Listening to the news these days can bring unspeakable sadness.
For Princeton Junction resident Lee Goldberg, it was a radio report about presidential bad behavior shortly before the 2020 election that caused him to snap. Realizing that he was “tired of feeling scared, helpless, and angry,” he decided he was “going to do something about it.”
In response to the news report, he says, “I walked out of the shower with shampoo in my hair and a towel around my waist and got 35 names of friends in the area.”
He invited them to join what he dubbed the Blue Soup Wednesday Project, in which he sells homemade soups for $10 a quart and has donated the proceeds to 2020 presidential and down-ballot races, to the Georgia Senate races, and most recently to the children suffering on both sides of the Israel-Hamas war.
Recalling making soup during the pandemic, Goldberg says, “In the middle of this terrible situation I had 20 to 30 people coming to my door with smiles behind their masks—that one moment of communion.”
Their smiles, he continues, were “as important as anything else—and I didn’t feel quite as isolated or as helpless.”
But it is a lot of work—buying and storing ingredients, making a meat and a vegetarian soup each week, and then storing it in the accessory refrigerator in his garage. To make the soup, he uses “three humongous pots,” one on loan from a customer.
In January 2024, Goldberg felt compelled to bring out his pots again in response to the Israel-Hamas war.
“I was horrified by the Oct. 7 attack and equally horrified by the response. It was so at odds with the principles I was taught in Temple—just watching all those children suffering on both sides,” Goldberg says. “It was my duty to do what I could to alleviate the suffering.”
“I was crying inside for two months,” he says, but at the same time he was concerned that the high emotions over the war might result in his losing friends. So he waited. But ultimately he realized that silence was not an option and asked himself, “How do you raise your voice in a way that it’s actually heard and do something about alleviating the suffering that is being felt on all sides of this conflict?”
In January 2024 he decided “to focus on the children and the families” as recipients of his soup proceeds. He currently serves 12 to 20 customers (out of a 50-person mailing list), every other week. He makes gourmet soups, both meat and vegetarian, like lemony lentil and spinach; vegetable mushroom barley; and marvelous minestrone (which often requires a hunt for the parmesan rinds he uses in the base).
So far Goldberg has raised a little over $1,800 since January. His list of donees has varied, but currently includes Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, and the New Israel Fund. On weeks he’s not cooking, he sells frozen classics. His wife, Catherine Beach, does the recordkeeping for the project.
Goldberg was born in Brooklyn, spent his childhood years on Long Island, and then moved with his parents to the family’s farm in Friendship, New York.
His mother was a housewife and an active volunteer. His father owned a Brooklyn insurance agency.
His parents were both political activists, initially socialists but eventually Democrats. Early on they were both involved in labor organizing.
During World War II his mother drove a truck for the Red Cross as well as an ambulance to transport wounded returning soldiers from their ship to medical facilities.
During the Vietnam War his father supported a group called Businessmen against the War. “He used his position as a well-respected businessperson to oppose the war when it was not a popular thing to do,” writes Goldberg in an email.
Goldberg attended antiwar protests with his mother. “My mom taught me to be active to make a difference in the world in whatever way you can,” he says.
Not only was his mother an activist. With her truck and ambulance experience during the war, she became the primary heavy equipment operator at the farm. “She could fly our John Deere #9 through a heavy meadow and cut down the hay for the horses and not jam it like everybody else,” Goldberg recalls. “She had this light touch, like a crop-duster pilot.”
At haying time on the farm her cooking skills shined. “The neighbors would come over and bale at night until the dew set in and the bailer would jam,” Goldberg recalls.
His mother would leave a couple hours early to cook for everyone. “She would hitch up one of the wagons to haul a load of hay to the barn and then hit the kitchen and pull out the pots and make two to three gallons of chili at one time or set up a barbecue,” he says. From his mother Goldberg learned “cooking for the masses.”
Goldberg’s communal values were reinforced as a student at the Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Massachusetts, which, he says, “was built as a community for learning and social equality and social change.” By design, a third of the students were on scholarship.
Students were considered “citizens” who were encouraged to take an active role in the school’s academic and social life. In a student effort to raise money for more scholarships, the school replaced all kitchen help, except for the cooks, and students rotated through serving, dishwashing, and cleanup three meals a day. Goldberg coordinated the labor of the student kitchen crew.
Goldberg earned an associate degree in electrical engineering at Alfred State College, then worked for more than 20 years as an electronics technician and engineer, starting an ending at RCA. He worked on the development of single-chip computers, on early research in wind and solar power, on ultrasonic test equipment, and on robotics and artificial vision.
At RCA Astro in East Windsor he worked 10 to 11 hours a day on the Mars Observer Spacecraft, while studying at night for a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Thomas Edison State College, which he completed in 1995.
A course in journalism at Thomas Edison, Goldberg says, “sort of changed my life.” He recalls his early freelance work doing “fun” stories for the Princeton Packet’s “Time Off” section. “That was when I discovered that when you have a pen and a pad in your hand you can satisfy your curiosity. The pay isn’t anything close to lucrative, but the perks are amazing,” Goldberg says.
After earning his bachelor’s degree, Goldberg landed a full-time job as a technology journalist at “Electronic Design” and realized that “the place I could make my contribution in the world was in writing.”
After six years he followed his boss to the first online publication for electrical engineers, but four years ago “Electronic Design” invited him back as a half-time contributing editor.
Goldberg especially enjoys writing about the relationship between technology and both the environment and society. In particular, he focuses on practical approaches to making products, and the economy they support, more environmentally friendly. this was the subject of his 1999 book “Green Electronics/Green Bottom Line: A Commonsense Guide to Environmentally Responsible Engineering and Management.”
In his private life Goldberg has been involved in meditation and spiritual pursuits through The Life Center, a former center for wholistic health and personal growth in Lambertville. He is also a pilot, and he studies Talmud, the book of Jewish rabbinic law, through the Jewish Center with Neil Litt.
Foodwise, soup was not his first endeavor. He used to sell eggrolls to raise money for political and environmental causes (and sometimes for his flying lessons). In the earliest years of the Shad Fest in Lambertville, he sold falafel, which is how he met his wife, in 1988.
Goldberg has cut down his soup making to every other week due to the challenges of working on this project from his house. He would love to find an institution with a large kitchen that would loan him the space for a day every couple of weeks. He is also looking for “co-conspirators”— soup makers who share his mission.
Pointing to empty shelves on the side of his kitchen, he says, “When things are In full swing, these shelves are full of groceries, bordering on chaos.”
And yet he persists. “Raising money with food is very labor intensive, but it’s the only thing I know.”
Anyone interested in helping out can contact Goldberg at bearberg@gmail.com.
West Windsor resident Lee Goldberg brews up a batch of soup.,
