Once, in the bulk goods aisle of the Park Slope Food Coop, a wild-haired woman stood next to me and scrutinized the coffee-grinder settings. “I’m using it for an enema,” she explained. “It needs to be very fine.” I suggested the espresso grind.
This is exactly the kind of shopping experience I hoped for when I joined the Park Slope Food Coop in the fall of 2009: a realization of the eternal promise of New York, home of the strange. (That and crazycheap organic food.) Founded in 1973, the Coop is a Brooklyn institution with enough character to have spawned its own genre of trend piece. Some examples: the Coop has Byzantine rules and work requirements (debatable); the Coop has nannies covering their employers’ shifts (dubious); and, most recently, the Coop is becoming a hotbed of anti-Semitism (downright wrong).
The New York Observer has contributed the latest addition to the genre, with a smug piece earlier this month devoted to Coop members’ efforts to initiate a boycott of Israeli products and divest from whatever Israeli holdings the Coop might have. At the historically progressive Coop, the Observer procured a chorus of sources declaring the campaign anti- Semitic and intolerable in “the heart of Chaimtown,” as one man put it, referring to Park Slope’s high Jewish population. For the full sensationalist effect, Alan Dershowitz—the de facto representative of the hawkish Israel-right-or-wrong Jewish establishment—denounced the campaign’s “bigotry” and threatened to shut the joint down, an ambitious goal for a Cambridge, Massachusetts, resident who is not a member of the democratically-governed Coop.
The Coop campaign is part of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), a global movement launched with a 2005 call by 170 Palestinian civil-society groups. Shorthand demands: end the occupation of the Palestinian Territories; end the legal discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel; and allow the 700,000 Palestinians expelled in the 1948 creation of the state to return—along with their descendants—to what is now Israel. Until the country complies with international law, the movement vows economic and cultural boycotts, institutional divestments, and governmental sanctions of Israel. Perhaps the strongest indicator of BDS’s power is the Boycott Law passed in the Knesset in July, making it illegal for groups like Boycott from Within to advocate BDS in Israel, a state that bills itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
Leading the charge against BDS at the Coop is Barbara Mazor, who told theObserver, “I think [BDS supporters are] latching onto it like slogans. Like true believers, it’s the cool thing to do. You know, ‘I’m a progressive, and it’s a progressive cause,’ so I think that’s how it’s coming through, very thoughtlessly.” (Mazor also alluded to her otherwise liberal politics with a dig at “a certain president [who] spent eight years in office.”) The political alignment of the Coop’s BDS opponents is made clear on their website, which links to the reactionary pro-Israel group Stand With Us, known for having once pepper sprayed anti-occupation activists from the group Jewish Voice for Peace, along with having published an anti-BDS comic book that depicted Palestinians asvermin, in a throwback to Nazi propaganda.
“People here are always thinking about the implications of everything,” Mazor was quoted as saying in a 2001 academic article about the Coop. “That’s really nifty. I find that stam people [Yiddish for “ordinary people”] think about less and less.”
Those who argue that the Coop boycott campaign is anti-Semitic believe that BDS “singles out” Israel among all the other nations of the world that commit grave human rights violations; the only reason anyone would focus on Israel, the logic goes, is because they harbor prejudice against Jews. “Israel has a lot of problems, but so does China, so does America, so does a lot of the world,” Coop member Andrew Sepulveda told the Observer, voicing a common BDS counterargument. But must we rank wrongdoing nations before taking a stand? And is it not logical to single out Israel, given that U.S. foreign policy has already singled out Israel with over $3 billion in annual military aid? “Whenever we take a political action, we open ourselves up to accusations of hypocrisy and double standards,” BDS supporter Naomi Klein reminds us, “since the truth is that we can never do enough in the face of pervasive global injustice.”
“The reason we’re boycotting Israel and not Atilla the Hun is because there is an international call for boycott on Israel, and we should be honoring boycotts,” according to one Coop boycott supporter, who asked not to be named. “We shouldn’t be crossing picket lines. End of story. The reason we aren’t boycotting Atilla the Hun is because there is no international campaign to boycott Atilla the Hun. If the victims of Atilla the Hun ask for a boycott, then we should take that seriously.”
