Thursday, October 1, 2026
Sea Cliff resident Jane Fox is leading the charge to help people struggling with addiction and reduce the stigma around it with her new book, “The Hungry Mother: Recipes for Recovery and Life in the Kitchen.”
The book, released on Oct. 26, takes a culinary approach to long-term recovery. Fox uses personal anecdotes, medical addiction and recovery advice and recipes to encourage women to use cooking as a medium to focus on their children and what’s important along the road to sobriety.
Fox highlighted how cooking for her children helped save her life and convinced her to beat her addiction. She wants to encourage other mothers to do the same.
“When women are substance abusers or alcoholics, you lose not only that woman, but you lose that generation of her children,” Fox said. “And I feel very strongly that when women get in touch with their maternal instincts, they can really push through and stay sober.”
Fox battled with substance use disorder throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Addiction was very poorly understood at the time, and often blamed on moral failure as opposed to chemical dependence.
“I had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals back in the day, before there were rehabs or programs,” Fox explained. “You were considered mentally ill, and you would be put in a psychiatric facility. I went through like four or five of them.”
Fox received help while living with a therapeutic community in midtown in the city for a year, where she was able to overcome her addiction. From 1995 to 2011 she lived in Sea Cliff with her two daughters before moving to Boca Raton, Florida for five years.
While there, she managed transitional housing for women, which serves as therapeutic communities where patients recovering from addiction can live amongst peers. Fox said she worked with women because she felt a personal connection with them and she missed out on important aspects of maternity during her struggles with substance use.
In 2016 as she was preparing to move back to Sea Cliff, Fox attended a conference in Florida held by the Jewish Recovery Center celebrating sobriety and teaching Jewish religious leaders about how to handle addiction in their communities. While there she serendipitously met Irwin Huberman, rabbi of Congregation Tifereth Israel in Glen Cove.
The two talked about what they could do to tackle the problem of addiction on the North Shore, particularly because the opioid epidemic was on the rise. Huberman said that they both felt it was important to provide a place to talk and a source of information for families and individuals struggling with addiction. They also wanted to reduce the social stigma around addiction.
“We realized that the issue of addiction is too often relegated to the basement or the boiler room, even when synagogues and churches become involved,” Huberman said. “We felt that it was time that the issue of addiction be addressed as a community concern, and to have meetings in our library, our community room, meeting rooms, etc.”
This led to the launch of Northeast Recovery Alliance Long Island, a sobriety resource organization founded by Fox and Huberman. The alliance works with those suffering from substance abuse and their families providing support, assistance in getting the proper medical assistance and teaching them important facts and skills to help live with all types of addiction.
Addiction is an endemic struggle in the United States, with roughly 19.7 million Americans battling substance abuse in 2017 alone, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
Louise, who wished to remain anonymous, was one person who met with Fox after her husband relapsed after 24 years of sobriety. She said she appreciated the help they got from the alliance and Fox helping him get sober again.
“Jane is very knowledgeable about addiction,” Louise said. “She actually was able to encourage my husband to go to Northwell for his addiction, which he did, and he was able to go back to being sober.”
In addition to support and encouragement, the alliance also offers helpful training, such as in the use of for Naloxone, more commonly known as NARCAN. This teaches people how to recognize an opioid overdose and administer the reversal drug, Naloxone.
