The findings will be formally presented at the Senate in Palazzo Giustiniani on March 3.
According to the CDEC, anti-Israel animus was a key ideological driver of the surge in antisemitism.
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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.
—
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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Antisemitism Spikes to Record Levels in Italy, New Data Shows
A protester uses a pole to break a window at Milano Centrale railway station, during a demonstration that is part of a nationwide “Let’s Block Everything” protest in solidarity with Gaza, with activists also calling for a halt to arms shipments to Israel, in Milan, Italy, Sept. 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Claudia Greco
Antisemitism in Italy surged to record levels last year, according to newly published figures, as Jews and Israelis across Europe continued to face a relentlessly hostile environment including harassment, vandalism, and targeted attacks.
In Italy, the Milan-based CDEC Foundation (Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation) confirmed that antisemitic incidents in the country almost reached four digits for the first time last year.
Of 1,492 reports submitted through official monitoring channels, the CDEC formally classified a record high 963 cases as antisemitic, according to the European Jewish Congress and Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), the main representative body of Jews in Italy.
By comparison, there were 877 recorded incidents in 2024, preceded by 453 such outrages in 2023 and just 241 in 2022. The data fits with several reports showing antisemitism surged across the Western world, especially the US and Europe, following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
“The main ideological matrix that has fueled hatred against Jews is anti-Semitism linked to Israel – i.e., the transfer of anti-Jewish myths, such as blood libel, racism by election, and hatred of mankind,” the organization stated.
In May, for example, a restaurant in Naples ejected an Israeli family, telling them “Zionists are not welcome here.” Months earlier, demonstrators at a January protest in Bologna vandalized a synagogue, painting “Justice for a free Gaza.”
Most of the incidents, 643, occurred online on digital platforms, while 320 involved physical acts such as graffiti, vandalism, and desecration of synagogues in addition to discrimination, threats, and assaults.
The surge in antisemitism came amid multiple surveys showing pervasive antisemitic attitudes among the Italian public.
Around 15 percent of Italians consider physical attacks on Jewish people “entirely or fairly justifiable,” according to one survey published in September.
The survey, conducted on Sept. 24-26 by the pollster SWG among a national sample of 800 adults, found that 18 percent of those interviewed also believe antisemitic graffiti on walls and other public spaces is legitimate.
About one-fifth of respondents said it was reasonable to attack professors who expressed pro-Israeli positions or for businesses to reject Israeli customers.
Months earlier, in June, the Italian research institute Eurispes, in partnership with Pasquale Angelosanto, the national coordinator for the fight against antisemitism, polled a representative sample of the country’s population and found that 37.9 percent of Italians believe that Jews “only think about accumulating money” while 58.2 percent see Jews as “a closed community.”
About 40 percent either did not know or did not believe that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, and the majority of respondents — 54 percent — regarded antisemitic crimes as isolated incidents and not part of any broader trend.
The report also showed elevated levels of anti-Israel belief among younger Italians, with 50.85 percent of those 18-24 thinking that “Jews in Palestine took others’ territories.”
The Institute for Jewish Policy Research estimates the number of Jews in Italy as ranging from 26,800 to 48,910 depending on which standards of observance one selects. Eurispes places the number at 30,000.
In January, the Anti-Defamation League released the newest results of its Global 100 survey which found that 26 percent of Italians — 13.1 million adults — embrace six or more antisemitic stereotypes.
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NYC Officials Sue Mamdani Over Failure to Disclose Docs on Decision to Scrap IHRA Definition of Antisemitism
Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS
A group of Queens elected officials and civic leaders has filed suit against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, accusing his administration of stonewalling a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request related to his decision to revoke an executive order adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
The lawsuit centers on Mamdani’s move on his first day in office in January to rescind a series of executive orders issued by his predecessor, former Mayor Eric Adams, to combat antisemitism. Among the orders revoked was one formally adopting the IHRA definition, which has been widely embraced by governments and institutions across the democratic world.
Plaintiffs include Queens Councilmembers Joann Ariola and Vickie Paladino, along with Queens Civic Congress President Warren Schreiber, the Queens Daily Eagle reported last week.
They argue that the mayor’s office has failed to provide adequate transparency regarding the rationale behind rescinding the IHRA order, a move critics say weakened the city’s formal commitment to combating antisemitism at a time of rising anti-Jewish incidents both locally and nationally.
“The purpose of the FOIL applications at issue in this proceeding is to decipher and obtain the documentary trail of information illuminating Mayor Mamdani’s motives, policies, programs, legislative initiatives, and budgetary priorities implicated within the EO [executive order],” the lawsuit reads.