In a letter published in the Coop’s house organ, the Linewaiters’ Gazette, boycott organizers noted that the Coop has a long tradition of boycotts—of both individual companies and entire nations. A 20-year boycott of South African products began in 1973, the year of the Coop’s founding. There have been eleven Coop boycotts since 1989, including Coca-Cola, Domino Sugar, non-United Farm Worker grapes, and tuna.
Until recently, the matter of boycotting and divesting from Israel had only been raised in letters in the Linewaiters’ Gazette, where the debate has ebbed and flowed for over two years. But at a July 26th general meeting—a monthly gathering held at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim—the grinding wheels of Coop democratic process began turning with the first face-to-face discussion of BDS. The question at hand was not whether or not the Coop should join BDS, but rather whether they should even hold a membership-wide vote. “Why not boycott Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Bahrain?” said Susan Tauber, one of the members advocating against the referendum, according to the Linewaiters’ Gazette’s recap of the general meeting.
Coop BDS organizers told me that almost all of the supporters who spoke at the meeting were Jewish and identified themselves as such. Still, Jewish opponents of BDS at the Coop show that the “progressive except Palestine” phenomenon in the American Jewish community has not gone away. While open to hosting the debate in his synagogue, Congregation Beth Elohim’s Rabbi Andy Bachman—generally considered a progressive rabbi—condemned the boycott efforts in a statement, writing, “BDS rhetoric reveals that the ultimate goal of the majority of its supporters is a dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state. This is simply untenable and unjust.” (Bachman was referring to BDS’ demand that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to what is now the state of Israel in accordance with UN Resolution 194.) In the Linewaiters’ Gazette, BDS opponent Ruth Bollettino made the same argument, but in starker language. “The ‘right’ of Palestinian refugees to return means dismantling the Jewish state demographically, flooding it with Palestinian Arabs,” Bollettino wrote, revealing the racial fears underpinning the drive to maintain Israel as a Jewish-majority state. Her letter joined seven others against BDS, one in support of BDS, and an unrelated letter thanking a stranger for having returned $90 that had fallen out of the writer’s pocket at the Coop entrance.
Boycott supporters at the Coop would seem to be in the minority, if one were to judge by the letters in the Linewaiters’ Gazette or the Observer, which admitted its nonscientific methods while noting, “Finding pro-boycott members outside the co-op Monday night was no easy task.” But Melissa, a Brooklynite Coop member of eight years, had a different impression of the membership’s stand. “The silent majority of Coop members are probably uncertain about the issue of BDS,” she said, adding, “The challenge that we have is not to change the minds of people like Barbara Mazor.” Rather, it is to educate their fellow Coop members as to the need to honor the Palestinian BDS call.
Retired lawyer Dennis James, a Coop BDS organizer, noted the generational divide he sees in conversations about BDS—who shuts off, and who’s willing to engage. “Some of the older people, you can’t raise the subject. It’s verboten,” James said. “Whereas younger people might argue with you but they will talk about it.”
The other day, I met up with my friend Jesse Bacon at Tealounge, a coffeeshop across the street from the Coop. Despite having once seen a mouse scamper through the glass dessert case there, I ate part of Jesse’s cookie as we talked BDS shop. He’s an activist with Jewish Voice for Peace, working on their campaign to get the pension fund TIAA-CREF to divest from Motorola and other companies profiting from the occupation of the West Bank. Many TIAA-CREF holders are teachers and other professionals who tend to skew liberal in their politics. Working on the campaign has helped Jesse see how important it is to have a sympathetic population when advocating BDS in an institution. Jesse weighed in:
In a certain sense, the Coop campaign is dealing with liberal people who just want to get their crunchy, hippie food and be left alone. But the best things that movements critical of Israel can do is to push people to be consistent. Consistency is a great thing to offer people. It requires some explanation and education as to why this is part of your other values–why boycotting or divesting from Israel is an extension of them.
The cringe factor was high for both of us while reading the Observer’s anonymous source decry the Coop BDS campaign reaching into the heavily Jewish populated Park Slope, “the heart of Chaimtown.” At the same time, Jesse pointed out, “The fact that a BDS campaign is even going on in ‘Chaimtown’—the heart of the Jewish crunchy liberal establishment—whether or not this wins, it shows that this issue is everywhere now.”
