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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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Winds of change are in the air in Hungary and at the Vatican. Will they reach as far as Israel?
For the past few days, the world’s oldest and youngest transnational institutions have been riding high. In fact, these institutions — the Roman Catholic Church and the European Union — seem to be riding the winds of a Zeitgeist, or “world spirit,” one that promises better days ahead for our battered and embattled ideals of liberal democracy, common decency and shared humanity. Suddenly, it appears there is reason for hope.
But the hope, held by some on the political center and left in Israel, that this mighty wind will gust as far as Israel may well be a hope misplaced.
Let us first take the youngest transnational institution. On Sunday, an event of seismic proportions rocked the European continent. The prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who gave to the world the model of illiberal democracy and gave to Hungarians deepening immiseration over the past 16 years, was voted out of office.
It was not close: The opposition party Tisza, led by Peter Magyar, won 138 parliamentary seats while Orban’s party, Fidesz, managed to claim only 55. This assures the new government of the 2/3 majority required to change the laws passed under Orban that hobbled the EU, disabled the nation’s political institutions, and enabled him and his cronies to line their pockets. In his victory speech, given by the right bank of the Danube in front of the Parliament building, Magyar declared to a wildly cheering crowd that Hungary is back not only as a European nation, but back fully as a EU member. Hungary, he announced, “will be a solid ally of the European Union.”
On Palm Sunday, a different crowd — holding aloft not the flag of the European Union, but instead olive branches — welcomed Pope Leo XIV at St Peter’s Square. In his homily, he took aim at the moral corruption of the American government, one that launched a reckless military campaign against Iran (as well as a foolish political campaign in Hungary on behalf of Orban). Responding to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s repeated invocations of Jesus Christ to justify his blood lust, Leo cited Isaiah: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood.” He returned to this subject during a peace vigil, praying for a kingdom of “dignity, understanding and forgiveness” to stand as a “bulwark against the delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.”
These remarks did not sit well with Donald Trump, who unleashed a series of bizarre accusations on Truth Social, declaring that “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime,” “terrible for Foreign Policy,” and “WEAK on nuclear weapons.” Leo should “get his act together as Pope,” Trump said, “and stop catering to the Radical Left.” A few days later, after Leo failed to get his act together and instead decried Trump’s threat of carrying out a genocide against the Iranian people, the president declared that “he was not a big fan” of the Pope. When asked about these remarks, Leo replied, “I have no fear of the Trump administration, or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do.”
The Israeli government, one imagines, is not a big fan of the Pope, either. In a recent Sunday Mass, he addressed Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, lamenting the deaths of more than 2,000 Lebanese, including 165 children and 250 women. Political and military leaders, he declared, have the “moral obligation to protect the civilian population from the horrific effects of war.” Nevertheless, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to rule out a cease-fire even as negotiations between Israel and Lebanon are set to begin.
No less predictably, opposition leaders in Israel have embraced the results of the election in Hungary. Writing in Hungarian — the language of his father’s family — Yair Lapid rushed to congratulate Peter Magyar on his victory, while the former defense minister Benny Gantz, also of Hungarian descent, expressed his hope that Hungary will be a “beacon of western values and moral clarity within the European community.”
Gantz’s words lacked the necessary clarity for Yair Golan, the leader of the Democratic Party, who cut to the chase: The election revealed that the “Hungarian public is fed up with corruption, incitement and the shattering of democracy.” Israel, he predicted, will “soon” experience a similar turnabout.
But there’s a rub. If the current zeitgeist does embody a renewal of a democratic and humanistic spirit, how one can insist on the importance of “moral clarity,” as Gantz does, while supporting the military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon? With the notable exception of Golan, most other opposition figures in Israel have expressed few reservations over the criminally inhumane razing of Gaza. As the columnist Iris Leal recently observed, “there is no war that a Zionist politician from the center-left would not support.”
While a majority of the Israeli public is as fed up as Hungarians with their own government’s corruption and shattering of democracy, they nevertheless support the various wars undertaken by that same government. In a recent poll taken by the Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Israel Democracy Institute, more than 90% of respondents support the war against Iran. As for the future of Gaza, a poll published last year by Haaretz revealed that 56% of Israelis support the forcible expulsion of Gaza’s population to other countries, and 54% think this expulsion should extend to the Arab citizens of Israel.
Only a fool would deny that Iran and its Hamas and Hezbollah clients pose serious threats to Israel’s security. But it also takes a fool to declare that never-ending war and military occupation will alone win lasting peace for Israel. The mighty wind of democracy and decency has swept Viktor Orban from office and carried the words of Leo across the world. But it remains to be seen if this same wind, at the moment when Israelis find themselves at a crossroads between fully becoming a Jewish state or a democratic state, is strong enough to lead them to take the right path.
The post Winds of change are in the air in Hungary and at the Vatican. Will they reach as far as Israel? appeared first on The Forward.
