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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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Lively Yiddish Forward columnist Miriam Hoffman has died
The Yiddish writer, Forverts columnist, playwright and Yiddish lecturer Miriam Hoffman passed away July 29 in Coral Springs, Florida. She was 90 years old.
Hoffman was a talented storyteller, as seen in the 2017 Forverts video about her, one of ten episodes in its documentary series, Yiddish Writers Monologues. In the 55-minute clip, she describes in dramatic detail her family’s journey from Siberia to a forced labor camp to a displaced persons camp and finally, to New York. The video is in Yiddish with English subtitles.
In a book, also published in 2017, A Breed Apart: A Miraculous Escape from Russia, she tells her life story again, this time in English.
For many years, Hoffman penned a lively column for the Forverts, where she commented, often with biting humor, on certain character types in Jewish society she disapproved of — like American-born Jews snubbing their noses at fellow Jews who had recently arrived from Europe, something she experienced first-hand.
She also wrote about the blatant sexism she encountered in the 1960s and ’70s among the leadership of Yiddish organizations like the Workmen’s Circle and the Congress for Jewish Culture.
But other essays had a serious, softer voice, like the one she told about her decision as a young teen to suddenly cut off her curly locks in order to look more “American” — and how her mother reacted to her daughter’s “rebellion.”
She also hosted a popular Yiddish radio program on the Forward station WEVD.
Hoffman loved the Yiddish theater and began writing plays herself. She and fellow playwright Rena Borow wrote the book for the musical, Songs of Paradise, based on the biblical poetry of Yiddish troubadour Itzik Manger. The show ran at NYC’s Public Theater and the Shakespeare Festival in 1989, drawing a rave review from The New York Times. Her plays were also staged in Montreal and in several European countries.
For 23 years, Hoffman was a popular Yiddish lecturer at Columbia University. In 2011, she published a Yiddish textbook, Key to Yiddish, that included not only lessons in grammar, but also passages on Eastern European Jewish history, customs, songs and holiday content.
I was personally most impressed with her dogged determination to preserve Yiddish as a spoken language with younger generations. In the 1960s, while teaching at the Sholem Aleichem Shul 21, an afternoon Yiddish school in the Bronx, she and three fellow Yiddish cultural activists — educator Gella Schweid Fishman, pianist-composer Malka Gottlieb and artist Tsirl Waletzky — published a series of Yiddish children’s books through a publishing house they created themselves, called Oyfgang (Sunrise).
As Hoffman and Schweid Fishman told me years later, the mood in the Yiddish world then was so pessimistic, and the attitude towards women so dismissive, that none of the Yiddish cultural organizations — including the Workers Circle and the Congress for Jewish Culture — showed any interest in publishing the books.
But Hoffman and her colleagues didn’t give up. An example of this concerned a musical Purim play they wrote and published in 1968, “Purim iz a shpil aza” (“Purim is a time to play”). On the book cover it gives the male name Gavriel Tolyes as the author. But this was a pseudonym; the real author was Hoffman.
“We understood that no one would take our book seriously if they found out that four women published it,” Hoffman told me. “So we took my mother’s name Tolye, and came up with the name Gavriel Tolyes.”
Years later, Hoffman translated the Purim play into English where it was performed and made into a video. This time, the author’s name was her own.
Hoffman was born Miriam Shmulevitsh in Tobolsk, Siberia in 1936. In 1950, her family immigrated to the United States where she studied Yiddish pedagogy at the Jewish Teachers Seminary until 1957. Years later, she finished her bachelor’s at the University of Miami and received a master’s from Columbia University in 1983.
During the 1970s she and her husband Mendl and two young sons, Avrom (Avi) and Binyomin, lived in Israel for several years where she hosted the first Yiddish television program in the Jewish state, together with the popular comedian Shimon Dzigan.
Hoffman often said that one of her main goals in life was to help instill Jewish pride among Jews of all ages in order to stem the tide of assimilation. In 2015 she, along with her son — the renowned Yiddish actor, director and producer, Avi Hoffman — launched the Yiddishkayt Initiative, an organization dedicated to bringing Jews back to their roots through lectures and performances that portray Jewish values and cultural traditions. For Hoffman, this was exactly what she had been waiting for.
