Andrew Kent talks about life
He’s the new chair of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey
Andrew Kent of Tenafly, the new chair of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, is a formidably accomplished man. He hunts for challenges so he can overcome them. He changes careers not only for pragmatic reasons (and he is also deeply pragmatic) but for the opportunity the change gives him to learn more.
And he has so much energy that it’s hard not to wonder how he does it.
From the end of the Second World War until the last decade or so, the long line of highly competent and committed federation chairs have been able to focus on the community’s growth, living freely in a stable world arcing toward justice. But the world has become far less predictable, less safe for everyone in general — and for Jews in particular.
So it makes sense for Mr. Kent to see steering the federation safely through these rocky shoals — while continuing to promote growth, and never to forget the importance of both comfort and joy — as another challenge that he can take on.
So — who is Andrew Kent?
To begin with, he is entirely local, a nearly lifelong Jersey boy. He was born in the Valley Hospital in Ridgewood in 1980 to Alison Brown of Fair Lawn and Greg Kent of Hawthorne. The young family lived in Glen Rock. When Andrew was 3, his parents divorced and eventually his mother remarried. Her new husband, Irv Glass, became Andrew’s stepfather; Andrew has managed to be close to both men. Greg also remarried, to Wendy Kim Kent; later the elder Kents moved to North Carolina, but when he was growing up, Andrew split time between his father’s family and his mother’s. As a child, he moved from Paramus to Wyckoff.
Mr. Kent remained an only child on his father’s side, and the oldest of three on his mother’s; his sister, Rebecca, lives in Pennsylvania, and his brother, Daniel, lives in Old Tappan. He went to high school at Ramapo, in Franklin Lakes, and became bar mitzvah at Temple Beth Rishon there.
Mr. Kent is not physically large, and that fact has shaped his life. “I have a slight build, and I was picked on and bullied growing up because of it,” he said. (To be clear, he’s well within average range; kids can be mean as they find and magnify small differences and turn them into shameful weaknesses.)
“There weren’t as many Jews in western Bergen County as there are in Tenafly,” he said. “And on average, the kids there were bigger. I loved playing sports — baseball and football — but I had to work really hard to keep up.”
He told a story that he said he’d also told on the federation’s podcast, “Jew-ish: Where Everyone Belongs,” when he was interviewed by his predecessor as federation chair, Daniel Herz, because the story details what he calls “the foundation of my journey.”
“When I went to a sports camp — there were mostly Jewish campers there, but it was not a Jewish camp — in 1992, when I was 12, I was playing baseball in a tournament. I’m playing right field, and the ball gets hit to me, and I don’t catch it. I’m supposed to be the next at bat, but they pull me in the middle of the inning.
“It’s embarrassing to be pulled in the middle of an inning, and every day for the rest of the summer I sat in the dugout early in the morning, and I cried.
“So that was my reaction. Why did I feel that way? Why did I have such a deep sense of accountability? Of a need for preparation? A desire to belong? I can’t explain why I remember all of that, all of those feelings, as much as I do remember it, but I was very emotional.
“I have never gone to a therapist,” he continued. “When your parents make a decision to separate — and my parents were amazing, and I am a poster child for how they did it — I did have a sense of wondering did I cause it? So when I am trying to make the team, or when I get cut in the middle of the inning of an important game, I react by knowing that I have to work harder. I have to be prepared.”
He started playing football when he was 9, and “I worked very hard at it,” he said. “Phil Simms” — the former New York Giants quarterback, who moved to Franklin Lakes decades ago and still lives there — “was involved as a coach, and his son Chris was our quarterback. Six players from our Pop Warner league made it into the NFL.”
The movie “Rudy,” about an aspiring football player who fights and overcomes obstacles as he works toward a position on the team at Notre Dame, came out in 1993 and provided great inspiration to 13-year-old Andrew.
“I’m five feet tall and one-hundred-and-nothing pounds,” he said. “People called me Rudy. The movie is a testament to having heart and grit. That matters to me.” Then he quoted the founder of the Four Seasons hotels, Isadore Sharp, who famously said “Excellence is the capacity to take pain.”
“If you study truly excellent people, you see that they have taken a lot of pain. More than working at baseball and football! So I started to learn the foundational lesson that you have to work hard to gain respect.”
