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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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Far-Left, Anti-Israel Candidates Flop in Illinois Congressional Races
Kat Abughazaleh (D-IL) participates in a door knocking event while campaigning for the 2026 Illinois Democratic primary election in Evanston, Illinois, US, March 14, 2026. Abughazaleh is running for Congress in Illinois’ 9th district. Photo: REUTERS/Jim Vondruska
A series of Democratic primary contests in Illinois on Tuesday delivered a decisive setback to progressive candidates aligned with the party’s left flank, underscoring the continued strength of more moderate voices and signaling potential limits to the electoral appeal of anti-Israel messaging within the party.
Across multiple congressional districts throughout the midwestern state, candidates backed by prominent progressive and anti-Israel groups failed to gain traction with voters, losing to opponents who emphasized pragmatism, coalition-building, and a more traditional Democratic policy agenda. The results mark what some observers are calling a sweeping defeat for the “Squad”-aligned movement in one of the country’s largest Democratic strongholds.
In Illinois’ 9th District, left-wing challenger Kat Abughazaleh was defeated by Daniel Biss, another progressive candidate with experience in local governance and a more moderate position on Israel, by a margin of 4 points. Notably, Abughazaleh, who is of Palestinian descent, repeatedly accused Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza and vowed to vote against additional US aid to the Jewish state. Biss, who is Jewish and an Israeli-American, issued criticism of Israel’s military operations in Gaza but refused to accuse the country of “genocide.” Biss has also expressed admiration for the country and its people despite criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the foremost pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, celebrated Abughazaleh’s defeat on Tuesday night. Notably, Biss did not accept financial assistance from AIPAC and repudiated the group in his victory speech, instead boosting J-Street, a progressive Zionist group.
“This district understands nuance and wants someone who accepts the reality of competing, even contradictory, priorities and values and realities. That point of view is not the point of view of AIPAC. AIPAC spends an unbelievable amount of money. Over $7 million to try to buy this seat,” Biss said in celebratory remarks.
“So enough about AIPAC. May tonight be the last night I utter their name. This victory belongs to J Street,” Biss continued.
In a statement, AIPAC lamented the defeat of their preferred candidate Laura Fine, while celebrating the successful thwarting of Abughazaleh.
“While disappointed Laura Fine didn’t prevail, the pro-Israel community is proud to have helped defeat would-be Squad members Kat Abughazaleh and Bushra Amiwala, who centered their campaigns on attacking Israel and demonizing pro-Israel Americans,” the group said in a statement.
Similar outcomes unfolded in the 8th and 2nd districts, where left-leaning insurgents fell short against candidates with broader institutional support and more moderate platforms. In the 8th District, AIPAC-supported Melissa Bean defeated left-wing insurgent Junaid Ahmed. Ahmed received endorsements from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), one of the most vocal critics of Israel in the US Congress, and Justice Democrats, a populist, far-left organizing group. Ahmed positioned himself as a staunch opponent of Israel, accusing Jerusalem of committing “genocide” in Gaza.
Donna Miller, who competed in the 2nd District, pulled off an improbable upset victory over the well-financed and establishment-backed Jesse Jackson Jr. AIPAC had poured approximately $2.4 million into the race, according to reports.
The outcomes come after months of intense campaigning and significant outside spending. Pro-Israel advocacy organizations and allied political action committees invested heavily in the races, backing candidates who supported a strong US-Israel relationship and opposing those whose campaigns centered heavily on criticism of Israel.
Supporters of such efforts argue the results reflect voter skepticism toward candidates who prioritize divisive foreign policy positions over domestic concerns. They say Democratic primary voters, even in reliably blue districts, remain broadly supportive of Israel and wary of rhetoric they view as overly ideological or polarizing.
Amid the war in Gaza, AIPAC had become a new flashpoint within the Democratic Party. Democratic hopefuls across the country were pressed about their connections to AIPAC and were pressured to disavow any funding from the group. Further, various surveys suggested that Democratic voters responded less favorably to candidates after learning they harbored connections to AIPAC. However, the mixed results on Tuesday indicate that anti-AIPAC sentiment was not as animating as left-wing pundits predicted.
Progressive groups, however, downplayed the failures of their ideologically aligned candidates, pointing to the scale of outside spending in the races and arguing that well-funded campaigns overwhelmed grassroots challengers and shaped voter perceptions through aggressive advertising. Some also contended that messaging in the races blurred ideological distinctions, making it more difficult for voters to differentiate between candidates.
