If you wish to sign on to this letter, email us at psfc4p.contact@proton.me.

An Open Letter on the Park Slope Food Co-Op Boycott Vote

To our neighbors, fellow New Yorkers, and the press:

We are writing as community leaders who hold a wide range of views about the Park Slope Food Coop’s May 26th proposal to boycott Israeli goods. Some of us support the boycott. Some of us are undecided. Some of us would vote against it. We sign this letter together because we share one conviction: organizing for this boycott, voting for it, and asking the Coop’s members to weigh it are legitimate acts of conscience, and labeling them antisemitic is both false and harmful.

The boycott is among the oldest nonviolent tools in American civic life. The Montgomery bus boycott helped break segregation. The grape boycott won contracts and dignity for farmworkers. The campaign against apartheid South Africa helped end a regime. The Park Slope Food Coop has joined boycotts before, against apartheid South Africa, Pinochet’s Chile, Coca-Cola, and the banks behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. A boycott is how ordinary people, with no army and no lobby, register a moral objection and invite others to join them.

This proposal concerns the policies of a state and the goods it exports. It does not concern Jewish people, Jewish customers, or Jewish neighbors, and it has nothing to do with their safety. Standing in solidarity with Palestinians living under what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem have all called apartheid, and under what UN bodies and genocide scholars have called genocide, is to stand with a people under siege. Treating that solidarity as an attack on Jews writ large does a disservice to Jewish New Yorkers, who deserve better than to be bound up with a foreign government’s military conduct. Many Jews, including Coop members, support this boycott for exactly that reason.

Several arguments have been offered for calling the boycott antisemitic, and none survives scrutiny. We are told that people who oppose Israeli policy may be acting on a bias they cannot detect in themselves, yet a charge that can never be answered tells you nothing about the person charged. We are told the boycott “singles out” Israel, while in truth people organize where they have leverage and American tax dollars and weapons sustain Israeli policies. We are told opposing “the only Jewish state” is inherently antisemitic, while the state discriminates against non-Jews based on a law legislating “national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” The question at hand is narrow: whether the Coop should stop stocking certain goods until Israel complies with international law. To brand this debate antisemitic cheapens a serious word at the very moment real antisemitism is rising, and it trains the public to treat one of our most important words as a political weapon.

Signed,
Rabbi Andy Kahn
Rabbi Ellen Lippman
Rabbi Sam Kates-Goldman
Rabbi Max Zev Reynolds
Rabbi Barat Ellman
Rabbi Abby Stein
Rabbi Louisa Solomon
Student Rabbi Max Buchdahl
Student Rabbi Hadar Ahuvia