Back in high school, Mr. Kent was class president and student council vice president. “I wanted to play football and baseball, but I wasn’t big enough,” he said. “I was the captain of my high school and college running teams. You can’t just show up to do that. You have to work at it. I ran a lot. And it takes a lot of discipline. I can only control what I can control. I work harder and I have discipline.
“I view youth athletics as great training for the skills required for success later in life,” he said.
Next, Mr. Kent talked about how important being part of the Jewish community has been for him, and how important the federation has been for his family, going back generations; he’s a third-generation federation investor on his stepfather’s side.
“Kent is clearly not a Jewish surname,” Mr. Kent said. “My father’s family are nonpracticing Protestants. My paternal grandfather, George Washington Kent, stormed the beaches of Normandy with the Army Corps of Engineers and helped liberate the camps. When he returned to this country after World War II, he settled in Hawthorne. He co-founded the Little League team in Hawthorne.” Later, Andrew Kent spent many years coaching Little League.
The need to give back is embedded on all sides of his family, Mr. Kent said. “I didn’t serve my country in the service, like my grandfather did. My service is different. I give back to the community through organizations like the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, and I honor his legacy by working with youth sports like Little League.”
Over the years, Mr. Kent has developed a shortcut for when he thinks about giving back to the community. “It’s the four Ts,” he said. Time, talent, treasure, and testimony.
He’s now on the boards of 10 organizations. He gives some of those four Ts to each of them. “For some I write a check, for some it’s easy to give time, for some it’s easy to give testimony, and when they need a special expertise, you give the talent.”
But let’s go back to Mr. Kent as he graduates from high school and goes on to Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Babson specializes in entrepreneurship — “it’s ranked number 1 in entrepreneurship for over a generation,” Mr. Kent said; he’s on its board now, he added. “I graduated in 2002 with a triple concentration in economics, finance, and entrepreneurship. I started two companies and sold them while I was a student, and I studied abroad in Italy and Australia.”
One of the companies was “a late-night sandwich delivery service,” he said. “We bought the ingredients, we assembled them — we had a limited menu — and the cross country team delivered it.”
He was a member of that team, which “defined my social life,” he said. “I am a competitive guy, always motivated to get ahead, and to create financial security. Before the dot-com bubble burst in 2002, the best jobs were in finance, investment banking, management consulting, or law. I took finance classes, I interviewed at all kinds of jobs, and I started my career at the Bank of America.
“Just like in athletics, I had to work hard and start at the bottom.” (Starting at the bottom is one thing, imposed from the outside, but listening to Mr. Kent, it is clear that it would be harder for him to not work hard than to plunge ahead as hard and as fast as possible.)
“I started in Charlotte, North Carolina, and worked for 100 hours a week. I learned a lot about running a bank.” Soon, though, he realized that he wanted to move back north. “I worked hard, and I had to interview with the same company for a year to get transferred to NYC. I had to take a big step back, and I became a trading assistant. It was terrible hours, terrible pay, I lived in a studio apartment on 57th Street and I got to work at 5 every morning.”
Soon, though, things got better. “I had a 12-year career in finance, nine as a bond trader. Ten of those years were at Bank of America, and the other two were at Nomura, a Japanese investment bank.”
During that time, he earned an MBA in quantitative finance at NYU, studying at nights and on weekends.
Mr. Kent’s life changed for the better when he went to a party in February of 2006. “I opened the door and I saw her in the corner of the room, and I knew the second I saw her that she was it,” he said. She’s Audrey Diamond, she’s a speech and language pathologist, and she grew up in Great Neck. “We had an epic conversation that night. I was so neurotic, I was so afraid that I’d mess it up, that I made up something else that I had to go to. So I got her number and left, like it was mission accomplished.
“I called her the next day, and we were engaged nine months later. We got married in November of 2007 at the Shelter Rock Jewish Center in Roslyn, on Long Island.
“On our first trip after we got married, we went to Israel,” Mr. Kent said. “I had never been there before. At the Kotel, I prayed to have a child, and nine months later we had Eli.” The couple now has three children — Eli, 17, Maya, 15, and Noah, 11. They all go to public school in Tenafly.
Andrew Kent grew up in the Reform movement. Audrey Kent’s family is modern Orthodox; her father’s uncle is Rabbi Shlomo Diamond. There are also Syrian Jews in the family.