Stay tuned for my next installment, in which Jesse and I go shopping at the Coop to see what products could go inside the Israeli boycart.
This post originally appeared on the website Waging Nonviolence.
“The challenge that we have is not to change the minds of people like Barbara Mazor.” Rather, it is to educate their fellow Coop members as to the need to honor the Palestinian BDS call.
Ding ding ding!!
“the heart of Chaimtown” — recall Jesse Jackson’s take-down after his (private) “Hymietown” remark?
At least it gave us one of the funniest Eddie Murphy skits ever on SNL
excellent article! i first read about park slope co op a few weeks ago. bds is gaining ground fast. hardly anyone had heard of it 2 years ago. please keep us informed kiera, thank you.
What feeble arguments the opposers to BDS have. I wonder why people ‘singled out’ South Africa under apartheid? No doubt there were other countries with reprehensible policies at the time, perhaps we should have ignored S Africa’s indigenous population because of that, and let them suffer. Who said anything about BDS being the sole issue at the Coop – the general principle is to fight injustice and support campaigns to restore justice, nothing ‘single’ about that. And as for the tired old ‘anti-Semitic’ ruse – really, is that all you can think of? The campaign is against the political actions of Israel, specifically ‘apartheid on steroids’ and doesn’t mention anything about the religious preferences of some of the people who live there. Are sanctions against Iran, which no doubt they are highly supportive of, anti-Muslim?
Idiots.
Fabulous report, Kiera. I wonder about those 11 boycotts since ’89– how many of them singled a country out when there were other bad things happening? how low the threshhold for outrage was in those other instances?
It reminds me of Rabbi Arthur Waskow calling for a boycott of BP after the Gulf spill and opposing boycott of Jim Crow.
Outrage threshold for boycotts at the Coop is pretty low, it seems. In “More Democracy, Please” BDS organizers at the Coop noted that a boycott of Flaum’s appetizing products passed easily in March due to worker rights concerns (link to foodcoop.com). I was wondering why the Coop stopped carrying Sonny and Joe’s hummus and went back to Sabra…
An article in the August issue of the Linewaiters Gazette–which, full disclosure, I’d never read till now–notes that a motion to boycott China failed in 1995. No details on why. link to foodcoop.com
Great piece, thank you.
I’m a Park Slope Food Coop member (and squad leader!) who supports the BDS initiative, mainly as a protest against our own country’s lavish military and diplomatic support for Israel. There is simply no reason to arm and bankroll a country that is committing ethnic cleansing and other crimes, and a relatively wealthy country with nuclear weapons at that. It makes no sense. When our country stops singling out Israel for lavish aid, gifts of weaponry and unlimited diplomatic cover, then I will stop singling out Israel for BDS initiatives. To pretend that the we have the same relationship with Israel as with Syria, Bahrain, Sri Lanka is disingenuous, to put it mildly.
As for the Observer’s smug squib against the BDS initiative, what else can you expect from a rag that used to employ Pam Geller as associate publisher? Honestly.
a squad leader? wonderful Chespirito. so, will there be a vote and if so when? what do you think the probable results might be?
It’s not clear yet whether or not the BDS resolution will come to a referendum vote by the Coop’s membership. The Coop’s rules about what it takes to get an issue voted on by the entire membership are pretty loose, and the PSFC’s management seems not to want to bring it to a referendum.
Would the BDS resolution win if brought to a general membership vote? I really don’t know. But it’s a victory just to be airing these issues and getting people talking about them. Huffing and puffing from Dershowitz only fans the publicity higher. (Thanks Al!) There are a lot members new to this issue who are hearing the pro-BDS line for the first time, perhaps even hearing criticism of America’s client-state patronage of Israel for the first time. And that right there is a victory.
thanks for your response, yes i agree it is a bds victory also.
From observing the progress of BDS in Australia, this is surely the case.
When Marrickville Council in Sydney and the NSW state chapter of the Greens resolved to adopt BDS the Murdoch press went ballistic and ran daily articles during an election cycle in their conservative national paper The Australian.
