There's nothing so delicious as watching the Left engaging in riotous autosarcophagy
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Park Slope Food Co-op members face anti-Israel, antisemitic hate from their fellow liberals
The Park Slope Food Co-op has devolved into a hotbed of antisemitic and anti-Israel hate, with members spewing Nazi slogans toward Jews and sneering they “smell of Palestinian blood,” according to a complaint filed with the state.
….The crunchy co-op, founded in 1973, requires its roughly 16,000 members to work 2.75-hour shifts every six weeks, in exchange for the privilege to purchase heavily discounted groceries, in addition to voting on store policies.
In the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack and the ensuing war in Gaza, however, several members began pushing to strip the store’s shelves of products linked to the Jewish state, such as Sabra hummus, with the spicy scuffle soon permeating campaigns for the co-op’s board of directors election earlier this year.
In May, a Jewish co-op member who was standing outside the store and trying to inform those strolling by about the boycott effort was confronted by a shopper, who called her a “Nazi,” according to Maislen’s complaint.
The odious member began walking away, but not before shouting “Sieg Heil” at the 35-year-old, according to the complaint.
“I’ve had antisemitic stuff happen to me, but like that publicly, that brazen, with that language … I was really shaken up,” the woman told The Post.
The co-op, she said, is “not a welcoming space anymore, for Israelis, for Jews,” she said.
Anti-Israel hostilities continued a week later, when Maislen, who unsuccessfully ran for a board of directors seat on the anti-boycott platform, was harassed by an unhinged member outside the co-op, who barked at him that Zionists “can’t have empathy,” the complaint noted.
And in late June, an Israeli-Jewish co-op member who was discussing the pro-boycott candidates during her shift was harassed by another woman espousing antisemitic conspiracy theories, including that Jews celebrated young Palestinians being raped and killed, according to the complaint.
The unhinged member seethed that she couldn’t work or stand next to the Jewish woman because she smelled “of Palestinian blood,” the complaint read.
This article from The Jewish Forward provides a taste of what life among the woke is like:
In theory, co-ops are the ideal of democracy, where everyone gets a say on everything; a society built on community, compromise, collaboration and shared values. But the reality tends to be less utopian; without an ultimate authority, every decision, no matter how small, can erupt into a chaos of a thousand opinions.
And though the Coop is a beloved neighborhood shop, it’s also a huge, profitable company; it has tens of thousands of members, many of whom commute from other neighborhoods or even other states to shop and work their shifts, making it the largest member-run co-op in the country. (Other cooperative companies, like REI, do not run on member labor; they are only coops insofar as members have some limited voting power.)
Those tens of thousands of members make for tens of thousands of opinions and rules — and zealous enforcers. Each change in operations is a battle. …. Members battle over which food additives are acceptable, the volume at which music can be played over the store speakers, what kind of meat to sell — and whether the Coop should sell meat at all. (It does, but my colleague, who has been a member since 1985, recalled a temporary compromise involving separate meat and non-meat shopping carts.)
In the letters to the editor section of the Coop’s newspaper, the Linewaiters’ Gazette, for the last several months, topics of contention included “the amplified collision of plastic” caused by the store paging system and pickle sourcing. And BDS is more controversial than any of those issues.
A Jewish woman reported feeling afraid that another member would yell at her when she bought Jerusalem-made matzo before Passover. Another mentioned a beloved tahini brand that the store carries. “Did you know it’s made by an Israeli Arab who champions LGBT rights?” she asked. The rest of the letter is devoted to a tahini smoothie recipe: “Pour into a glass, take a sip, and savor the creamy goodness of standing against BDS and supporting products that promote unity and understanding.” Many, many letters accuse the store of being unwelcoming to Jews — members wearing keffiyehs while working their shifts is a common theme — and the Gazette of antisemitism for even publishing letters about BDS.
Meanwhile, others argue that the Coop is an inherently political project, and that it has boycotted other products and countries — Coca-Cola, Nestlé, South Africa, Chile — in the past. They speak of their guilt in eating good produce from the Coop while children in Gaza starve. Several letters accuse the Coop of being unwelcoming to Muslims for not having Ramadan foods on display — and for fomenting anti-Muslim sentiment by printing letters that accuse BDS of antisemitism.
Things have gotten so bad that, in the same issue, the Gazette published back-to-back letters in which both a pro-Unity and a pro-BDS member reported being called a Nazi.