The Illinois results could carry national implications as Democrats look ahead to future elections. While progressive candidates have found success in certain districts, particularly in urban areas, the latest outcomes suggest that their coalition may face challenges in more competitive or diverse electorates.
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Message From a Democratic Legislator: Iran’s Long Oppressed People Deserve to Be Free
Cars burn in a street during an anti-regime protest in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Yesterday’s election results in Illinois sent an unmistakable message: the American people are rejecting the far left’s reflexive opposition to the war with Iran.
In Illinois, every member of the Squad on the ballot lost their primary, a stunning repudiation of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) wing of our party that has spent years excusing Iranian aggression, undermining our alliance with Israel, and treating supporters of human rights and democracy as warmongers. The voters have spoken, and I am proud to stand with them.
As an elected Democrat, I have no interest in endless wars in the Middle East. What is happening in Iran is, I believe, not a repeat of the mistakes of the Bush administration. It is instead an American-led effort to put an end to the war that Iran has been waging against its people, its neighbors, and the United States of America for the past 47 years.
The people of Iran have long suffered at the hands of their government. The Islamic Republic denies basic human rights to Iranians, particularly women, the LGBTQ+ community, and religious and ethnic minorities. As a Democrat, the Islamic Republic stands in opposition to every value that I cherish.
Iran’s now former Supreme Leader, the theocrat Ayatollah Khamenei, deserves no mourning. On the other hand, Iran’s long-suffering women deserve both our prayers and our efforts to eliminate their tormentors. The women of Iran are subject to a puritanical head-to-toe dress code in public. They are also subject to “male guardianship” by their fathers, husbands, or other male relatives.
The situation is equally as bad for Iran’s beleaguered LGBTQ+ community. Homosexuality is illegal in Iran and can be punished by death, sometimes carried out by hanging victims from giant construction cranes in the center of major cities, a medieval punishment with a surreal modern twist.
Non-Muslims are similarly persecuted. Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians have some protections as “Peoples of the Book,” but these are quite limited in practice. Iranian Jews have been arbitrarily arrested and tortured for allegedly “spying for Israel,” and Iranian Christians have been sentenced to up to 280 years in prison for religious practices as simple as putting up a Christmas tree. Believers in other faiths are not tolerated at all by the regime.
Against such intolerable oppression, it is no wonder that the Iranian people have repeatedly expressed their desire for change.
The Iranian people are considered the most pro-American population in the Middle East. Yet every time the people have sought redress of their grievances, they have been violently crushed by their government. Although the people of Iran have elected reformist presidents, these elected presidents are figureheads who are sidelined by the unelected “Supreme Leader.”
Beyond its borders, Iran has waged war and slaughtered civilians in an effort to export its “Islamic Revolution.”
Iran militarily supported the unpopular Assad dictatorship in Syria until it was finally overthrown in 2024 after more than 13 years of civil war in Syria. Iran has also supported terrorist groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis in their bids for power against the legitimate governments of Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. Iran also aided Hamas, which seized power by force in Gaza in 2007, enabling its brutal invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, during which more than 1,200 civilians were massacred, including dozens of Americans, and more than 250 (including 12 Americans) were taken hostage to Gaza.
When Operation Epic Fury began, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) tweeted, “President Trump, along with his right-wing extremist Israeli ally Benjamin Netanyahu, has begun an illegal, premeditated, and unconstitutional war.”
Senator Sanders could not be more mistaken. The right-wing extremists waging a premeditated war are the fanatical Islamist clerics in Tehran. This is a war they have been waging since 1979 against their own people, their neighbors, and against Americans.
The goal of Operation Epic Fury is not endless conflict; it is to end this conflict once and for all. A better future is possible — a future where Iran can join the community of free nations, where women can live without fear of being beaten or even murdered for not covering their hair, where minorities can practice their faith openly, where LGBTQ+ people can live openly, and where citizens can choose their leaders through real elections.
I believe that one day, the Iranian people will experience freedom and build the peaceful, democratic nation they deserve. And I believe that Operation Epic Fury will lead to the future that the Iranian people deserve.
Democratic state legislator Rep. Alma Hernandez represents Arizona’s 20th House District in Tucson.
