New York Food Co-op Votes to Boycott Israeli Products
Members of a Brooklyn food co-op passed an anti-Israel boycott resolution on Tuesday night. However, legal challenges are already underway.
After years of failed attempts by activists to prohibit Israeli-linked products like hummus and matzo from its shelves, a Brooklyn food co-op passed an anti-Israel boycott resolution this week. But legal challenges to the measure are already in the works.
During a “chaotic” meeting on Tuesday, 67% of members of the Park Slope Food Co-op voted in favor of a boycott of Israeli foods, the New York Post reported. Normally, a 75% supermajority is needed to pass boycotts within the organization, but members lowered the threshold on Tuesday night. More than 7,000 members attended the meeting.
A previous effort failed in 2012, after pushback from leading figures including then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, according to the New York Times.
Attendees said pro-Israel voices were effectively shut out during the Zoom proceedings, while supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement appeared to receive preferential treatment throughout the process.
The NY Post reported:
Almost immediately, many Jewish members expressed outrage at a motion earlier in the meeting — which passed — to move straight to voting on the boycott without allowing any anti-boycott proponents to speak up.
“The motion was proposed after only the pro BDS group spoke,” one attendee, who preferred to remain anonymous, told The Post. “It’s horrible.”
“This is the first time in 15 years an item has been voted on without discussion,” a disgusted attendee at the meet noted.
“I definitely see a lawsuit coming,” another told The Post. “Especially if you change voting rules the same night a vote is set to occur.”
Indeed, a challenge has already been filed to overturn the vote.
Professor Jeffrey Lax and his organization, Students, Alumni, Faculty for Equality, filed a formal complaint with the state.
“This Israel-only discrimination on national origin clearly and blatantly violates NY Exec Law §296(13),” the City University of New York professor wrote on X. “Both I and S.A.F.E. Campus condemn this bigotry, racism, and antisemitism, and we have today filed a discrimination complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights.”
That law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or national origin.
Lax noted that the co-op did not vote to boycott countries with established human rights abuses, including Turkey and China.
BREAKING: Last night the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, NY voted 67% to boycott Israeli goods (Bamba snacks, tahini, olive oil, peppers, persimmons etc.) — but refused to boycott:
• China (Uyghur genocide/Xinjiang forced labor + Tibet occupation)
• Russia (invasion &… https://t.co/GyTiLKZS2e— Prof. Jeffrey Lax (@CUNY_Prof) May 27, 2026
Likewise, the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law said it is “actively evaluating all available legal claims arising from the discriminatory nature of this boycott and the procedural irregularities that allowed it to pass.”
The BDS movement “metastasizes into open hostility toward Jewish people everywhere, even those with no connection to Israel,” CEO Kenneth Marcus stated in a news release.
“This is the kind of hostility the Co-op’s own leadership has acknowledged was already happening within its walls,” Marcus said. “A grocery store should never become a springboard for extremist political campaigns.”
[Featured images from PSFC4Palestine Instagram]
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Comments
The entire state of New York has gone bugout crazy. I’m glad I left in ’75.
I left in ‘79. Don’t miss it.
I am amazed that more than 7,000 were in attendance!
It was held on Zoom, because the coop said it couldn’t guarantee the safety of anti-boycott members who attended.
And of course it was in gun-free New York, so they couldn’t guarantee their own.
The boycott makes much more sense in the original German.
What’s next? Are we going to go around breaking windows? Are we going to build a wall around Crown Heights? Load Jews onto railroad cars and ship them to Seneca Falls? Surely NYC has an emergency supply of Zyklon hanging around for just such an occasion.
I might sound flippant and hyperbolic but it’s not as though this hasn’t happened before, amiright or amiright?
Israel’s response to the October 7th atrocities was just and proportionate. There can be no doubt that they were attacked by Muslims living out the literal word of their prophet. Mark my words that if given an opportunity they will gladly, gleefully do it again.
I am a Christian and I stand with my Jewish brothers and sisters against this outrage.
Israel’s response to the October 7th atrocities was absolutely just, but rather than “proportionate”, I’d label it “overly measured”.
They should have bombed Gaza out of existence.
It was “proportionate” in the sense that that term of art is used in what passes for the international law of war, namely not greater than what necessary to accomplish legitimate military objectives, considering how Hamas and Hezbollah embed themselves within civilian populations. Thus, if a Hamas leader or group are holed up in a mosque, then that mosque is a legitimate military target even if there are a 100 civilians inside as well, while it might not be a legitimate military target if there were 100 civilians and one low-level Hamas operative. Rabid antisemitism in the UN and in the academic cesspool has, with the connivance of the media, transformed “proportionate” into a notion that if they killed 1,200 of you, then you are only allowed to kill 1,200 of them.