Miriam Hoffman is survived by her two sons, Avi and Benjamin, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
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Are you there Hashem? It’s me, Clara
“I can complain no more of what brutal tongue-abuse I suffered today. I have exhausted all manners of expression for my grievances.”
I wish I could tell you I don’t recognize those words. I wish I could say they were written by a beleaguered 19th-century governess, or a soldier in the Continental Army afflicted with gangrene. Unfortunately, they were written by me. The day was May 20, 2016. I was 12 years old and full of spite.
I am not sure what, exactly, provoked me that day (since I had exhausted all manners of expression for my grievances), but judging from other angry rants found in this deceptively cute, panda-covered journal, it probably had something to do with: A) My obsession with school, B) My enemies, let’s call them Kyle and Reese, C) My parents’ attempts to discipline me, and D) My conviction that the whole world was conspiring against me. These were heavy burdens for a sixth-grader to bear. Fortunately, the school year was almost over. Reform Jewish summer camp was just around the bend, and I was praying for change. Literally.
“God, if you can hear me, please let me have an amazing camp-experience,” I wrote a few weeks before the session started. “It’s my only escape.” Also, while I had His ear, could He make sure I got a really good part (preferably Belle) in the summer musical, Beauty and the Beast? The previous year, in Aladdin, I’d been relegated to some sadsack ensemble role that clearly did not make use of my incalculable dramatic potential. Please, Hashem!!
But God had His work cut out for Him.
During my first summer, I had established a reputation for myself as a puritanical hardass thanks to my clashes with the popular girls of Bunk 15. Let’s call them Samantha, Madison and Lindsey. Lindsey slept in the bunk bed next to mine, and every night she would amuse the other girls by pretending that she was singing Taylor Swift hits in her sleep. This enraged me. I hung up towels around my bed so I could silent-scream in private. Soon, the trio began to whisper that I was “gossiping” about them. I don’t think the counselors bought that story, though, since successful gossiping requires you to spread lies to many people, and I knew around three. I spent seven weeks in non-stop kvetch mode, writing pathos-ridden letters home, crying a lot, and making petty demands on God in a prior journal that I am scared to open. It got so bad that the camp director had to call up my parents on vacation.
Yet when the long-awaited last day came and my parents loaded up the car with all my musty-smelling camp stuff to take me home, something inexplicable happened: On my first night back in my own bed, I cried that I missed camp. Maybe I had been wrong all along! Send me back!
I don’t know how I got sucked back into another year. Maybe I’d been hoodwinked by ritual — the s’mores, the songs, the tie-dyed shirts, the crying around the lake as we promised to come back — or the fantasy that next year, I would finally be accepted. In any case, nostalgia had caused me to keep secrets from myself. “When does the memory keep secrets?” the Italian writer Alda Merini asks cryptically in her 1989 book Delirio amoroso, or Amorous Delirium, a collection of poems inspired by her experiences with love-induced madness. “When it forgets.”
I had forgotten, and now I was going to pay the price.
On my first day back, I arrived to find that all my complaining to the camp director had backfired: I’d earned an exile worthy of Napoleon, except instead of Elba, I was going to Bunk 20, where I knew nobody. I had no foes, and also no friends.
According to 12-year-old me, I spent the next seven weeks fighting back an unstoppable tide of hostilities. In reality, I probably spent just as much time swimming, kayaking, trying to play volleyball, hanging out with my new friends Lana, Hannah and Sabrina, painting clay pots, and pretending I wasn’t spending Shabbat services writing installments of a bleak tale called “Gertrude’s Life,” about a long-suffering Victorian girl with a mangled left leg. But 12-year-old me was fluent exclusively in “kvetch.” A couple of times a week, a cadre of rabbis with guitars tried to counteract my natural crankiness by teaching us key principles of Reform Jewish wisdom: Shalom (keeping calm), Tikkun Olam (repairing the world), and Hineini (present awareness). Unfortunately for the rabbis, I was too far gone. I had braces on my teeth and eczema on my skin, an intimidating combination of blood and steel.
