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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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Who’s responsible for deadly antisemitism? Everyone will hate the answer
Twenty Jews outside of the state of Israel were murdered for being Jewish in antisemitic attacks across three continents in 2025, the highest death toll among diaspora Jews in more than 30 years. In every country surveyed, antisemitic incidents of all kinds — including beatings, vandalism, threats and online harassment — remain dozens of percentage points higher than they were in 2022, before the Gaza war began.
This information, released in a report from Tel Aviv University on the eve of Yom HaShoah earlier this week, should haunt everyone, regardless of political affiliation.
Neither left nor right is wholly responsible; instead, the report concludes that “rather than a backlash to a specific geopolitical crisis, high levels of antisemitism have become a normalized feature in societies with large Jewish minorities.”
What the left should hear
There is a strain of progressive opinion, particularly vocal since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, that dismisses accusations of antisemitism as, essentially, a political weapon — a tool wielded by pro-Israel voices to silence legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy, shut down protests and conflate opposition to political Zionism with hatred of Jews.
There is some truth to this narrative. But the Tel Aviv University report reveals it has severe limitations, as well.
The Bondi Beach massacre did not happen because a government defined antisemitism too broadly. The synagogue attackers in Manchester, England did not gun down worshippers because someone misapplied the IHRA definition. The victims of attacks in Boulder, Colorado and Washington, D.C. were not statistics manufactured by an advocacy group. Twenty Diaspora Jews died violent deaths because antisemitism remains a lethal force in the world — a truth that the left, across the globe, needs to do a significantly better job addressing.
The physical assaults, murders, firebombings, and other acts of concrete violence chronicled in the report cannot be rationalized away as mere criticism of Israel. In Canada, incidents rose from roughly 2,000 in 2022 to 6,800 in 2025. In Australia, the total number of reported antisemitic incidents rose from 472 in 2022 to 1,750 in 2025 — nearly a fourfold increase in three years, including multiple arson attacks on synagogues, in addition to the Bondi Beach shooting.
The tendency among some progressives to dismiss most antisemitism complaints as presumed to be in bad-faith unless proven otherwise has real costs. When allegations of antisemitism are reflexively treated as a political tactic, it becomes easier to ignore actual antisemitism, even when it’s claiming lives and burning down religious buildings.
To be clear, there are real and important questions about how to define antisemitism, and where the line between good faith criticism of Israel as a nation-state and antisemitism against Jews as a people falls. Those questions must continue to be asked.
But when Jewish institutions are targeted and a primary political reflex on the left is to search for Israeli wrongdoing that might have “provoked” the attack, the victims are abandoned.
What the right — and the Israeli government — should hear
The Tel Aviv University report challenges progressive denial. But it challenges the Israeli government and its defenders just as directly.
The report’s authors write that Israeli politicians at the highest levels have “expanded the scope of the term ‘antisemitism,’ including through cynical and hasty declarations, drained it of meaning, and damaged the struggle against Jew-hatred.”
The government, they conclude, “has not contributed in any meaningful way to the cause” of fighting antisemitism against diaspora Jews.
This is not a minor complaint buried in a footnote. It is a central finding of the most authoritative antisemitism report on the planet, published by an Israeli university.
Consider what that behavior looked like in practice. When gunmen massacred 15 Jews at Bondi Beach in December, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s immediate political instinct was to blame Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government, specifically its decision to recognize Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.
“Your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fire,” Netanyahu declared — a response that made it seem like an act of violence motivated by the Islamic State was somehow part of the legitimate pro-Palestinian movement. As former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull pointed out, the vast majority of the world’s nations recognize Palestinian statehood. Were they all complicit in Bondi?
This pattern of using the word “antisemitism” as a cudgel against any policy position that Israel’s government dislikes — whether it is recognizing Palestinian statehood, criticizing settlement expansion or questioning IDF military operations — has a corrosive effect on the fight against actual antisemitism. When the term is deployed reflexively and politically, it trains audiences to be skeptical of the label. It gives ammunition to exactly those who want to dismiss Jewish fear as manufactured. It is, in the deepest possible sense, counterproductive.
