Gordon Zacks

Chairman of the R.G. Barry Corporation

Gordy Zacks, a successful businessman and chairman of the R.G. Barry Corporation, has been active as a volunteer in a wide variety of civic, philanthropic, and political leadership roles at the local, national, and international levels for nearly half a century. During that time he has worked closely with three American Presidents and almost all of Israel’s Prime Ministers. Gordy turned down an ambassadorship and a cabinet post so that he could be an informal advisor to first Vice President and later President George H.W. Bush on crucial policy matters, relating to Israeli-American relations, the Middle East Peace process, Soviet and Ethiopian Jewry, and more.

Defining Moments

Most Americans are fed-up with the lack of integrity, character, and courage among many of our business and political leaders. They’re hungry for leaders who inspire trust and offer a vision of a better world; leaders with the character to know right from wrong, good from evil, and with the courage to act and make the world a better place. Leaders who believe one person can make the world a better place.

Gordy Zacks profiles such leaders in Defining Moments: Stories of Character, Courage, and Leadership. He describes individuals who changed the world through their courage, resolve, and strength of character. Not an autobiography, this book is a series of powerful, first-person accounts of towering leaders Gordy has known well and the lessons he learned from them. These valuable lessons are about leadership, life, and being a part of something greater than yourself.

Defining Moments chronicles Gordy’s encounters with these remarkable people who helped change the world for the better, and the book’s profiles include:

• David Ben Gurion: Israel’s founding father and first prime minister
• Avital Sharansky: How the love, strength, and persistence of one woman freed her husband from an unjust sentence in a communist jail against all odds
• The Danish Fisherman: How a selfless group of people courageously decided to risk it all in order to save nearly the entire Jewish population of Denmark
• Ronald Reagan: How he played a part in helping Jews escape oppression in the Soviet Union and to emigrate to freedom
• Menachem Begin: How this Israeli Prime Minister – a confirmed hawk – achieved peace with Egypt through skillfully managing relationships with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and US President Jimmy Carter
• Vice President George Bush: Leadership of the rescue of Ethiopian Jews from Sudan in 1986, saving them from starvation and life-threatening persecution

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