1) I’m not Christian, but I will stand beside you.
2) The obvious response is to boycott products and services from NYC and New York State.
Subotai Bahadur
So brave. So virtuous,
No one ever said New Dork was full of intelligent people. They stop listening at the word free. Never question what or who pays the cost.
How could any Jew who lives in Park Slope walk into that coop market without feeling like a target? I would shop at the Foodtown and not in the Coop Market.
The prices are much better. And the number of hours you have to work depends on the number of adults in the household, i.e. either one or two, not on the size of the family and thus the volume of purchases, so it’s especially a good deal for large families. In return for that you have to do those hours, and put up with all the lefty bullcrap. So for many families quitting the co op would cost a lot of money.
Well then, let the communists who support this put in the hours at the food co-op. The self-loathing Jewish types can don “Free Palestine” t-shirts and shop there at ease. The rest will do the right thing at Foodtown.
Spoken like someone who’s made of money, and/or not trying to support a large family.
I’m not a co op member, because it wouldn’t save me nearly enough money to compensate me for the leftist crap. But I know many people who are, because for them that tradeoff is worth it.
Free corn!
I’d suggest folks become far more intentional and restrictive in their consumer choices. Only grant their support, patronage and commercial activity where they are appreciated, declining to go where they are merely tolerated, despised or worse.
Will the food bank now turn down donations from Jews?
Huh? It’s not a food bank. It’s a cooperative grocery store. It doesn’t receive donations, but it does receive membership fees and volunteer hours.
That will teach me to read more carefully.
The communist/Islamofascist/Muslim supremacist Dhimmi-crats are the most evil group of subversives and terrorists, in the U.S.
It’s time to reject the contrived and Goebbels-like propaganda narrative that has seen the Kingdom of Israel, Roman Judaea, and Roman Syria Palaestina — all founded millennia to hundreds of years before Islam’s founding — ignored or replaced by an utterly propagandistic and revisionist history-grounded Arab Muslim “Palestine.”
The same vile Dhimmi-crats who loudly claim to support “indigenous” peoples and who engage in performative “land acknowledgement” antics, won’t recognize Jews’ historical existence in the middle east, pre-dating Islam’s founding, by millennia.
Jews’ millennia-old ties to middle eastern lands, pre-dating Islam, are an inconvenient fact.
I don’t see how national-origin discrimination fits in here. The discrimination is not against the customers who can’t buy the products but against the manufacturers, so surely only they have standing.
You are being too pedantic and logical. The argument is that the coop has discriminated by deciding not to stock certain “ethnic” foods; all it takes for standing is one coop member to insist that as a matter of Jewish pride and personal taste he wants hummus from Israel. That’s for standing, not necessarily a decision on the merits of the case. And I suspect that it might actually get uglier if the coop starts insisting that members sign a pledge not pester them to stock Israeli products or and not to sue the coop.
How is that a legal claim at all? Failure to state a claim. There is no reason a private company can’t refuse to stock any foods associated with a certain culture. There’s no law that says they can’t do that. What they can’t do is discriminate against any person because of the country he came from. That is against the law. But that doesn’t seem to be happening here, unless the person is an Israeli manufacturer.
can blks eat at the same lunch counters as others???
pork slop
I wish them luck importing Palestinian crops and products.
Talk about a food desert….
Well, certainly don’t LEAVE the co-op, or do anything similar that would inconvenience YOU for your principles.
But sure, sue them — that’s an acceptably Democrat response.
Leaving just concedes the ground to the enemy, and gives them what they want. They want all the Jews to leave. They don’t care what that would cost the coop. They’re in the coop in the first place out of dedication to socialist principles, and despise all those bourgeois people, especially religious people who vote Republican, who joined only to save money.
Hmmm. If anyone can join, then in the category of “Don’t get angry, get even,” how would they react if a thousand Jewish families (many with 4 or more kids) joined, which would skew both the economics and the voting power? (I do not expect that to happen for a number of reasons.)
But they would have to be “the right kind of Jews.” The kind that stand up for their culture. Not just more of the kind that Milhouse excuses.
They have to contribute work for the free corn. If they don’t belong, they don’t supply work. Jews that care about their ultimate safety and don’t quit are nothing but enablers.
I quit Target. I quit Costco. I quit Dove. I quit Bloomin’ Brands. I quit BOA and Chase. I quit Disney. I quit CVS. I quit Allstate. I’m not a stranger to the inconvenience and extra cost my principles impose on me.
Of course, the co-op’s members could decide individually whether or not to buy Israeli products.
Totalitarians are sooo alike.