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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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Bret Stephens, a stalwart Israel defender, calls out ‘Jewish terrorists’ in West Bank
(JTA) — Bret Stephens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist known as one of the paper’s most consistent defenders of Israel, used his Tuesday column to take direct aim at the country’s handling of settler violence in the West Bank — warning that unchecked attacks now pose a threat to Israel’s security and to Zionism itself.
Stephens, who has spent years pushing back on what he sees as double standards applied to Israel, wrote that he decided to speak out against what he called “Jewish terrorists” despite his reluctance to feed the volume of global condemnation facing Israel.
“That’s not only because the terrorism is a menace to Palestinian lives and property, or an affront to Jewish ethics, or a stain on Israel’s reputation — though it’s all those things,” he wrote. “It’s also a direct threat to Israel’s security and statehood, and thus to Zionism itself.”
Stephens’s column drew heavily on a public letter sent Sunday to President Trump by Matan Vilnai, a retired IDF deputy chief of staff, on behalf of Commanders for Israel’s Security, an organization representing hundreds of retired senior Israeli officers. The letter cautioned that Israeli security services have been effective against Palestinian terror groups but hamstrung when it comes to curbing Jewish extremists. The letter warned about the consequences of Israeli inaction in curbing attacks on Palestinians.
“Unless arrested swiftly and decisively, escalating violence in the West Bank is poised to ignite the region and carries severe ramifications for both Israeli security and U.S. regional interests,” wrote Vilnai.
Stephens pointed to last week’s rampage by extremist settlers through several Palestinian villages — attacks that reportedly included arson at a home and two mosques and an assault on a stonecutting factory — as evidence the problem has become routine rather than exceptional. He cited Israeli military figures showing nationalistic and settler-related crimes climbed to 867 incidents in 2025, up from 682 the year before.
Stephens also cited Eran Shamir-Borer of the Israel Democracy Institute, a former IDF legal official, who told him the government has specifically declined to place suspected Jewish settlers under administrative detention. The practice, imprisoning individuals without formal charges, is regularly deployed against suspected Palestinian terrorists.
The columnist dismissed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public framing of the violence as the work of roughly 150 “juvenile delinquents,” as he did in an interview with NBC earlier this month. Stephens argued that a government capable of eliminating a Hamas commander deep inside Iran cannot plausibly claim it’s unable to rein in a few hundred vigilantes.
Stephens is known, and widely admired within the pro-Israel community, for his robust defense of Israel, from refuting the charge of “genocide” directed at Israel to condemning what he has called the “hyperbolic and often conspiratorial hatred of the country.” Editor of the conservative Jewish thought journal Sapir, Stephens was also chosen to give the annual “State of World Jewry” address at the 92nd Street Y earlier this year.
“I think it is really important that people like Bret Stephens are speaking up about settler violence, and I think that it also shows how terrible that it’s become,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, in an interview with JTA. “Even people who are pretty, let’s say, hesitant or who almost never criticize Israeli policy are speaking up.”
But she also suggested that the issue goes beyond a failure to enforce the law or hold settlers accountable, and instead reflects the priorities of Netanyahu’s right-wing government.
“This is actually government policy because this is violence that is designed to take more and more of the West Bank,” said Jacobs. “There’s already been not just violence, but expulsions, shoving Palestinians to smaller and smaller areas and, ultimately, annexing the West Bank or at least as much of it as possible.”
Liberal Jewish groups like T’ruah, including Torat Zedek and Bnei Avraham in Israel and the U.S-based groups Smol Emuni, J Street and New Israel Fund, regularly condemn the settler violence and call on Israeli security forces to hold the perpetrators accountable. They also take part in “protective presence” visits to the West Bank in solidarity with Palestinians threatened by Jewish settlers.
The largest Jewish organizations have been less vocal on the topic, although the American Jewish Committee and the Union for Reform Judaism have issued statements condemning settler violence.
Right-leaning groups have either downplayed the extent of the violence or say Jews living in the West Bank have been provoked by neighboring Palestinians. On the same day that Stephens’s column appeared, the media watchdog group HonestReporting ran an article saying that the major news outlets disproportionately focus on settler violence, and run many fewer articles about Palestinian attacks on Jewish civilians. It also cited official Israeli data suggesting that violence by Jewish civilians in the West Bank had declined significantly since March.