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A View From Inside Iran: Silencing a Generation — Voices Lost to the Gallows
Iranian demonstrators gather in a street during anti-regime protests in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
“Don’t tell Mom.”
It is a sentence that has echoed through Iran’s prisons for decades. A sentence carried through monitored phone lines in the final minutes granted to the political prisoners before execution.
It’s a closing plea made just before the state carries out a sentence from which there is no appeal in practice, regardless of what the law suggests in theory.
Political prisoners are typically permitted one final phone call. The call is brief and the tone measured. A father or a sibling answers. There is no explicit reference to what awaits. The word execution is rarely spoken aloud. Surveillance renders such candor both futile and dangerous.
Instead, there is a restraint.
“Dad … please don’t tell Mom.”
He once imagined a different future. He is a teenager with dreams. Employment. Stability. The ordinary dignity of contributing to his household. A simple life with shared meals, familiar arguments, the slow accumulation of years.
He did not anticipate becoming an example.
In the final hours, time takes on a different texture. Memory becomes intrusive. Childhood surfaces with disorienting clarity. The mind hangs between improbable hope and quiet comprehension. There may be a reprieve. Perhaps international pressure will intervene. Perhaps the sentence will be suspended. Hope flickers irrationally. But the machinery of execution is efficient. The last image is not of ideology. Not of slogans. It is of home.
And then, silence.
Executions function not only as punishment, but as communication. A message sent through prison walls into society: dissent has consequences. Protest has a cost. Silence is safer.
Within Iran’s Revolutionary Courts, outcomes in political cases are determined long before the hearing begins. Access to a lawyer is restricted. Trials may last minutes; in some cases, there are no trials. Charges such as “enmity against God” or “corruption on earth” are applied, enabling capital punishment under a broadly interpreted definition of dissent.
By the time the final call is made, the legal process has typically run its course.
What follows is administrative efficiency.
Hours later, families are notified. The burial conditions are controlled and restricted. Public mourning is not permitted. Grief itself becomes regulated.
The executions of political prisoners in Iran emerge from a judicial architecture that has long blurred the boundary between adjudication and enforcement.
Political cases are typically adjudicated in Revolutionary Courts, institutions established in the aftermath of the 1979 coup d’état to address actions perceived as threats to the state. Over time, their jurisdiction has significantly expanded. Proceedings are conducted behind closed doors. Defendants in national security cases, as defined by the regime, may not be allowed to consult their preferred attorney during the investigative stage, which is a crucial time when coerced confessions are frequently obtained.
Claims of forced confessions, brief trials, and a lack of evidentiary transparency have all been documented by human rights organizations on numerous occasions. The way charges like “enmity against God” (moharebeh) and “corruption on earth” (efsad fel-arz) are phrased leaves room for interpretation. These offenses are punishable by death under Iran’s Islamic Penal Code.
In politically sensitive cases, appeals are reviewed in minutes and without public scrutiny. The interval between sentencing and execution is usually brief, especially during nationwide protests.
The outcome is a system in which capital punishment transcends its role as a criminal penalty and instead operates as a deliberate instrument of state control and intimidation.
The right to a fair and public hearing, access to independent legal counsel, and the exclusion of evidence obtained under duress are guaranteed under international legal standards, notably those set out in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a member. International Law limits the use of capital punishment, where it has not been abolished, to the most serious crimes, understood to involve deliberate killing. Significant concerns arise regarding proportionality and due process when the death penalty is applied in cases related to protests. In such conditions, the legitimacy of the sentence itself is called into question, and fundamental legal protections are undermined.
Executions in this context serve a dual function: they eliminate the individual and communicate a warning to the broader public. Particularly in the aftermath of protest movements, they operate as instruments of deterrence, reinforcing the cost of dissent.
This is not merely a domestic judicial matter; it is a question of whether procedural form can substitute for substantive justice and whether the language of law can obscure the absence of its protections.
The cases differ in detail, but the structural concerns remain consistent: restricted legal representation, opaque trials, and the rapid advancement of capital sentences.
Time, in such cases, is measured not in months but in days, sometimes hours.
The international community has mechanisms at its disposal. Governments engaged in diplomatic relations with Tehran possess channels through which urgent appeals have been raised, yet these efforts have too often failed to elicit meaning response. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran has repeatedly called for transparency and adherence to international fair trial standards, but such appeals lack effective means to hold authorities inside Iran accountable.
Public pressure matters. Diplomatic engagement matters. Clear and coordinated messaging matters. Silence, too, carries consequences.
In the context of war and ceasefire, the Islamic Republic of Iran has intensified its repressive measures, imprisoning and executing young individuals for the simple act of sharing images and videos with international media. The Internet blackout has severely restricted access to information about detainees and ordinary Iranians.
