It’s hatred — and wrong – Latest News
At this month’s Park Slope Food Coop normal assembly, a member introduced on Zoom: “Jewish supremacism is a drawback on this nation … “
And the group cheered.
I’ve been a coop member for 15 years, and I’ve by no means felt more unwelcome in my own group.
Members of the self-proclaimed “Park Slope Food Coop members for Palestine” have referred to as me a racist genocide-supporter, merely for opposing their attempt to have our coop be part of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions motion, which needs customers and shops to boycott Israeli corporations.
Ramon Maislen is fed up with the unwelcome feeling he and others have endured in Park Slope. J.C. Rice
I’ve grown used to it. What I’ve not grown used to is listening to antisemitic rhetoric spoken so brazenly, and so comfortably, in my own group.
This didn’t occur in a single day. The coop has seen a regular rise in anti-Jewish sentiment.
In 2024, an Israeli girl stocking cabinets was screamed at and advised she smells of Palestinian child blood. Weeks later, a queer Sephardic Jewish girl was given a Nazi salute outdoors our entrance. This previous Halloween, a member sporting a costume themed across the Israeli peanut-butter snack Bamba was menacingly confronted by two males on the entry desk.
These usually are not nameless online incidents.
They occurred in our store and had been perpetrated by our fellow neighbors. At the April 2025 normal assembly, a coop member accused “right-wing Jews” of sabotaging a BDS vote. When a Jewish member filed a grievance, the response was that he ought to stop invoking “Jewish privilege.”
Then, of course, there was what occurred Tuesday evening, and the masks is slipping. Today, the hatred towards Jews rises again.
The Park Slope Food Coop has confronted quite a few accusations of hatred towards Jews in recent times. Gregory P. Mango
What is placing is how voices that not often agree are starting to echo each other. Tucker Carlson and Hasan Piker have little in common, but on the concept “Jewish power” is a corrupting drive that have to be confronted, the far proper and the far left are discovering common ground.
The thought of Jewish energy has a long and troubling historical past. Framing Jews as a supremacist drive controlling establishments, finance and politics shouldn’t be a new critique. It is the foundational conspiracy of fashionable antisemitism. Today, variations of it are being cheered in brownstone Brooklyn by people who contemplate themselves progressive.
The proposal to boycott Israeli merchandise echoes campaigns in Jewish historical past that started with financial exclusion and didn’t finish there. Stores in Crown Heights already post stickers refusing service to “Zionists.” The trajectory is legible to anybody with data of the place such issues have led.
Last evening, I stood up onstage on the assembly, going through a hostile crowd, and mentioned what many didn’t wish to hear. Jews, like Palestinians, are indigenous to the land of Israel. Dehumanizing each other on the Coop violates the values we declare to share.
Applauding a speech that labels Jews as supremacists shouldn’t be principled: It is wrong.
What makes this second significantly painful is that it isn’t taking place regardless of the Jewish group, it’s taking place with the tacit help of a portion of it. Park Slope’s own Brad Lander, presently campaigning for Congress, has deployed anti-Jewish canine whistles, which have despatched a clear message: Jewish considerations come second to political alliances.
Maislen asserts that applauding a speech that labels Jews as supremacists shouldn’t be principled: It is wrong. J.C. Rice
In 2024, some coop members launched a marketing campaign to strip the store’s cabinets of Israeli merchandise.
Obtained by The New York Post
Some of our neighbors, distraught by the warfare in Gaza, have aligned themselves with a motion the place anti-Jewish rhetoric has turn out to be routine. Their grief is comprehensible. The hostility it has helped normalize shouldn’t be.
For more than 50 years, the Park Slope Food Coop has been a model of shared accountability and mutual respect. I stood on that stage final evening, and the room went quiet. Not as a result of what I mentioned was radical, however as a result of, for a second, everybody current understood what had simply occurred.
That silence was the coop’s conscience. The solely query now could be whether or not it listens.
