Ocasio-Cortez’s official House of Representatives biography does not mention these two positions, focusing instead on a post-college position she held as educational director with the National Hispanic Institute and on stints as a bartender and waitress. Similarly, the acclaimed 2019 Netflix documentary “Bring Down the House,” which follows Ocasio-Cortez during her successful June 2018 primary bid in New York’s 14th district, shows her working as a bartender.
“They call it working class for a reason,” she said in the documentary as she hauled buckets of ice and mixed drinks, “because you are working nonstop.”
But elsewhere on the internet, there are traces of Ocasio-Cortez’s less publicized gigs, in which two Israeli-Americans figure — Joe Raby and Chen(i) Yerushalmi, men associated more with the world of venture capital and startups than with the working class.
It was under the aegis of these men that Ocasio-Cortez prepared curricula teaching entrepreneurial and self-presentation skills to ambitious young college students and graduates in the Bronx. These skills, which she helped teach to others, may have been instrumental in her own political rise.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesperson, Lauren Hitt, told The Times of Israel that the names Cheni Yerushalmi and Joe Raby “are not ringing a bell with us over here. It may be a fairly tenuous connection.”
Public sources, however, indicate that Yerushalmi was Ocasio-Cortez’s boss at a company called Gage Strategies, while Raby vetted candidates for the Sunshine Bronx business incubator that she applied and was admitted to. Ocasio-Cortez herself publicly associated with both these employment experiences over a period of five years prior to her election to Congress.
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Both the Brook Avenue Press and GAGEis (also known as Gage Strategies) operated from the Sunshine Bronx Business Incubator, a city-subsidized co-working space launched in 2012, where for about $200 a month entrepreneurs could take advantage of workspaces, conference rooms, mentoring and business training. Raby and Yerushalmi, its owners, were seasoned entrepreneurs in the co-working industry who had won a city contract in 2009 to develop the incubator with financial support from the city.
Ocasio-Cortez’s startup Brook Avenue Press was chosen to participate in the incubator program in 2012.
In a 2011 video she recorded shortly after graduating from college, a younger, less polished Ocasio-Cortez described the publishing startup she would go on to develop while at the Bronx business incubator.
“What Brook Avenue Press seeks to do is develop and identify stories and literature in urban areas” for kids, she said.
Despite the fact that participants paid rent to the incubator, there was an application and interview process to get in.
Joe Raby, who a year later would run a major venture capital fund in Israel, described the vetting process in a January 2012 press release.
“We’re different from a traditional incubator because we won’t accept you if we don’t think we can help you succeed,” said Raby, the incubator’s co-founder and managing partner.
“We try to understand your business objective, and create the bridges and opportunities that will help you achieve and measure it.”
Ocasio-Cortez may have gained some early political experience as well while working at the incubator owned by the two Israelis. In August 2012, she, owner Cheni Yerushalmi and a few other incubator participants lobbied for federal legislation that would allow Bronx entrepreneurs to deduct a higher percentage of their startup costs from their taxes.
“Young entrepreneurs are playing a special role in developing promising, creative enterprises for our future and a small break can open up their resources for hiring, creating a new product, or reinvesting in the local economy,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a press release.