As the United States and Islamic Republic of Iran prepare to engage in more high-stakes talks in Islamabad, aimed at stabilizing a fragile ceasefire following weeks of conflict, concerns are intensifying that those at risk of execution and ordinary Iranians may face heightened risk under an increasingly vengeful policy of the regime.
For Iranians, the future remains uncertain and unsettling. Rather than offering reassurance, these negotiations are met with anxiety and distrust, as many fear that diplomatic engagement may come at the cost of further repression at home.
Amid pervasive fear and danger, the fate of millions of Iranians remains unknown.
The men and women awaiting execution today are not abstractions. They are sons and daughters who once ended a phone call with the same plea:
“Don’t tell Mom.”
The question now is not only what will happen inside prison walls, but also what will happen outside of them — in foreign ministries, in multilateral institutions, in the public conscience. Because once the sentence is carried out, there is no correction. What Iranians might face now is the aftermath of an unfinished war.
Maddie Ali is based in Iran. In addition to her academic work, she has been involved in civic activity in her hometown, including participating in and helping organize local protests alongside friends and family. Her name has been changed to protect her identity.
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Haftarat Shabbat Rosh Chodesh: All Who Mourn for Jerusalem
An aerial view of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
This year, as Parshat Tazria-Metzora coincides with Shabbat Rosh Chodesh, and the weekly haftara gives way to the closing chapter of the Book of Isaiah, it is impossible to hear Yeshayahu’s stirring words of consolation this season without feeling their weight.
Almost three years have passed since the horrors of October 7th. We have lived through war fought on multiple fronts — in Gaza and Lebanon, Syria and Iran. Homes destroyed across the north, south, and center of Israel. Families cycling through bomb shelters and reserve duty. Non-stop shiva calls. And, as this haftara falls just before Yom Hazikaron, military cemeteries that have grown far too large.
Yeshayahu’s vision of comfort is addressed precisely to this kind of grief — and it places a profound and demanding condition on that comfort.
The prophet paints a future of joy and renewal: Jerusalem rebuilt, her streets once again filled with laughter and light. “Bring Jerusalem joy, exult in her, all of you who love her; celebrate her joy with her, all of you who mourned her” (Isaiah 66:10). The Gemara (Taanit 30b) reads this verse with care and draws out a powerful principle: Only those who have genuinely mourned for Jerusalem will merit sharing in her future joy. The invitation to rejoice in redemption is conditional upon having grieved.
This teaching about who truly “mourns for Jerusalem” carries urgent contemporary weight. A Pew Research Center study released last month found that American favorability toward Israel has dropped eight percentage points in a single year, with 60% of Americans now holding an unfavorable view. More troubling is the trend within the Jewish community: just last year, 73% of American Jewish respondents held a favorable view of Israel. That figure has fallen to 64% — a decline of nearly 10 points in 12 months. For those who love Zion, these are not merely political data points. They are a challenge to the very solidarity that Yeshayahu’s vision demands.
What lies behind this shift? Part of the answer is a well-funded, coordinated campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel and Zionism — visible in American higher education, in the media, and in political lobbying. This must be named and addressed.
But it would be a mistake to look only outward. We in Israel must honestly ask whether the policies and public statements of top Israeli officials have not made it easier to misrepresent Israel as a state unconcerned with minorities, insensitive to other faiths (including Jewish denominations which are not Orthodox), and willing to flatten Gaza and repopulate it with Jewish settlements. The obligation to protect the state is sacred; so too is the obligation to ensure that the vision of an independent, flourishing Jewish State remains one that Jews in Israel and the diaspora can embrace together.
“As a man is consoled by his mother, just so shall I comfort you, and in Jerusalem, you shall be consoled” (v. 13). Yeshayahu’s image of consolation is strikingly intimate — the warmth of a mother, the certainty of belonging. This comfort is not meant to be experienced alone. It is promised to a people that returns to Jerusalem together, whose grief has been communal and whose joy will be shared. Since October 7th, so many Jews worldwide have indeed mourned, prayed, donated, advocated, and made aliyah. That solidarity is real, and must not be taken for granted.
Generations ago, a visitor to the Kotel etched into its ancient stones a verse from this very haftara: “You shall look on, your heart rejoicing, while your bones grow vigorous, like grass, and the hand of the Lord becomes known to His servants” (v. 14). An anonymous hand carved those words of hope into the wall — a private prayer left for all who would come after. This person understood Yeshayahu’s meaning precisely: Our hope is not merely personal. The rejoicing, the vigorous renewal, the recognition of God’s hand in history — all of it belongs to all our people, as one.
As we approach Yom Hazikaron, mourning our fallen with aching hearts, may we recommit to the work of shared solidarity that Yeshayahu demands. May we grieve together, hold one another, and confront with honesty and courage whatever stands between us and the vision of Jerusalem restored. And may we all merit, as a nation, and not merely as individuals, to see that day of consolation soon.
Rabbi Dr. Kenneth Brander is President and Rosh Yeshiva, Ohr Torah Stone.