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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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There’s something rotten in our approach to antisemitism. Tucker Carlson exposed it
The federal government has cracked down on antisemitism from the left, while ignoring or justifying antisemitism on the right. That’s a cold, hard and very uncomfortable fact.
After anti-Israel protests swept campuses amid Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, Congressional panels subjected university administrators to withering public cross-examinations over antisemitism. President Donald Trump’s administration levied millions in fines, and withheld or threatened to cancel billions in federal funding, including to university medical research.
It was a quick and harsh reaction to protests that, in some cases, veered into antisemitism and singled out Jewish students. “Nobody gets the right to harass their fellow students,” Vice President J.D. Vance said at the peak of the student protests. “Nobody gets a right to set up 10 encampments and turn their college campuses into garbage dumps. And nobody gets the right to block their fellow students from attending class.”
Contrast that to Vance’s reaction earlier this month, when the conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson hosted the far-right activist Nick Fuentes on his popular podcast, kicking off a massive debate about the mainstreaming of extremist views on the right.
Fuentes, who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and called for the execution of “perfidious Jews,” told Carlson that the great challenge to American social harmony is “organized Jewry.” Carlson didn’t push back. And when asked for comment, Vance said he didn’t want to take part in Republican “infighting.”
Trump, too, declined to join the Carlson critics.“I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it. Get the word out. Let them,” Trump told reporters.
Get the word out? What, exactly, is going on?
Ignoring horseshoe theory, at our peril
Defenders of this lopsided response might argue that the administration actually has leverage over universities in the form of billions of taxpayer dollars. The government has legal recourse to hold colleges and individual students accountable.
Carlson’s choice to play nice with Nazis, on the other hand, is a matter of free speech — even if it is ominous, incendiary speech. What action could the government take against a privately-funded podcaster?
The obvious answer is: At least condemn it. But that has not happened at any level of this administration.
Carlson himself, in a long new interview with a New York Times reporter, downplayed Fuentes’ overt antisemitic statements and positioned himself as someone who, like Fuentes, merely questions U.S. policy toward Israel.
“Mr. Carlson said he abhors antisemitism and that he has numerous Jewish friends who share his qualms with the Israeli government,” wrote the Times reporter.
If that sounds awfully familiar, it’s because anti-Israel protesters at the other extreme say much the same things. Some of their best friends are Jewish, and they too hate what Israel’s leaders are doing.
American Jews are witnessing the horseshoe theory of politics in real time — the idea that the far-left and the far-right bend more toward each other than to the center. The ideology that the extremes are converging on is that Jews are the problem.
Both extremes, beginning with outrage at Israel, have a propensity to slide into overtly anitsemitic conspiracy theories that blame Israel for the Iraq War, 9/11, NYPD violence, manipulating Congress, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Meanwhile, the political leaders who can confront both these extremes through words and policy, only seem to be hammering away at one side: the left.
A virus among young conservatives
The organized Jewish community, too, is highly attuned to instances on the left when anti-Israel attitudes bend toward outright Jew hatred. The most vocal critics of New York’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani accused him of just that — fomenting antisemitism and supporting antisemites in opposing Israel.
Immediately after Mamdani’s election, the ADL announced it was debuting a special program to monitor his administration for antisemitism.
But the ample evidence that a growing segment of the right is slipping back into the well-worn alliance that characterized the United States in the 1930s, when isolationists and antisemites made common cause against the Jews, doesn’t raise the same institutional alarms.
Trump has engaged with the extremist right, where antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment have both flourished for years, since the beginning of his first presidential run. Yet his Jewish supporters have given him far more leeway than they would ever think of giving Mamdani.
Meanwhile, that antisemitic segment of the conservative movement has quietly expanded, and found increasing tolerance in mainstream conservative spaces. The conservative analyst Ron Dreher wrote recently that he estimates some 30 to 40% of the Republican Gen Z’ers who work in official Washington are Fuentes fans.
Antisemitism “is spreading like a virus among religious conservatives of the Zoomer generation,” he wrote.
Antisemitism for me, but not for thee
That boom might explain the disparity between Trump and Vance’s stance on college protesters and on Carlson and Fuentes.
Like so much else in our polarized society, antisemitism itself has become politicized. Your Jew-hatred is abhorrent, the thinking goes, but mine is free speech. Yours must be prosecuted. But I’m just asking questions.