The Tel Aviv University report goes further, recommending that Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism be dissolved entirely, with its funding transferred instead to Israeli embassies and consulates. The author’s argument: only professionals embedded in local communities, working alongside law enforcement and educators, can actually make a difference in combatting antisemitism. Grand declarations from politicians in Jerusalem motivated more by their own domestic political considerations than by the safety of the Jewish diaspora cannot.
A need for discipline
What this report ultimately demands, from the left and the right alike, is a discipline that both sides have conspicuously failed to practice: the discipline of treating antisemitism as a separate issue from the issues of Israel, Zionism and Palestinian rights.
These issues do overlap. But they are fundamentally individual. Antisemitism is hatred of Jews as Jews, a prejudice that has existed for millennia, operates independently of any particular government’s behavior, and kills people without asking victims what they think about Israeli settlements.
The contemporary state of Israel is a nation-state which commits specific actions, many of which are worthy of criticism.
Conflating the two, in either direction, produces disaster.
On the right, treating any political position unfavorable to Israel as presumptively antisemitic weaponizes Jewish suffering for political ends and corrupts the language we need to name and fight real hatred. On the left, treating the existence of real Jew-hatred as essentially a cover story for Zionist advocacy abandons Jewish communities to violence, and prevents the kind of serious policy response that could actually reduce harm.
The people killed at Bondi Beach were not symbols in a geopolitical argument. They were not collateral in a debate about international law or protest rights. They were Jews who had gathered to celebrate Hanukkah. Their deaths — and those of the other diaspora Jews killed last year — demand better than either cynical exploitation or willful minimization by either side.
The Tel Aviv University report, to its considerable credit, refuses both postures. It counts the dead honestly. It honestly holds the Israeli government accountable. It refuses to let anti-Jewish violence be erased, and it also refuses to let that violence be used as a political instrument. In doing so, it models the intellectual honesty that this moment desperately requires.
The question is whether anyone on either side of this exhausting divide is willing to listen.
The post Who’s responsible for deadly antisemitism? Everyone will hate the answer appeared first on The Forward.
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2026 Tribeca Film Festival to Screen World Premiere of Israeli Films, Including Noga Erez Documentary
A still from “What Is To Come.” Photo: Tribeca Film Festival
Organizers of the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival announced on Thursday the official lineup for this year’s event in June and it includes the world premiere of three Israeli co-productions.
“What Is to Come” will be screened as part of the festival’s International Narrative Competition. The drama from Israel and the United Kingdom is about a woman named Yehudit who unexpectedly loses her husband and is forced to start over on her own. “In the process, she finds that abrupt and painful detours can lead to bright roads,” according to a synopsis of the film. The feature is directed and written by Ruthy Pribar, and stars Ronit Yudkevitch, Yaakov Zada Danielm and Tovit Adis Semay. “What Is to Come” will make its world premiere on June 8.
Pribar’s debut feature film “Asia” screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2020 and won three awards, including the Nora Ephron Prize for Pribar, a best actress award for Shira Haas, and best cinematography for Daniella Nowitz. The film also won nine Ophir Awards in Israel.
“Moishe Badhan (or The Tale of a Wedding Entertainer),” will also make its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, in the Viewpoints section. Directed by Gidi Dar and written by Shuli Rand, the co-production from Israel and the US is a comedy-drama about a disgraced Hasidic wedding-comedian who is trying to gather enough funds to marry off his daughter. The cast includes Shuli Rand, Tal Friedman, and American Jewish comedian Elon Gold, who is also an executive producer on the film. The world premiere will take place on June 4.
The 2026 Tribeca Film Festival will also feature the world premiere of the documentary “Noga,” about Israeli alternative pop singer Noga Erez. The movie, which was directed and co-produced by Jono and Benji Bergmann, is a c0-production from Austria, Germany, Israel, and the US. It examines how Erez “must redefine her role as an artist on a global stage” after the Israel-Hamas war breaks out in 2023. The film’s world premiere on June 7 will be followed by an acoustic performance by Erez and her longtime partner in music and life Ori Rousso.
