The food fight over banning Israeli products from Brooklyn’s lefty Park Slope Food Coop is getting rotten — and members are saying a few bad apples are ruining the bunch.
Longtime members have divided into factions — and Jewish shoppers say they have been subjected to threats of violence and intimidation for publicly opposing the push from anti-Israel activists.
The vote was originally set to happen at a meeting at The Picnic House in Prospect Park on Tuesday, but it had to be moved to a Zoom-only vote after many of the coop’s 15,000 members raised “explicit concerns about their safety,” according to internal emails obtained by The Post.
“People were nervous to go physically,” coop board member Ramon Maislen told The Post.
“They are fairly violent,” Maislen alleged of the anti-Israel members.
Some coop members told Maislen they were worried that people who publicly opposed the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) motion could be harassed when the meeting ends late Tuesday.
The coordinators of the coop, Ann Herpel and Matt Hoagland, admitted in an email to members that even with stepped-up safety measures at the meeting, “we cannot guarantee their security.”
The vote is almost entirely symbolic — the coop carries only a handful of products from Israel, including matzo that’s kosher for Passover, sold seasonally, and some hummus.
Even liberal rabbis are enraged
Tuesday’s vote — which has been on the table for over a year — is the culmination of an anti-Israel movement at the coop that has been raging since 2012.
It all got worse after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel and the war in Gaza.
Maislen filed a complaint with the state Human Rights Division in 2024, alleging he and other Jewish members were harassed for opposing the campaign to boycott Israeli products.
Then, at last month’s meeting, a coop member sparked outrage when he declared, “Jewish supremacism is a problem in this country,” and compared Jews to Nazis.
Even liberal leaders in the Jewish community are horrified by the coop’s boycott push.
Rabbi Rachel Timoner, who has taken criticism in the Jewish community for publicly backing Mayor Zohran Mamdani, has become a vocal leader of the anti-boycott side — telling her congregants in a recent sermon that BDS “is not a movement for Palestinian statehood, or for co-existence or for peace. It is part of a larger movement for the elimination of Israel.”
Many coop members told The Post that this has become the most volatile and divisive issue in the organization’s 53-year history.
‘A scalp hanging from the belt’
Outside the Park Slope Food Coop on Monday, pro-Palestinian activists chanted about genocide, apartheid, and Zionism while newly hired security guards stood nearby.
“Vote yes to not be silent during genocide. Be on the right side of history at the coop,” shouted one woman, who was wearing a shirt that said “I’m Jewish and I’m against genocide.”
But far from being welcomed, many frustrated shoppers told The Post that they were disgusted by the protesters.
Noah Potter, 54, a lawyer and a coop member since 2012, said that if the board votes yes, it will be a “scalp hanging from the belt” of the BDS movement.
“It’s about putting the coop’s brand on the BDS ideology.
“In practice, when BDS comes into an organization, the modus operandi is to polarize and expel, purge and cause the organization to adopt a statement that is highly reductionist, and inflammatory, and assigns blame to the extent of incarnating evil,” he added.
Another shopper, a Prospect Heights local who’s been a member since 1987, said she was horrified by the comments made about Jews — and is thinking about dropping her membership.
“I thought it was disgusting,” she said, adding that if the vote passes, she will do the bulk of her shopping at the Key Food on Flatbush Avenue.
“When people are passionate about an issue, they sometimes don’t realize the antisemitism that’s there.”
Accusations of physical intimidation
One Jewish member affiliated with the anti-boycott group Coop 4 Unity said she saw one pro-boycott member physically intimidate someone who was posting flyers against the policy change.
“A member walked up to another guy who was flyering and got really physically aggressive,” she said.
“He backed up to him closely and started yelling about genocide and apartheid.”
Though coop staffers eventually intervened, it was just one of several examples of volatility happening at the grocery store that has increased every day in the last several weeks.
“The whole time I was out there flyering, my heart was racing,” the 37-year-old woman said. “I’m a mom of two. I could think of 1 million other things I could be doing.”
Ahead of the vote, the pro-boycott group Members for Palestine has sent aggressive marketing emails urging members to support the boycott while dismissing security concerns as intimidation tactics.
The increasingly heated rhetoric has left some Jewish members saying they no longer feel comfortable attending meetings in person.
The Post reached out to Members for Palestine for comment, but did not hear back Monday.
Palestinian activists ‘flooded’ a meeting
In a recent formal complaint filed in the last few weeks and reviewed by The Post, one longtime member described experiencing severe anxiety after receiving emails from boycott organizers referring to “Zionists.”
“I used to love the coop more than any other institution in my life (I am fast falling into a state of utter disgust with every part of it),” the member wrote.
“I lost sleep. I had diarrhea. My stomach was in knots for the two weeks between the April 14 email and the April 29 meeting,” she continued — referring to the heated debates over the boycott.
“I was so nervous that I went to the Picnic House at 4:30 pm, to ensure I could get in, because I expected to be prevented from entering.”
The member described the atmosphere at the meeting as “intimidating,” alleging that pro-Palestinian activists “flooded” the venue, wearing keffiyehs and watermelon imagery associated with Palestinian solidarity protests, which caused many members to avoid the meeting altogether because they were intimidated.
Bruno Grandsard, who has been a member of the coop for 25 years, described the conflict as unprecedented.
“There have been other periods like this in the past, but this is the worst it’s ever been,” he said.
“The majority of people just want all of this to go away. It’s just very divisive, extremely divisive.”
For board member Maislen, the vote is especially concerning because of the probability that if the vote is successful, members will leave.
An informal survey estimated that nearly 1,000 current members would abandon the Brooklyn institution if the boycott were to go through.
“My concern is that if coop members leave in disgust, it actually kind of harms us in a way, because if we have to have another vote, there’s just fewer people that are on our side,” Maislen said.