You probably won’t be shocked to learn that I didn’t get Belle. Instead I got cast as something more fitting, the wicked crone who turns the Prince into the Beast to begin with. It seemed unfair to me that such an important catalyst didn’t have any lines, just menacing gestures. Later in the summer, our bunk went on a camping trip where I broke a glow-stick on myself and my sleeping mat, and I became convinced that I was going to die. I briefly developed “enamorous feelings” for a young fellow before concluding that “he was really into cursing and being a general idiot.” On the bus back from some field trip, a kid named J.T. said he wanted to kiss me, which was repugnant and secretly flattering.
And of course, I somehow still managed to scrap with my tormenters from the year before. On a visit to Bunk 18, the lair of my enemies and also a few friends, Madison told the counselors that she felt “uncomfortable” changing out of her swimsuit in front of me. For my part, I felt uncomfortable that she was framing me as a pervert.
Looking back on this journal, I may have had myself to blame for the isolation I spent so much time complaining about. How would anyone make friends with a 12-year-old nudnik who wrote things like “I had to go to the compost bin thrice during breakfast” and “I started off the morning by crying the equivalent of Taghaza, the city made of salt”? Even Job would not have had the patience.
One way or another, by summer’s end, I was ready to leave camp forever. Or so I claimed. “At the moment, our bunk is creating a plaque to commemorate the summer. Everyone’s laughing, sharing inside jokes I’ll never be a part of,” I wrote. “To be honest, I’m rather sick of this camp thing and going home in two days is perfectly fine with me. Camp days are too frivolous. I need something with which to occupy the mind.”
But if I wanted “something with which to occupy the mind,” I was about to get it. Two days later, I was back home. Camp was no longer tormenting me with its frivolity, and I missed it. Memory had worked its hazy rearview magic on my mind once again. I thought about my friends, about singing the evening prayer and swaying back and forth, about the wooden float we’d burned in the middle of the pond like a Viking ship to commemorate the summer. I thought about ice cream sandwiches. “It’s been so fun, and now it seems like it had all been a dream,” I wrote.
A day or so later, missing camp had become a dream, too. I never went back.
It’s been ten years since I was twelve. That time of life is increasingly dream-like. When I reread the cursed document that is my camp journal, I feel the misery. I feel it churn in my stomach sure as suspicious falafel. Yet in photos taken at camp, I see myself smiling, entwined with other girls, my braces glinting in the sun. I cannot tell which person is real. Both girls — the one in the journal and the one in the pictures — seem unknowable.
I don’t know if I’ll ever figure out what I really thought. Memory is made of such blobby, malleable stuff that you can’t touch it without changing it, reshaping it in some way. And since memories make up our “sense of self,” whatever that is, this must mean that we are constantly morphing, too.
The last thing I wrote about camp at the summer’s end was that it seemed like another life, “as if it had all happened to someone else.”
Maybe it did.
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Cornell condemns student’s viral antisemitic remarks, but won’t bar him from campus
(JTA) — Cornell University is condemning viral antisemitic remarks made by an undergraduate student who appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” earlier this week, but the school’s president says no further action is planned against the student.
During his appearance, the student, Austin Franco, defended his statement in June that he did not want to work with Jews, saying that he did not like most of the Jews he had met. The remark was made in a private message that the company that received it publicized.
“As a university built on the solid foundations of our nation’s democratic freedoms, Cornell has an obligation to fiercely defend freedom of speech — even when we find that speech abhorrent,” Cornell’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, said in a statement issued late Wednesday, shortly after the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reached out to the school for comment on Franco.
“The student’s public comments invoked hateful generalizations and uninformed tropes with a long, ugly history of harm,” Kotlikoff said, adding that “antisemitism generally” is “detestable, ignorant, and fully at odds with the values of the Cornell community.”
Kotlikoff, who is Jewish, did not mention Franco by name in his statement, citing federal privacy law, nor did he specify which of Franco’s comments about Jews the school found objectionable.
His comments once again place Cornell on the front line in tensions over antisemitism at colleges and universities. The school reached a $60 million settlement with the Trump administration last year to resolve antisemitism claims and regain $250 million in funding that had been frozen over campus unrest in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Cornell was one of the earliest schools to face antisemitism allegations after Oct. 7, 2023, when a professor spoke at a pro-Palestinian rally and said he had been “exhilarated” by the Hamas-led attack against southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
But the latest incident involving Franco had little to do with the subsequent war in Gaza until Tuesday, when the student told Morgan on his YouTube show that he objected to Jews in part because of Israel, which he deemed “a genocidal country.”