The best hope American Jews have is that enough brave souls from across the political spectrum will step up and speak out, even against their own political tribe, knowing the dark fate of societies that go down this path.
Dreher, in a private meeting with Vance earlier this month, told the vice president that standing up to Nazis and their publicists like Tucker Carlson is not “infighting,” but a fight for the soul of the Republican Party, and of the U.S.
No word on how Vance responded. But can I suggest the ADL monitor him, too?
The post There’s something rotten in our approach to antisemitism. Tucker Carlson exposed it appeared first on The Forward.
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‘My teenager’s going to boarding school. I’m panicked she’ll face antisemitism’
Dear Bintel,
My daughter’s dream, throughout middle school, has been to go to a private boarding high school. I didn’t fight her on it because it was so out of our price range. My plan was to let our finances be the villain. She ended up finding the money herself through grants and scholarships and was accepted.
Now I’m panicking because I’m afraid she’ll experience antisemitism or anti-Israel hate. She experienced that in middle school but she came home and we helped her. I don’t want to hold her back but I worry high school is too young to deal with this alone. She’s very proud of her Jewish and Israeli heritage and wears a Star of David necklace from her grandma everywhere. Any advice?
Signed,
Worried Mama
Dear Mama:
First of all, congratulations on raising an incredible daughter. Self-directed, resourceful, smart — I know plenty of adults who are far less successful at setting goals and realizing their dreams than your amazing teenage girl!
But I also want to recognize something that you don’t bring up, and that’s your heartbreak at losing this golden child. You probably thought you had another four years before this baby bird would leave the nest. Now suddenly she’s flying away much sooner than expected. That’s a huge adjustment for any parent — and it’s not just about your desire to protect her from a potentially hostile world. Many of us grieve when kids leave home, even when those kids are older than yours. You see the empty bedroom, the missing dinner plate, the “one less” member of the family at every gathering, and you just want to cry.
So let’s acknowledge that pain. You weren’t ready for this to happen so soon, and it’s OK to feel sad about it. You’re going to miss her something awful, and I’ve no doubt that no matter how well she does at boarding school — and I bet she will thrive — she’s going to miss you too. But that’s what cellphones are for, right?
Now let’s talk about your antisemitism worries. Your daughter already had to deal with this in middle school, so there’s no guarantee that a local high school would be less problematic than boarding school. The difference, of course, is that when she was living in your house, she had immediate access to your wisdom.
But you’ve already helped her develop coping skills. The proof is that she still proudly wears her Star of David. She’s not afraid. She’s not hiding. She’s ready to take on the world. She knows you’re only a phone call or text away, and you’ll always be there to listen, with unconditional love and support as needed.
Just don’t go overboard with the warnings and advice. Sometimes kids don’t want to burden their parents if they think we’re freaking out about something. They try to protect us by holding back, and that can make it worse for them.
In fact, when you say you’re “panicked” on her behalf, I can’t help but wonder if that’s part of what’s driving her to leave the nest so young. Is it possible she needs some distance from your emotions? I don’t know, but it might be helpful for you to have a few sessions with a therapist about separating your feelings from hers. You need to figure out how to express concern without suffocating her.
You might also reach out to the boarding school’s guidance counselors. I’m sure they’re used to helping parents manage their anxiety over sending a young teen away from home. Perhaps there’s even a parents’ group where veterans who have older kids can share how they’ve coped.
I’d also ask the counselors how the school typically handles student conflicts and bias. Offenses related not only to religion but also to race, ethnicity, politics and gender have unfortunately become commonplace in our world, and every school has had to develop protocols for dealing with these situations. My hope is that you’ll feel comforted knowing what policies are in place to support your daughter, and that the wonderful job you’ve done raising her so far will keep her flying high.
Signed,
Bintel
What do you think? Send your comments to bintel@forward.com or send in a question of your own. And don’t miss a Bintel: Sign up for our Bintel Brief newsletter.
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Some blame Qatar and unions for K-12 antisemitism. Experts say that’s the wrong focus
While antisemitism at colleges and universities gets the most attention, discrimination against young Jewish students is also growing in pernicious ways that often have less to do with nuanced political debates over Israel than outright bullying, including Nazi salutes, jokes about Hamas killing Jews and memes in the online forums where many students socialize.