The growing family moved from Manhattan to Tenafly. “We were both raised in the suburbs, we wanted a backyard — and I am starting to think about my career,” Mr. Kent said.
Once back in Bergen County, the Kents joined the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly and Temple Emanu-el of Closter, where they are active and Mr. Kent sits on the board.
“And I interviewed with Terry Glass, the second generation of my family business, to return to it,” Mr. Kent said. The family business is Glass Gardens, which owns 14 ShopRite supermarkets in New Jersey and New York.
Mr. Kent could return to it, rather than joining it for the first time, because he started working “when I was a kid, as a cashier, stocking shelves, slicing cold cuts, learning about retail at the front lines.”
The family business started in 1938, when Mr. Kent’s stepfather’s father, Abe Glass, and his brother, Ben Glass, “began peddling produce,” he said. The brothers lived in Clifton, and Mr. Kent thinks that their parents were born in the United States, into a family that had immigrated from Romania.
“They would go to Hunts Point in the Bronx to buy produce during the Depression,” Mr. Kent said. “Abe was able to serve in the South Pacific during World War II. Ben was disqualified for health reasons. He ran the company. Abe returned from the war, and Ben said, ‘You were away because you were sacrificing for the country. The business has flourished, and half of it is yours.’
“In 1955, Abe and Ben incorporated Glass Gardens Inc. They joined the Wakefern Food Cooperative, which is “the largest private employer in the state,” Mr. Kent said. “It operates in 10 states, with eight supermarket banners. It feeds 12 million people a week.
“Wakefern’s mission is helping small businesses succeed in the big business world by being elite, being innovative, and working hard.”
As for Glass Gardens, “we are the third generation now,” Mr. Kent said; Abe’s son, Irv, and Ben’s son Terry, lead the company, and Irv’s two sons, Andrew and Daniel, and Terry’s daughter, Karen Holbrook, are all executive vice presidents. They model a family business at its best.
Mr. Kent went to Glass Gardens 12 years ago. He started once again at the bottom. “I went from being a big-time bond trader on Wall Street to being on my hands and knees, making promotional displays, stacking cans,” he said. “I had to learn the business, and you have to start at the bottom to do that. I didn’t have to do all the roles, but I had to learn, and I also had to build credibility with the team. I knew that I was doing it as a stepping stone, but I had to put in the time to learn.”
In other words, it demanded, once again, hard work. And once again, Mr. Kent rose to it.
Different stores in different neighborhoods are different, he said. “There is a store in Brooklyn on the border of Boro Park and Midwood. We have OU supervision there, just like in our Englewood and Paramus stories. I got to help open the largest supermarket in East New York, which is more Caribbean, with very different consumers. We opened a store in College Point, in Queens, and that’s a very different community, Greek and Italian and Asian. There are not as many Jews there.”
As if Mr. Kent wasn’t busy enough with his family and his business and his coaching and his volunteer organizations, in 2015 he decided to pursue another interest. “I went to the French Culinary Institute in Soho,” he said. “The course was for about a year, three nights a week. I earned a culinary diploma in classic French cooking technique.
“I was the only 30something with any income or family in the class. I love to learn and I have always loved to cook. It is my one creative outlet. I host and cook for the holidays. But the real reason I did it was to elevate our culinary offerings, in both our kosher and non-kosher kitchens.”
And he earned one more degree. “I had earned a second master’s at Babson, in advanced entrepreneurial leadership,” he said. “I did it during covid. It was virtual and asynchronous” — that is, it was entirely online and prerecorded, so a student could work with it at any time of the night or day.
Mr. Kent believes that the way to keep sharp and alive is to continue to learn, and the way to keep a business sharp and alive is to continue to learn about the changes and challenges its field faces. “I invest in continuing education every year,” he said. “My wife has to do that. There is no such requirement for a business leader, but you have to keep your skills relevant.
“When we settled in Tenafly, I started to get really engaged in the Jewish community. My stepfather introduced me to Jason Shames,” the federation’s CEO, “and Jason said, ‘You are just getting settled. Why don’t you team up with one of us?’ There was a federation board member who was also on the board of Jewish Family and Children’s Services, and they got me on JFCS’s finance committee. That really resonated with me because it was about food security, mental health, and caring for the elderly.