In their filing, the plaintiffs accuse the administration of having “stonewalled, deflected, delayed, and denied” their FOIL request, calling the response timeline “arbitrary and capricious.” Although the city’s Law Department acknowledged receipt of the request and projected a response date in April, the plaintiffs contend that such delays are unacceptable given the gravity of the issue. The lawsuit characterizes Mamdani’s actions as “anti-Israel” and “anti-Jewish.”
IHRA — an intergovernmental organization comprising dozens of countries including the US and Israel — adopted the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2016. Since then, the definition has been widely accepted by Jewish groups and lawmakers across the political spectrum, and it is now used by hundreds of governing institutions, including the US State Department, European Union, and United Nations. Law enforcement also uses it as a tool for matters such as hate-crime investigations and sentencing.
According to the definition, antisemitism “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It provides 11 specific, contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere. Beyond classic antisemitic behavior associated with the likes of the medieval period and Nazi Germany, the examples include denial of the Holocaust and newer forms of antisemitism targeting Israel such as demonizing the Jewish state, denying its right to exist, and holding it to standards not expected of any other democratic state.
Jewish community advocates have expressed alarm that rescinding the executive order could signal a retreat from clear standards at a moment when antisemitic incidents have surged in the two years following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The Israeli government and leading US Jewish groups sharply criticized Mamdani’s decision.
Mamdani’s supporters say the move was part of a broader action by Mamdani to revoke all executive orders issued by Adams since Sept. 26, 2024, when the ex-mayor was indicted for corruption, charges of which have since been dismissed. Mamdani’s office has framed the move as an administrative reset rather than a targeted policy shift, saying the new mayor sought to begin his term with a clean slate.
However, critics argue that lumping the IHRA adoption together with other rescinded orders was, at best, careless and, at worst, reflective of an ideological discomfort with pro-Israel policy frameworks.
The New York Times reported last month that Mamdani “knew from the moment he won the election” in November that he would revoke the executive orders related to Israel and antisemitism but believed rescinding them would upset Jewish groups whose concerns he spent months trying to allay. Therefore, the report continued, Mamdani’s team laid out a few options, and he chose to rescind every order that Adams issued after his indictment, “allowing him to frame the choice as a matter of good governance.”
The lawsuit now seeks a court order compelling the mayor’s office to produce internal communications and documentation explaining the decision-making process behind the revocation.
The IHRA definition could have been problematic for Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist and avowed anti-Zionist who has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career and been widely accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric. A supporter of boycotting all entities tied to Israel, he has repeatedly refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; routinely accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide”; and refused to clearly condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been used to call for violence against Jews and Israelis worldwide.
Leading members of the Jewish community in New York have expressed alarm about Mamdani’s electoral victory, fearing what may come in a city already experiencing a surge in antisemitic hate crimes.
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China Unleashes ‘Antisemitic Wave’ Amid Gaza Conflict, New Report Shows
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands as they meet, in Beijing, China, Sept. 2, 2025. Photo: Iran’s Presidential website/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
The Chinese Communist Party has embraced overt antisemitic messaging in its domestic propaganda in recent years, according to a new report which ties the move to both geopolitical rivalry with the United States and efforts to curry favor with Arab and Muslim countries hostile to Israel.
The Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), a prominent think tank based in Israel, documents in the report how China’s authoritarian government has deliberately cultivated antisemitism among the population and internationally as a strategy.
One key trend detailed by the study’s author, JPPI senior fellow Shalom Salomon Wald, is the way in Chinese media that Israel, Jews, and Judaism have grown conflated.
“In popular discourse, Israel and Jews are more or less synonymous. This is not much different from the West, where the anti-Israeli presentation of the Gaza war by official and social media is regularly causing verbal and physical violence against local Jews,” Wald writes. “Chinese officials, intellectuals, and news providers are generally aware of the difference between Israel and world Jewry. Officials acknowledge the distinction when it suits them, for example, when they insist that their criticism of Israel has no antisemitic connotation. They often fail to draw the distinction when it does not suit them.”
The report identifies 2021 as when “the Chinese government chose to harden its attitude toward Israel and its Jewish supporters. Chinese contacts informed some Israeli experts of this policy change. Whether [Chinese President] Xi Jinping himself made the relevant decisions is not known. No single reason, but a convergence of events caused this change.”
Writing in The Jerusalem Post, Wald identifies at least three factors driving China’s shift toward anti-Zionism.
The first is economic, with Israel walking back its relationship with China under US pressure.
“Israel, admonished by the United States, made Chinese investments, particularly in hi-tech and infrastructure projects, more difficult,” he writes. “The Chinese expressed their resentment quite openly.”
