Obama Chef Sam Kass to Leave the White House
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Liza Schoenfein December 8, 2014
White House chef Sam Kass is packing up his knives and heading to New York to be with his bride.
The White House announced today that Sam Kass — private chef to the Obamas, senior policy advisor on nutrition policy and executive director of the first lady’s Let’s Move! Initiative — has resigned.
Kass, 34, is moving to New York to live with his wife, MSNBC anchor Alex Wagner, whom he married in August 2014 at farm-to-table mecca Blue Hill at Stone Barns. The first family attended the wedding.
Kass began cooking for the Obamas in Chicago in 2005, when the president was a junior senator and the first lady was a full-time working mother. He joined them at the White House in 2009. Since then, he’s been credited with helping Mrs. Obama revive the White House Garden — and keeping it entirely free of pesticides and herbicides —and with promoting the cause of healthier school lunches.
Kass’s successor has not yet been announced.
Liza Schoenfein is the food editor of the Forward. Contact her at [email protected]
Why I became the Forward’s editor-in-chief
You are surely a friend of the Forward if you’re reading this. And so it’s with excitement and awe — of all that the Forward is, was, and will be — that I introduce myself to you as the Forward’s newest editor-in-chief.
And what a time to step into the leadership of this storied Jewish institution! For 129 years, the Forward has shaped and told the American Jewish story. I’m stepping in at an intense time for Jews the world over. We urgently need the Forward’s courageous, unflinching journalism — not only as a source of reliable information, but to provide inspiration, healing and hope.
— Alyssa Katz, editor-in-chief
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