These incidents have prompted a growing interest in countering K-12 antisemitism — the Anti-Defamation League is ramping up pressure on districts and a new political action committee is seeking “pro-Jewish” school board candidates. But alongside these efforts has been a hunt for a boogeyman supposedly driving the problem.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an influential neoconservative think tank, along with Republican lawmakers in Congress have sought to lay the blame on Qatar for “fueling anti-Jewish bigotry in K-12 schools” by, among other things, distributing for years a map of the Middle East to some schools that omitted Israel.
Teachers unions have also come under special scrutiny, especially after a contingent of National Education Association members unsuccessfully tried to cut the union’s ties with the ADL over the summer. Eric Fingerhut, chief executive of the Jewish Federations of North America, went on a self-described “rant against the NEA” from the stage of his organization’s annual conference this week in which he described the union as “invidious” and “one of the biggest, most serious problems that we have.”
This framing presents the plight of young Jewish students as an especially daunting front in the ongoing fight over how Israel is treated in American society; most concerns about both the NEA and Qatar are focused on growing hostility toward Israel.
But away from the conference’s main stage, experts working on the issue had a less conspiratorial outlook.
“It’s exciting to believe that if only we get rid of foreign funding we could solve this problem,” Hindy Poupko, a top lobbyist for the UJA-Federation of New York, said during a Tuesday panel on K-12 antisemitism. “It’s not true.”
Poupko added that some Jewish leaders were painting unions with too broad of a brush in describing them as anti-Israel and she credited the positive relationship Jewish organizations in New York City have with local unions, including the teachers union, for their success in blocking a ceasefire resolution at city council.
***
Rather than a sinister plot to seed classrooms with antisemitism or a political agenda about Israel, Poupko and the other experts suggested the problem was much more prosaic: Teachers have limited time and resources to learn about Jews, Israel and antisemitism.
David Bryfman, chief executive of the Jewish Education Project, said that many teachers simply Google to find information to teach about current events and are increasingly turning to ChatGPT — the artificial intelligence chatbot — to build lesson plans plagued by the flimsy sourcing and false information caused by the bot’s “hallucinations.”
One effective solution has been to provide classroom materials that teachers can easily integrate into their lessons. UJA-Federation distributed lesson plans pegged to Jewish American History Month to New York City schools along with posters of “Jewish heroes,” including authors Judy Blume and Emma Lazarus.
They’ve also promoted an interactive theatrical performance, featuring actors portraying Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. who come to classrooms for a show that weaves together the writings of both figures.
The local Jewish federation in Toronto realized that the only lessons about Jews in many schools centered on the Holocaust, so they wrote materials about ancient Israel that could be worked into the block on “ancient civilizations” taught to every fourth grader, and distributed books about Hanukkah to teachers.
And Bryfman is working on a database of educational resources about Jews and Judaism that teachers can both access directly and that will be given to artificial intelligence models with the hope that, when teachers search online in the future, they’ll turn up more accurate information.
***
None of these are groundbreaking solutions, but I appreciated hearing about them because they provide an important reality check. If we imagine antisemitism to be the result of a malignant conspiracy — Qatar turning teachers into sleeper agents for Hamas, or the NEA seeking to indoctrinate kindergarteners against Israel — the challenge of addressing it can seem insurmountable in the absence of a magic bullet.
Certainly, hanging a poster of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a middle school hallway isn’t going to solve antisemitism. But these kinds of practical interventions can help make Jewish students feel included at a time when many are feeling stigmatized and isolated.
Poupko said that, at least anecdotally, Jewish students had reported excitement at seeing their school hold an assembly block on Jewish heritage month for the first time, and data has found that Americans who personally know at least a few Jews are less likely to believe antisemitic stereotypes.
That’s the same logic behind a George Washington University project that offers a summer institute for faculty at schools of education at universities around the country, some of whom come in not knowing what the “Hebrew Bible” refers to, according to Ben Jacobs, the professor who runs the program.
And Be the Narrative, a group that trains Jewish students to present basic information about Judaism to their non-Jewish peers, found that 78% of teachers believed the presentations helped reduce antisemitism in their schools.
One throughline in all of these strategies is that they’re focused on working in good faith with teachers and school administrators. This is much harder when organizations view them as enemies rather than potential partners, as Fingerhut was encouraging.
“We can’t out mob the mob,” Poupko said. “Our special sauce is relationships with the people who are actually in positions of power.”
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