“Then I joined their board, and I served on it for four years, and I started to better understand the entire ecosystem of Jewish institutional investment and continuity in our catchment area. I learned more about the Jewish Home and the Kaplen JCC. I learned how the federation helps fund a lot of these institutions to make sure that they would be successful for a long time.
“That’s part of the federation’s core mission — to bring people together and bring institutions together to serve the whole catchment area, from birth to death. So I made the decision to join the board of the federation, and I have been on that board for over eight years,” holdng a number of positions on his way to becoming chair.
“My vision for federation is not drastic change, because we are doing such amazing things to execute our core mission. I just want to continue to improve our financial sustainability, which we do by continuing to grow our endowment and continuing to raise record funds to support our major beneficiary institutions.
“I would like no one in our community to feel alone. I want them to feel like they’re part of a community. I see my role as lifting people up in the community, finding where they want to engage Jewishly with the institutions that we help fund and support. I want them to know that we’re there advocating on their behalf as it pertains to antisemitism in the public schools in the state and universities that are in our catchment area.
“I want all the members of our community and the synagogues and the Jewish day schools to feel safe. I want to improve their funding and their security.
“I want to make our community the safest, most vibrant, most inclusive community that exists. I really like bringing people together. It’s a great feeling. I really like when people feel like they belong.”
He’s involved in some national organizations, Mr. Kent said, but he finds that he’s increasingly prioritizing local ones.
“It’s become a social activity for me, and it is a great source of meaning, fulfillment, and happiness,” he said. “I have such a great variety in my life. I can focus on a thriving business, I’m blessed with an amazing family, I’m blessed to have my faith, and to have this amazing community. I’m lucky to be able to be a two-year steward for it.
“My vision is we are scaling excellence, getting better incrementally. It’s constant improvement. We’re trying to reach more people. We’re trying to communicate our message more effectively. And the message is about who we are, what we do, why you should invest in us, and how you can benefit from that investment.
“It’s clear as day to me, but there are opportunities to carry the torch, and to grow the flame.
“The other thing I’m focused on is the denominational aspect of our work,” Mr. Kent continued. “I want the modern Orthodox in our community to be heavily invested in the federation. We fund a lot of Jewish day schools. We do a lot of great work. We support synagogues and synagogue security across denominations. We want everyone to be represented on the board.
“Our voice is strongest when we’re together. When all 600,000 Jews in the state of New Jersey come together.”
One other thing, Mr. Kent said. The team at the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey. “We have a great team,” he said. “Jason is tremendous, and his whole professional team at the federation is absolutely amazing. I’ve worked with them for nearly a decade now, and I know that we are firing on all cylinders to execute our mission. And I’m very blessed to have that.”
Jason Shames is equally enthusiastic about Andrew Kent. “He’s charismatic,” he said. “He’s energetic. He’s always positive. He is polished. He is sophisticated. He cares an awful lot. He is the perfect sequel to Daniel Herz,” the immediate past chair.
Both Mr. Kent and Mr. Herz are in their 40s, and they represent a new generation of leadership. “We wanted to get that next generation not just involved and committed to federation, but to be part of its leadership and its future direction,” Mr. Shames said.
He marveled at Mr. Kent’s energy. “He’s like the old Army commercial — they do more by 9 a.m. than most people do in a day. Andrew is remarkable — not only does he give to the community, but he works like crazy for the family businesses, Wakefern and Glass Gardens. He is involved in multiple food organizations and Jewish organizations — and he goes to his kids’ soccer games. He coaches softball, and he also finds the time to be a husband.
“He’s really amazing.”
He sees great hope for the future of the federation system in the choices that Mr. Kent and Mr. Herz have made. There has been a long line of very effective, very distinguished, very committed federation presidents and board chairs before those two men, and Mr. Shames respects and honors them. And he’s glad that younger people are making the same choices that those older community leaders made. Generational change can be difficult, but these two made it look easy.
“They both entered our federation life when we didn’t have much of their generation going forward,” Mr. Shames said. “They came to it, they saw it, they saw the value in it, they stuck with it, they put in the time, and they learned. They learn from the people who came before them, and they nurtured their relationship with them.
“That’s indicative of the culture that I want the organization to have, and the culture that Andrew and Daniel have embraced.”