Trump, you better not back down,’” said Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh, a vice president at American Jewish University and the daughter of Iranian immigrants. “We believed in you. If you do this, we’re never going to believe in you again. And you’re going to have blood on your hands.”
At the same time, some Iranian American Jews described feeling pressure to defend their concerns as calls grow on the American right to avoid foreign intervention altogether. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X that “President Trump threatening war and sending in troops to Iran is everything we voted against in ’24.”
Anna Hakakian, a community leader and president of the Babylonian Jewish Center Sisterhood in Great Neck, said, “The ‘staying out’ rhetoric feels like abandonment, especially when it translates into silence on human rights or appeasement of the regime.”
Rabizadeh said she struggles to understand how critics ignore the Iranian regime’s broader threat to the U.S. because it is the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, funding groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
“Forget about Israel,” she said. “What about the Houthis and all of the American ships they keep bombing?”
A deafening silence
Yet even more resistance to the idea of U.S. military action in Iran comes from Democrats — 79% of whom oppose intervention even if protesters are killed while demonstrating, compared to 53% of Republicans.
For Hakakian, the paucity of activism supporting the protesters revealed a double standard.
“Where are all the celebrities who speak loudly about human rights?” Hakakian said. “Where are the feminists? Where are the campus activists? It’s not west versus east, it’s not colonizer versus oppressed, so the suffering is ignored.”
That frustration has been compounded by antisemitic conspiracy theories circulating in some progressive spaces – including one shared by a Columbia University professor – claiming the protests in Iran were instigated by the Mossad to distract from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“In Great Neck, where many families have direct memories of persecution and exile, this framing seems dehumanizing, and it has an antisemitic undertone,” Hakakian said, adding, “It’s very much in line with what the regime narrates and what they want people to believe.”
On social media, some on the left have criticized the Iranian diaspora’s support for opposition figure Reza Pahlavi, who has been widely attacked for being pro-Israel. Pourmoradi said that Iranian Jews are frustrated by the refusal of those on the left who refuse to back U.S. intervention because they believe it is connected to promoting Israeli interests.
“Their ignorance isn’t just ignorance anymore. It’s detrimental. How many of those people that can’t back it have spoken to anybody who lived through it?” she said. “I think that most of my community feels the same way.”
Keypour said involving Israel in the conversation was a cheap way to dismiss the thousands of lives that had already been sacrificed in the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom.
“If we are mixing the conversation about Iran with Israel, Zionism, and Mossad,” said Keypour, “we discredit the agency of the Iranian people that they have exhibited so bravely.”
The post Iranian Jews caught between frustration and hope as US debates intervention appeared first on The Forward.