Kathy Goldman, who fought hunger in New York City, dies at age 92

Kathy Goldman, who dedicated her career as a civic leader to building food banks, pantries and free breakfast and lunch programs in public schools to support low-income New Yorkers, died on March 5 in Brooklyn. She was 92.

The cause of death at a hospital was congestive heart failure, said her daughter, Julie Goldman.

Ms. Goldman was determined to confront the collective indifference that she believed had contributed to the Holocaust. Over fifty years, she has worked with many associates to successfully lobby for federal subsidies such as food stamps and nutritional assistance for women, children and infants; creating partnerships between business providers of facilities and local communities; and expand the mandate of anti-hunger programs to include assistance with housing, health care, education, and other needs.

In 1980, she founded the Community Food Resource Center, a food bank, as a buffer against stricter welfare eligibility requirements. Three years later, she helped organize what it is today Food Bank for New York City, which served dozens of soup kitchens and food banks across the city from the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx. She was director of the center until her retirement in 2003.

In 1984, she started the Community Kitchen of West Harlem, an innovative program that not only provided food but also helped the hungry with other needs, including housing and health care. After renovations to the dining room, “when a 10-year-old boy exclaimed, ‘It’s like McDonald’s!’ Goldman ‘considered this the greatest compliment of all time from a child,’” Lana Dee Povitz wrote in “Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice” (2019).

In the early 1990s, she persuaded the city to open evening school cafeterias in Chinatown and Harlem to serve dinners for older adults.

“She was the leading voice in the fight against hunger in New York for 50 years and the first to focus on food in schools, which led to literally thousands of children eating the food instead of throwing it away,” says Fran Barrett, Governor of New York. Kathy Hochul’s nonprofit interagency coordinator, said by email.

In establishing federal school breakfast and summer meal programs in New York, Ms. Goldman “hired people who had expertise and got out of the way,” said Ms. Barrett, who had been one of her associates (along with Liz Krueger, who would become a senator, and Mary McCormick of the Community Trust of New York).

In 2002, Ms. Goldman was invited to carry the Olympic torch a quarter mile in New York and in 2012 she was honored by President Barack Obama at the White House as a “champion of change” for her contribution to reducing hunger in America.

After retiring from the food center, she and Agnes founded Molnar Community food advocates in 2009 to lobby for universal school lunches and other government strategies to meet Americans’ nutritional needs.

As Mrs. Goldman often said, “If the will were there tomorrow morning, we wouldn’t have to be hungry. There is no shortage of food.”

In 2022, she moved to a retirement community in Sleepy Hollow, NY

Catherine Vera Friedman (she later changed her name to Kathryn, after the actress Kathryn Grayson) was born in the Bronx on January 15, 1932, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her mother, Ila (Goldman) Friedman, was a writer who founded a Hungarian women’s magazine. Her father, Samuel, was a furniture maker and secretary-treasurer of his union.

After graduating as one of the first group of girls admitted to the Bronx High School of Science, three blocks from her home, she became the first in her family to go to college, studying film at New York University and then briefly attending City College and Hunter College went. In 1986, she received a master’s degree in urban studies from Queens College of the City University of New York.

In 1949 she traveled to Budapest, where she worked as a translator at the World Youth Festival; in college she joined the Labor Youth League, which was founded by the Communist Party (although she later said she opposed the Red Flag’s self-interest, dogmatism, and contempt for women); and took courses in Marxism and black history at the Jefferson School of Social Science, once described in The Times as “the premier training center for communists and communist sympathizers in this city.”

She and her husband, Jack Goldman, were active in the Urban League’s campaign against racial discrimination in housing. She also joined a group of white, middle-class parents who supported school desegregation.

In 1966, Ms. Goldman and another activist, Ellen Lurie, compared the reading test scores of every school in the city and published them as evidence that black students were receiving a poor education.

She and Evelina Antonetty organized to improve the South Bronx public schools, develop a bilingual education initiative for adults through United Bronx Parents, and introduce a federally funded free summer meal program for children in 1971; she helped draft regulations when the program was expanded nationally in 1979.

She and her husband divorced in 1974. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by her sons, Joseph and Robert Goldman; five grandsons and two great-grandsons. Most of her relatives who remained in Europe after her parents emigrated (her father from Slovakia and her mother from Hungary) were killed during the Holocaust.

“I was really raised to believe that if more people had spoken up, the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened,” Ms. Goldman’s daughter quoted her as saying. “If there had been a backlash, it would have been mitigated. I believe that to this day. You can do something. You can make a difference, you can make a change.”