Here in Melbourne BDS protests at Max Brenner (whose owner Strauss Group support 2 IDF units with direct financial and other donations) resulted in Victorian Police arresting 19 people at a non-violent protest. A month later after a follow-up protest the police conducted dawn raids on activists houses and made further arrests. In the interim former PM (now Foreign Minister) felt compelled to visit Max Brenner and spout some scary (and false) crap about “boycott of jewish businesses” and the nazis – resulting in local press coverage. After the 2nd round of arrests a Victorian minister asked the ACCC (consumer and competition watchdog) to investigate if BDS could be declared illegal under Australian law – which resulted in even more press coverage.
In both instances, attempts to crush and defame BDS have introduced the issue to a much wider audience than the initial campaigns. It is only necessary to plant the seed that a group of activists are conducting a boycott campaign. People aren’t stupid and are aware of Israel’s actions in Lebanon 2006, Gaza 2008/09, the siege on Gaza and the shocking raid and executions on the Mavi Marmara last year. They can and do join the dots themselves. I hardly ever discuss Israel/Palestine with my friends [who aren't already involved], but one by one they are turning onto the issue; asking questions, borrowing books etc.
Chesperito ~ even if the BDS resolution comes to a referendum and is defeated, you’re right, it’s a victory. It is a short-term victory only, because invariably Israel will commit some new atrocities, and all those who might have been persuaded by the various hasbara experts, will re-examine their position. I predict Israel’s next atrocities will be the IDF’s attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising that will likely occur after the UN vote next month. I hope the housing protests are still live in Tel Aviv when this occurs, because it will force the issue of the occupation onto their agenda…
Stay tuned for my next installment, in which Jesse and I go shopping at the Coop to see what products could go inside the Israeli boycart.
While you’re at it, you might want to check out all those Syrian, Saudi and Bahraini products cramming the shelves.
Besides for Schumer living there, there is no reason to call Park Slope “the heart of Chaimtown”. I’ve lived there forever as did my parents and their parents before them. I’ve never heard of Park Slope as being known for its ‘high Jewish population’ before the Observer article.
This whole, ‘you’re coming into OUR backyard, with your BDS’ frames it as an attack(!) on the Jewish community in Brooklyn. Putting aside that BDS is entirely peaceful, it draws a line in the sand that isn’t there.
Park Slope is more of the home base of the ‘crunchy liberal establishment’, yuppies and of the LGBT community….it’s natural that BDS would be find sympathy there.
Israel thinks we should send flotillas to Syria. Then it starts laying more mines.
Another Palestinian was just murdered in Syria by Assad’s goons. 10,000 Palestinians unaccounted for now in Syria after having fled their camps. A two year old girl shot in the eye, her father arrested two days ago.
Is it progressive to ask who mourns their deaths? Is it progressive to request sanctions with teeth against the Assad regime? Is it progressive to ask what right Assad has to torture children and then to return their bodies to their parents as a warning? Or is it reactionary to ask such questions since Israel is not involved and it’s just arabs killing arabs, and the lovely Assad and wife have a perfect record of supporting Palestinians(until he started murdering them) and hatred of Israel?
Instead of asking is it progressive or is it reactionary, why not ask if it is just.
Well it is possible there will be sanctions against Syria. I don’t recall anybody here supporting Assad. Certainly it suited Israel and the US to keep him in power, as they did Mubarak. On the same principle Israel qualifies for sanctions also. And we have asked if it is just, and the Palestinians have replied that it is. Just start treating Palestinians as equal in every respect to Jews, with equal rights before the law, equal votes and the same rights to building and land. Then there may not be any need for sanctions.
You do not understand BDS in the US. We oppose Israel because our government is complicit in her crimes. Politically, this is the only practical tactic. What is happening in Syria is unfortunate, but at least the US is not paying their military and providing the weapons in that carnage. It is sad but it is a problem for which the US is not responsible.
You guys won when you convinced the US to invade Iraq, but now it is pay back time.
biorabbi, why do you assume that BDS activists would not also support a boycott of the Assad regime?
BDS is an initiative started by the Palestinian civil society.
So why don’t you lecture them. Tell them, that you – a Zionist – are upset with the deaths of Palestinians (by Assad, not by Israel) and think BDS is hypocritical as a result.
I’m sure your logical argument will sway them.
Why are you deflecting from the article?
What makes you believe Israel is not involved in Syria?