Nevertheless, Stephens appeared to be echoing a growing sentiment even on the right that the settler violence is both wrong and a black eye for Israel at a time when its reputation is suffering around the world.
“I don’t think there are many supporters of Israel in the U.S. who are happy with how Israel has handled, or really mishandled, settler violence,” said David E. Bernstein, a professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School and a frequent commentator on Jewish affairs, in an email exchange with JTA. “To me, it’s anti-Zionist to allow settlers to flout the law and public policy, whether by violence or by setting up illegal outposts, because Zionism means accepting the legitimacy of the Israeli state, and radical settlers who don’t are no different than extremist Haredim [Orthodox] in not doing so.”
Last week, Israel’s Channel 13 reported that the government had approved a plan in March to tackle violence by extremist settlers but kept the plan secret due “to political considerations.” The report didn’t say whether the plan has been implemented.
The post Bret Stephens, a stalwart Israel defender, calls out ‘Jewish terrorists’ in West Bank appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu drags Mamdani into his reelection campaign as face of antisemitism
For nearly two years, Zohran Mamdani has made Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a central political target. Now Netanyahu is making Mamdani part of his own reelection campaign.
The 50-second video released Wednesday on Netanyahu’s political social media channels builds on comments the Israeli leader made on Fox News this week, portraying Mamdani as the face of a worldwide surge of antisemitism directed at Israel. It intersperses footage of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and antisemitic incidents with recent clips of Mamdani condemning Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war after the mayor backed off a vow to have the Israeli prime minister arrested during an upcoming visit to New York. It also features Mamdani’s wife, artist Rama Duwaji, who liked social media posts that supported Palestinians immediately after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. (Mamdani said his wife is a private citizen and does not work in his administration.)
The clip ends: “No one will stop me from fighting for the truth of Israel.”
The video comes as Netanyahu faces one of the toughest reelection campaigns of his political career, trailing his rivals ahead of Israel’s Oct. 27 election, which could determine not only his political future, but also his legacy and potentially his freedom as he faces a corruption trial.
The fight with Mamdani has become politically useful for Netanyahu. His main rivals — former Israel Defense Forces chief Gadi Eisenkot and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett — are seen as more moderate leaders who could rebuild strained ties with Democrats and win back support for Israel among Americans.
Joel Rubin, a Democratic commentator and foreign policy expert, said in an interview that turning Mamdani into a symbol of today’s Democratic Party gives Netanyahu a way to challenge one of his rivals’ central arguments that they are better positioned to course-correct the U.S. political shift against Israel. “For Netanyahu, it’s very important to try to portray the Democrats as Mamdani and make the argument that only he can stand up to that,” Rubin said.
Mamdani has positioned himself as a prominent progressive critic of Israel amid the war in Gaza, a position that helped propel his rise and which has become increasingly part of national Democratic Party politics.
Mamdani’s high-profile confrontation with Netanyahu escalated when he announced a review of whether he had the legal power to arrest the Israeli prime minister when he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly in September. Experts on Israeli politics warned of an unintended consequence: would allowing Netanyahu to cast himself once again as Israel’s defender against international efforts to isolate the Jewish state.
“Many Israelis are sick of him and hope to vote him out,” Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro wrote on X on Saturday. “The only possible outcome of a fruitless attempt to arrest him in NYC would be to give him a political boost at home. That would be an own goal.”
Some political strategists argue that Mamdani and his allies have little reason to mind if Netanyahu remains in power. “I bet they’re rooting for Bibi, in a perverse way,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder and executive vice president of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, in an interview with the Forward discussing how Israel is reshaping Democratic politics.
While still serving as a New York state Assembly member, Mamdani zeroed in on the Israeli prime minister as an enemy, leading chants of “Netanyahu, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” during a protest in Oct. 2023.
Throughout his mayoral campaign last year, Mamdani repeatedly injected Netanyahu into New York politics., Mamdani first pledged to arrest Netanyahu shortly after he launched his campaign. According to a report, members of Mamdani’s inner circle were pushing for him to make this arrest declaration. After his election, already knowing the city lacked the authority to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani proceeded with the review. When it concluded he did not have the power to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani used a mayoral address to declare him a war criminal and then encouraged New Yorkers to protest him on his UN visit. Critics say the episode was a calculated political move aimed at energizing the pro-Palestinian and progressive base that helped elect him.