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US House Report Finds Faculty Driving Campus Antisemitism While Institutions Protect Them
Protesters gather at the gates of Columbia University, in support of student protesters who barricaded themselves in Hamilton Hall, in New York City, US, April 30, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/David Dee Delgado
A new damning report by Republicans on the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce slammed higher education officials for having done little to abate faculty antisemitism, as the issue continues amid allegedly craven leadership and institutional whitewashing of professorial misconduct.
Titled, “How Campuses Became Hotbeds: The Rise of Radical Antisemitism on College Campuses,” the report is comprehensive, chronicling what has been described as the “campus antisemitism crisis” from the hours and days following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. In the wake of the attack, anti-Zionist student and faculty groups throughout the US celebrated the atrocities while, according to lawmakers, being protected by college administrations even as they escalated their conduct to violence, harassment, and flagrant violations of federal civil rights law.
It adds to a growing body of literature which explores institutional protection afforded to faculty who utter antisemitic comments against Jews similar to what other colleges have condemned when directed at other minority groups.
The report listed a slew of examples: Haverford College president Wendy Raymond extolled a professor who called Jewish community advocates “racist genocidaires”; University of California president Richard Lyons described a professor who cheered Oct. 7, while proclaiming that he “could have been one of those broke through,” as a “fine scholar”; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) refused to rule in favor of a Jewish student who filed a discrimination complaint disclosing a pattern of alleged abuse perpetrated by linguistic professor Michel DeGraff, which included his threatening to single out the student as an example of “Zionist mind infection.”
“Antisemitism continues to spread like wildfire at schools across the nation,” committee chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said in a statement on Tuesday. “Over the past several years, we’ve seen university leaders surrender to the radical demands of terror supporting mobs targeting Jewish students and faculty. This weakness has emboldened hatred and allowed campuses to devolve into hotbeds of radical antisemitism.”
He added, “Republicans remain committed to holding college and university leaders accountable for their failures. Time and time again, school leaders appeared before my committee and failed to take responsibility for the hatred they let spiral out of control.”
Colleges need robust oversight from Congress, the report concluded, imploring higher education to do its part by adopting the widely recognized International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, reforming admissions to foster viewpoint diversity, and fighting antisemitism as doggedly as it has combatted other forms of racism.
Another similar report, released in February by the AMCHA Initiative, touched on faculty antisemitism in the University of California (UC) system. It documented dozens of examples of faculty antisemitism, including their calling for driving Jewish institutions off campus; founding pro-Hamas, Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters; and endorsing institutional adoption of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. It also said that FJP chapters offered more than supportive words, “defending and helping orchestrate boycott-aligned activism (including encampment demands), seeking to deplatform Israeli speakers, and filing an amicus brief … that denied Zionism’s place within Jewish identity and defended exclusionary encampment conduct toward Zionist Jewish students, including expulsion from campus spaces.”
The AMCHA Initiative argued that the University of California system is a microcosm of faculty antisemitism, a vidid portrait of “how concentrated networks of faculty activists on each campus, often operating through academic units and faculty-led advocacy formations, convert institutional platforms into vehicles for organized anti-Zionist advocacy and mobilization.”
The AMCHA Initiative explored faculty antisemitism before, stressing that while student activities drive headlines, faculty act with impunity and wield governing power which shapes the campus culture and limits the power of college presidents to oppose them.
In September 2024, the organization published a groundbreaking study which showed that FJP is fueling antisemitic hate crimes, efforts to impose divestment on endowments, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Using data analysis, AMCHA researchers said they were able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FJP on a college campuses increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
The Algemeiner has previously covered this issue as well. In February, for example, it learned that, according to a lawsuit, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University assigned a Jewish student a project on “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.”
Similar incidents have come at a fast clip since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre: A Cornell University professor praised the terrorist group’s atrocities, which included mass sexual assaults; a Columbia University professor exalted Hamas terrorists who paraglided into a music festival to murder Israeli youth as the “air force of the Palestinian resistance”; and a Harvard University FJP chapter shared an antisemitic cartoon which depicted Zionists as murderers of Blacks and Arabs.
In Tuesday’s statement, Wahlberg said the committee’s report should put higher education on notice.
“If university leaders forget their legal responsibility to address discrimination of any form on campus, my colleagues will remind them.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.