““People here are always thinking about the implications of everything,” Mazor was quoted as saying in a 2001 academic article about the Coop. “That’s really nifty. I find that stam people [Yiddish for “ordinary people”] think about less and less.””
LOL…hard to know whether to laugh or cry when you hear a PEP hypocrite like Mazor say ordinary people think about less and less.
Does a mental deficiency have something do to with being a hypocrite?
Seems like it must…no other way to explain the disconnect.
Tablet wrote an impressively unbalanced piece about the campaign, suggesting all Park Slope Food Coop Jews hate BDS and would leave if Israeli products were pulled from the shelves (link to tabletmag.com). Not a single BDS supporter quoted, not even a straw man! In it, Mazor describes herself as “ultra Modern Orthodox.” It’s not a “mental deficiency” (as you say) to be progressive except palestine; it’s an ideology. That’s Zionism, with its tribal blinders firmly in place.
RE: “It’s not a ‘mental deficiency’ (as you say) to be progressive except palestine; it’s an ideology. That’s Zionism, with its tribal blinders firmly in place.” ~ K. Feldman
TRUE, BUT ALSO CONSIDER:
Defense Mechanisms – link to planetpsych.com
Defence mechanism – link to en.wikipedia.org
I’ve been a supporter, and periodic leader of food and other cooperative efforts (organizing the formation cooperatives in Westchester, a neighborhood of DC, Seattle, Denver. (Small ones, mostly buying clubs, but also an car cooperative, cooperative libraries, cooperative banking)
In every case in which politics that are not about the food (quality, disclosure, living wage, locus, etc.) enters a food coop’s process, it divides.
If the Park Slope Coop were to lose 1/3 of its members due to alienation from a non-relevant issue (not relevant to the business of the coop), then another 1/3 on the basis of another contreversy, then the coop would CEASE to provide food in a cooperative setting.
It doesn’t matter if you agree or not. The imposition of the choice of products to carry, is a large one.
The reason that the Palestine issue is not regarded as a no-brainer, is because the issue is set in a conflict. Although Park Slope residents have not experienced body parts on the street of a comparable city to Brooklyn, they are entirely aware that hostility is mutual, a conflict at least as much an oppression.
The presumption of calling someone that opposes BDS PEP, is insulting, isolating, divisive, self-destructive to your effort (then requiring name-calling as the litmus test, rather than convictions and actions).
Please just respect your neighbors, as a model for how to treat those with differing views and priorities, if nothing else.
In every case in which politics that are not about the food (quality, disclosure, living wage, locus, etc.) enters a food coop’s process, it divides.
did that happen over SA apartheid too, was that during a period you not involved or was that a boycott that your coops didn’t participate?
was that during a period you [were] not involved or was that a boycott that your coops didn’t participate
Actually that was the period when Richard was dancing in airport lobbies chanting ‘hari khrishna’. We should forgive him not being a political being during that phase of his life.
Yes,
The boycotts of South Africa were divisive, and in some similar ways, particularly the willingness of proponents to abuse others that were less politically motivated.
In the case of South Africa, a coop boycotting had no decisions to make. They didn’t buy South African sourced products anyway.
That is not the case with Israeli products, and not the case with the vaguely defined set of what to boycott.
The boycott of Israeli goods is new in the world, boycotting one’s family friends.
Toivo,
I did spend a great deal of time in my 20′s meditating (not chanting hare krishna), but associated with an approach that emphasized ethics, social service, political activism, cooperative economics.
Are you prejudiced against those that do chant hare krishna? I guess that’s better than being anti-semitic.
“The boycott of Israeli goods is new in the world, boycotting one’s family friends.”
Presumably this is because white people in South Africa had no friends, I guess. Or because when someone is your friend you cut them some slack if they practice apartheid. Or something like that.
It means that a boycott of Israeli goods is not clearly a good, as there are multiple “bad guys”. It means that such a boycott will be of personal friends and family of members of the Park Slope Coop (boycotting someone’s friend, in favor of a political ideological approach). It means that a boycott of Israeli goods will inevitably be divisive, and will lose a not insignificant portion of its membership.
A frivolous, bad move. If individuals want to boycott Israeli products, that is their personal decision. The imposition onto the business by a cadre, is imposing.
Disclosure about the qualities of food products is an entirely different beast than imposition.