“There is a core principle amongst the left in American politics that having someone to organize against is crucial to growing numbers and persuasion, and for Mamdani, having the foil of Netanyahu is an incredibly valuable tool for motivating support,” said Rubin, who led Jewish outreach for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.
Whether that principle translates into votes for Netanyahu’s coalition in Israel’s Oct. 27 election remains to be seen. At the moment, Mamdani and Netanyahu have become unlikely political assets for each other, each giving the other a powerful opponent to campaign against.
The post Netanyahu drags Mamdani into his reelection campaign as face of antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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As Conservative rabbis, we’re rethinking our communities’ policies toward interfaith families
(JTA) — As Conservative/Masorti rabbis, we see firsthand the joy of couples building a life together in the Jewish community, and the pain of those who feel shut out because one of them is not Jewish.
We think of the community member, though not Jewish, who developed a profound love for davening (prayer) and Torah study, and has supported his children’s and grandchildren’s Jewish education and observance of mitzvot. We think of another community member who faithfully drove her four children to Hebrew school for years and, after her youngest child’s bat mitzvah, chose to convert to Judaism herself.
It is time for our halacha, or Jewish law, to address issues facing intermarried couples and families robustly.
The two of us had the honor of joining colleagues in co-authoring a teshuvah — a rabbinic response to questions of Jewish law — that does just that. The Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has approved a teshuvah that seeks to honor these couples and families and their commitment to Jewish life in our congregations and communities.
Since we are part of a movement that balances a commitment to halacha with the realities of modern life, our work is grounded in traditional Jewish texts, laws and principles while also reflecting the core belief that welcoming others and extending hospitality are essential Jewish values.
Based on halacha and Jewish tradition, the teshuvah affirms the longstanding standard of Conservative/Masorti rabbis that clergy may officiate only at weddings where both partners are Jewish. It emphasizes that while a wedding is a significant moment that often singularly drives these conversations, there are many other important life-cycle moments that rabbis can offer as occasions for Jewish celebration and reaffirmations of commitment to mitzvot.
Through this teshuvah, we formalize a public mishebeirakh (blessing) before or after the wedding day for a couple committed to building an exclusively Jewish home, as well as a hanukkat habayit ceremony to dedicate their home.
We welcome non-Jewish parents on the bimah during their children’s b’nei mitzvah and offer “mazal tov” and other basic gestures of inclusion to intermarried couples, both of which were once considered unacceptable. Our goal in doing so is to inspire the couple and family to grow in Jewish living.
We affirm that synagogues may not hire intermarried individuals as clergy but may hire intermarried individuals for other roles, and that rabbis may officiate at funerals for non-Jewish family members and support a Jewish mourning process when a non-Jewish loved one dies.
It’s been about 40 years since the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which sets halachic policy for our movement internationally, broadly addressed questions around intermarried couples and families. We have learned over time that those intermarried couples who choose to embrace Jewish life are integral to the fabric of Conservative/Masorti communities.
We invite these couples to engage meaningfully in Jewish practice at home and in community, and, if they are having children, to raise them as Jews. Sometimes they may even choose to convert to Judaism at some point.
We do so because, as rabbis, we enjoy the privilege of being invited into people’s lives, and our role is both pastoral and educational. As people figure out their own identities and relationships, our role is to help them integrate Jewish tradition. As couples turn toward each other and seek to integrate Judaism into their lives, we are here to help them chart a course and to bring Torah into the conversation and observance of mitzvot into their lives.
We aim to inspire the couple to grow in Jewish living, observing mitzvot, studying Torah and searching for God in daily life. To do so, we must create gateways so everyone can find a place to learn and find joy and inspiration in our traditions, within the boundaries of halachic standards and principles.
Many of the practices in the teshuvah are already in place in some communities. Some offer solutions that speak most directly to realities in North America, and we call on local rabbis to interpret them in light of the circumstances in their local communities.
In the days of the Mishnah and the Talmud, when faced with new and challenging circumstances, our rabbis found creative and often beautiful solutions to embody the Torah as they understood it. As we follow in their footsteps, we use the wisdom we have inherited to both uphold and transform those values and honor the halachic principles that are central to our rabbinates and communities.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
The post As Conservative rabbis, we’re rethinking our communities’ policies toward interfaith families appeared first on The Forward.