Erez is performing twice at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival this month. She has never performed at the festival before and has made history as the first Israeli singer to take to the stage at the annual event in Indio, California.
The 2026 Tribeca Film Festival will run from June 3-14. The event will feature 118 feature films including 103 world premieres, which is the most in the history of the festival, and 86 short films. The festival this year will represent 143 filmmakers, including 55 first-time directors, spanning 44 countries.
“Tribeca began 25 years ago as an act of healing, a mission to reunite our community through the power of storytelling. Today, that purpose feels more urgent than ever,” said Jane Rosenthal, co-chair and co-founder of the Tribeca Festival. “This year’s incredible feature and short film lineup includes stories from filmmakers who make us think, feel, laugh, cry, and ask why. Tribeca remains dedicated to the artists’ voices and diverse perspectives that challenge us to see one another more clearly.”
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Over 1,000 Entertainment Industry Figures Back Israel’s Inclusion in 2026 Eurovision Song Contest
A photographer takes a picture of a TV screen in Wiener Stadthalle, the venue of next year’s Eurovision in Vienna, Austria, Nov. 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger
More than 1,000 members of the entertainment industry have signed an open letter expressing support for Israel’s participation in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) held in May, in response to demands to have the country excluded from the competition because of its military actions in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war.
Creative Community for Peace, a non-profit organization comprised of prominent members of the entertainment industry, penned the initial open letter in 2024 in response to efforts by anti-Israel activists to have the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the ESC, ban Israel from the event and to pressure countries and artists to withdraw their participation from the competition. The open letter voiced support for Israel’s inclusion in Eurovision as well as solidarity with the contest’s participants, while denouncing calls for a boycott of the event.
Hundreds more entertainment industry leaders have since added their names to the open letter, including actresses Amy Schumer and Mila Kunis; singer Matisyahu; actors Jeremy Piven and Jerry O’Connell; television writer, producer, and directors Amy Sherman-Palladino and Matthew Weiner; “Wonder Woman” director Patty Jenkins; and “Nobody Wants This” co-creator Erin Foster.
“We have been shocked and disappointed to see some members of the entertainment community calling for Israel to be banished from the contest for responding to the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust,” the letter stated. “We believe that unifying events such as singing competitions are crucial to help bridge our cultural divides and unite people of all backgrounds through their shared love of music.”
“Music should bring us together,” said O’Connell. “No artist should be silenced for where they are from. These boycott efforts destroy the very connections the arts are meant to build.”
Those who signed the initial open letter back in 2024 include Helen Mirren, Boy George, Liev Schrieber, Sharon Osbourne, Gene Simmons, Debra Messing, David Draiman, Mayim Bialik, Julianna Margulies, and Ginnifer Goodwin.
“Artists and culture are being dragged into the angry, misinformed politics of the moment,” said Osbourne in a released statement. “Attempts to exclude Israelis from the international stage twist art into a tool of division and erode the shared humanity that the arts are meant to preserve. I’ve watched this play out for over three years, and it just breaks my heart.”
The 2026 Eurovision semi-finals will take place on May 12 and 14, and the final live show will be on May 16. The competition is being held in Vienna, Austria.
After the European Broadcasting Union confirmed late last year that it will allow Israel to participate in the 2026 ESC, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Slovenia, and Iceland announced they will not participate in this year’s event.
Spain’s national broadcaster RTVE said it will not broadcast or participate in the event, which marks the first time the country has completely boycotted the ESC since it began participating in the competition in 1961. Spain’s Culture Minister Ernest Urtasun called the move “brave.”
Meanwhile, the EBU confirmed this week that for the first time ever the live shows of the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest will be available to watch for free in the United States. It will air on YouTube but also be available for viewing in the US on the Peacock streaming service.