J.C. Rice
It’s a vicious food fight.
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.
Real estate developer Ramon Maislen, 43, said he filed the complaint with the state Human Rights Division on Oct. 7 after he and other Jewish members of the socialist-leaning grocery cooperative on Union Street were harassed for opposing a campaign to boycott Israeli products.
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 woman, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said she has yet to return to the store to shop or work after her complaint to the co-op’s “Dispute Resolution Committee” was met with a half-hearted apology from her aggressor.
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.
Despite reporting their harrowing encounters to the Dispute Resolution Committee, neither Maislen nor his fellow member have been told outcome of the investigations.
The pro-boycott campaign, known as the Park Slope Food Co-op Members for Palestine, wrote in an open letter that they are looking to ensure their organization is “not supporting an apartheid government and unfolding genocide.”
“Our goal has always been just to have a conversation so other members can understand why their actions may be hurtful to us,” Maislen said.
A state Human Rights Division spokesman and the boycott campaign declined to comment. The co-op did not respond to requests for comment.