The controversy over Franco, a rising junior at the Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York, began in June when he wrote in an internship application that he was “not interested in working for a jew.”
His name and remarks were publicized by the Jewish co-owners of Handshake, the tech company to which Franco had applied for an internship, though Franco has claimed he’d already turned down an offer. His comments prompted online backlash — including from Leo Terrell, the Trump administration’s antisemitism czar, who posted dozens of times about the 19-year-old.
Franco has garnered significant support from the far right, including through a crowdfunding campaign initiated by a YouTuber who had previously drawn criticism for saying he hoped to see “another Hitler.” Franco’s comments to Morgan included positive references to “America First,” the Trump-led nativist movement embraced by the far right.
Cornell had announced it was opening an investigation into Franco when his comments were first publicized. He remained in the headlines after he was secretly filmed by an apparent sting operation led by Accuracy in Media, a right-wing activist group that has targeted pro-Palestinian students and university heads the group deems antisemitic on other campuses. Franco told a hidden camera interviewer connected to the group last week that the university’s investigation had amounted to little and that he would be returning to Cornell.
Asked by Morgan Tuesday to explain his beliefs, Franco said that a Jewish friend of his at Virginia Tech University, where he was enrolled before transferring to Cornell, “said we should genocide all Palestinians.” He named other “bad experiences with Jews” he claimed to have experienced in college, focusing on Jewish campus figures he said had “made things up about me,” and said Jews had “made my life a living hell.”
As Morgan pushed Franco to admit he was antisemitic, the student insisted he was not.
“Not wanting to be around Jewish people does not mean you don’t like them,” he said, adding that one of his exes “was half-Jewish.” He returned to Israel later in the conversation, chargingthat it is a Jewish-led “genocidal country” that insists upon “killing Palestinians and reporters and dragging America into wars abroad.” He concluded, “No, I am not going to want to associate with those people.”
“This is a common sentiment that is held,” Franco said. “If you think this is just me, you are completely wrong.”
Morgan, for his part, concluded, “You kind of made yourself unemployable.”
Franco is facing more immediate consequences, he announced on X on Wednesday. “My parents are kicking me out,” he tweeted, drawing offers of support from a handful of prominent far-right personalities.
Like many other schools that faced unrest after Oct. 7, Cornell has taken steps aimed at countering campus antisemitism while attempting to balance academic freedom concerns, in part as a result of its settlement with the Trump administration. The university commissioned an antisemitism task force and has undertaken several initiatives, including new campus climate surveys and stricter Title VI enforcement. It has also enforced a range of disciplinary actions against pro-Palestinian students.
But when it comes to Franco, one Jewish faculty member at Cornell theorized, the administration’s hands were tied.
“You sort of have to live with it,” Menachem Rosensaft, a visiting professor at Cornell Law School and former general counsel for the World Jewish Congress, told JTA. “He is engaging in obnoxious thought that is not harming anyone else.”
Rosensaft has been at the center of other antisemitism-related controversies at Cornell, including in 2024, when he prompted Kotlikoff to criticize another Jewish professor’s planned class on Gaza — an action that the school’s faculty union said was a violation of academic freedom.
In the case of Franco, Rosensaft argued that Cornell shouldn’t “turn him into a First Amendment martyr.”
But Rosensaft added that there could be grounds for discipline if Franco returned to campus and made harmful comments about Jews in the classroom or in other public spaces.
In 2025, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, praised Kotlikoff for what he called “a comprehensive approach to countering antisemitism.” An ADL spokesperson did not return a JTA request for comment on Cornell’s latest statement about Franco.
Franco himself has launched a second crowdfunding campaign to support his housing costs.
“I have reiterated that my parents do not share my views, and it seems they no longer wish to provide me with a home to live in,” he wrote in the description. “I know the road ahead will be difficult, but this is the path I chose. I could have lived a more conventional life, as my parents did, and perhaps in a different time I would have. However, that is not the world we live in today, and because of that, I chose a different path than most.”
This story has been corrected to reflect that the original comments Austin Franco made about not wanting to work with Jews were made in a private message rather than publicly.
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