CURRENT WORK

Izzy Waxman is an emerging leader with a decade’s experience in Jewish leadership, fundraising, non-hierarchical management, and community outreach. Since 2018, she’s served her community as Executive Director of MAZON Canada, the National Jewish Response to Hunger - a role that perfectly combines her love for Jewish community organizing, social justice and food.

In the last five years, she’s piloted Mazon through a significant period of change, growing the team, lay leadership, revenue, and, most importantly, impact – during through the pandemic and the worst food security crisis in a generation. In the first three years of her direction, alongside her Associate Director, Grant Goodman, Mazon’s support of the food aid sector through grants to front-line, grassroots programs grew from $350,000 to over $1 million, or 360,000 meals annually.

She often lectures at synagogues and conferences on issues of philanthropy and food security, teaches at Jewish peer-learning events like Limmud on issues of Jewish ethics, and has recently been named Congregation Darchei Noam's Social Justice Scholar in Residence. She is a connector with relationships with progressive Jewish leaders, established and emerging, across Canada and the US.

EARLY CAREER AND EDUCATION

Before Mazon, Izzy worked as a fundraising trainer and recruiter at Public Outreach, as well as a Jewish educator at many Hebrew schools , including the Habonim Shul, the DJCC, and the Winchevsky Shule, and as notably as Summer Director and Educational Director at Camp Gesher. She holds a Bachelor’s in Liberal Arts with a focus on the anthropology of psychology, mental health and madness from Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

OTHER INTERESTS

When she's not busy running campaigns and building relationships to feed vulnerable people, she loves to volunteer for political advocacy projects, cook ancestral recipes, and is currently learning to cartwheel. She is proudly and openly queer and neurodivergent, and seeks to make all the spaces she leads inclusive to people of all marginalizations.

Outside of her role at Mazon, she is passionate about Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, and its intersection with psychedelics and Jewish magical practice. She teaches introductory-level Kabbalah and is currently seeking to run informal Kabbalah study nights that center the needs and voices of women and queers.

She has many dreams of her future: to be a great ancestor, to be a voice for her progressive Jewish community, and to see the face of G!d in every single person with whom she interacts.