The second is geopolitical. “China was in the midst of expanding its presence in the Arab Middle East, offering major economic cooperation and long-lasting political ties,” Wald explains. “A harder attitude against Israel was a cheap sweetener for such offers.”
The third is the perception that, due to internal issues, Israel has grown weaker: “Israel’s domestic crisis eroded its ‘strongman’ image in Chinese eyes. A country wracked by mass demonstrations and numerous ineffective elections could no longer be taken as seriously as it had been.”
However, recent Israel-Hamas conflicts in Gaza were also key catalysts for upticks in antisemitism.
“Antisemitic waves washed over China’s social and official media following the Gaza conflicts of 2021 and 2023-25. They were authorized, if not initiated, by the Chinese government in pursuit of China’s political goals and based on anti-Jewish tropes,” states the report, which notes the hostility especially surged following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
“Chinese media began spreading antisemitic tropes under the cover of criticism of Israel’s military actions,” it continues. “While similar denunciations conflating Israel, Zionists, and Jews occurred in other countries too, in China all political speech is tightly monitored and censored if it is not in line with official positions. If antisemitism was spreading on China’s media, it meant that it was officially sanctioned. It appeared in government sources and public media, in social media, and in universities.”
Wald notes in the JPPI report that Beijing’s turn toward antisemitism will have a long-term impact on education.
“Universities are among the most influential promoters of Chinese antisemitism,” he states. “As they train China’s next generation, they risk transmitting current prejudices to some of China’s future leaders. Today, almost all Chinese government leaders and most Communist Party high officials are university graduates.”
The report describes how the rise in academic antisemitism in China has destroyed years of positive scholarship, quoting Prof. Ping Zhang of Tel Aviv University who said that “the foundation of the good relationship built between the two sides over the past three decades has been shattered.”
JPPI’s research notes that during the 20th century, China’s leaders originally supported Zionism. Sun Yat-sen, the first provisional president of the Republic of China and known today as the “father of modern China,” wrote in 1920 to the head of the Shanghai Zionist Association that he favored the “movement to restore your wonderful and historic nation which has contributed so much to the civilization of the world.” Similarly, in 1948 the Communist Party’s People’s Daily praised the founding of Israel.
Since then, however, China’s sympathies have shifted dramatically, recognizing a Palestinian state in 1988 and, more recently, moving closer to Hamas and Iran, whose leaders openly promote antisemitism and seek Israel’s destruction.
This month, for example, a Chinese military attaché in Tehran presented Brigadier General Bahman Behmard, commander of the Iranian Air Force, with a scale model of China’s J-20 fifth-generation stealth fighter. Even though no official contract was announced, experts interpreted the Chinese gesture as a sharp warning to the US and its ally Israel amid mounting fears of renewed conflict in the Middle East.
Days earlier, a new study revealed the extent to which the Iranian regime used Chinese technology to silence dissent during recent nationwide anti-government protests, imposing near-total internet shutdowns and disrupting satellite communications while carrying out a brutal crackdown. According to the international human rights organization Article 19, China has provided material and technical support to Iran since at least 2010, bolstering its surveillance and censorship capabilities as Chinese firms continue operating in the country despite international sanctions.
China, a key diplomatic and economic backer of Tehran, has moved to deepen ties with the regime in recent years, signing a 25-year cooperation agreement, holding joint naval drills, and continuing to purchase Iranian oil despite US sanctions.
China is the largest importer of Iranian oil, with nearly 90 percent of Iran’s crude and condensate exports going to Beijing.
According to some media reports, China may be even helping Iran rebuild its decimated air defenses and ballistic missile program following the 12-day war with Israel in June.
Closer to home, Beijing has also lambasted the Jewish state for its increasingly close ties with Taiwan. China considers Taiwan, a nearby island run by a democratic government, as a renegade Chinese province that must be reunited with the mainland — by force, if necessary.
In September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to a delegation of 250 US state legislators at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, warning of China’s role in demonizing Israel.
There is “an effort to besiege — not isolate as much as besiege Israel — that is orchestrated by the same forces that supported Iran,” Netanyahu said. One is China. And the other is Qatar. They are organizing an attack on Israel … [through] the social media of the Western world and the United States.”
That same month, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), an Israeli think tank, released a report examining how China has increasingly used state media and covert campaigns to spread anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives in the US. The effort includes the promotion of conspiracy theories about “Jewish control” of politics, the economy, and the media.
While China’s primary aim is to target and undermine the United States, according to the study, Israel ends up suffering “collateral damage” as a result.