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How the push to unionize at Breads Bakery became a debate over Israel/Palestine
When Ellie, a barista for Breads Bakery, learned that some of her coworkers were forming a labor union, she was interested. The 24-year-old, Brooklyn-based artist who has worked at the Israeli-owned bakery for less than a year, thought it could lead to increased pay and benefits. And she believed her employers could afford it; they regularly sell out of their $18 babkas at their seven different New York locations.
“It started out about wages and conditions,” said Ellie, who, like many of the people I spoke with, asked to be quoted anonymously or with a pseudonym, “but it’s turned into Israel/Palestine.”
At the start of the new year, 30% of the 275 employees had signed union authorization cards for the United Auto Workers Local 2179, the percentage necessary to petition the National Labor Relations Board for a union election. Calling itself “Breaking Breads,” the group put out a press release, stating, “Workers are demanding a living wage, safe workplace, and basic respect.”
But beyond discussing cost-of-living issues and what was portrayed as management’s discriminatory practices, the press release included a demand “to cease Breads’ support for the genocide in Gaza.”
New Yorkers are generally supportive of workers’ campaigns. But in this case, after news of the demands was published in the press, there were lines outside of Breads’ locations to purchase babkas and challahs in support of management. The workers’ refusal to “participate in Zionist projects” like painting Israeli flags on cookies, was interpreted by many as demanding the Israeli bakery stop being Israeli.
Louis Putman, a 62-year-old delivery driver who has worked for Breads for six years, was surprised by his coworkers’ demands. “I’m not political like that,” said the Brooklyn native after he had parked his truck outside the bakery’s Union Square flagship. Putman told me he supports unionization — in the past he was a member of the powerful Service Employees Industry Union — but thinks the campaign shouldn’t focus on the owners’ politics. “They have their views and I have mine,” he said.
Eric Milner, a labor attorney whose firm represents unions in the New York area, said that while unions often support political causes, making political demands of an employer is unusual and unlikely to succeed. “A union can’t legitimately tell the boss what products they can or can’t sell, or who they can sell to,” he said. “That’s a core business decision, not a term or condition of employment.”
But organizers say these issues are linked. “We see our struggles for fair pay, respect, and safety as connected to struggles against genocide and forces of exploitation around the world,” Leah A., a worker whom the union says was illegally fired for organizing, stated in the press release.
This isn’t the first time that Local 2179 has injected Gaza into their organizing. Last winter, members in the midst of negotiating their first contract with the Alamo Drafthouse movie theaters petitioned the cinema to cancel the movie September 5 about the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, which they called “Zionist Propaganda.”
Johannah King-Slutzky, an official of a different UAW local and a student leader of Columbia University’s 2024 campus encampments, is acting as a media contact for Breaking Breads. While her name does not appear on the press release, I received it from her personal gmail; she is also listed as the owner of photos linked from Google Drive in the release, and her phone number is the contact.
King-Slutzky and Local 2179 declined to comment or clarify her role in the union drive. The PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature is a Sergeant-at-Arms for Student Workers of Columbia, a local of UAW, which represents the school’s teaching assistants, instructors and researchers. In 2024, she was arrested at the campus encampment and subsequently suspended. She also acted as a spokesperson for the dozens of students who occupied Hamilton Hall.
Ellie, the barista, identifies as pro-Palestinian but says she regrets that more attention hasn’t been given to the other issues. The company’s recent job listings for both the front and back of the house start at the city’s minimum wage of $17 while the union says the business’ revenue is more than $30 million a year. Employees complain of unpredictable schedules, and the union says a worker was hospitalized after an unsecured locker fell on them. The union also says that management has prohibited workers from playing Spanish language music and speaking in Arabic, which, if true, would be a violation of anti-discrimination law.
Neither Breads’ owners nor their representatives responded to requests for comment on these and other issues.
Both workers and a manager told me that the company told them not to discuss the union while on the clock, something Milner says would most likely be a violation of the National Labor Relations Act and can have a chilling effect. Off the clock, workers were hesitant to discuss the topic with me even anonymously, though several told me they support the union and consider themselves pro-Palestinian.
After two years of Israel’s aggressive response to the Hamas attack, for the first time a majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of Israel. Many of Breads’ workers are in their 20s, a cohort far more likely to view Israel’s military campaign as a genocide. A New York Times/Siena poll found adults under 30 are three times more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis. For young workers at businesses that have publicly supported Israel, that creates an uncomfortable position.
One counter worker, who also asked not to be named, said her differences with the bosses over Israel didn’t affect her work, until pro-Israel customers began confronting employees after the news of the union drive broke. “One woman came in and ordered a cappuccino,” she said. “I asked if I could get her anything else and she said, ‘Yeah, I’d like that with a side of Zionism.’”
Breads is a spin-off of the popular Tel Aviv bakery, Lehanim, and is operated by Israeli-Americans — Chief Executive Yonatan Floman and the owner Gadi Peleg. After its opening in 2013, the bakery set off a babka boom and has since become known for its festive challahs, rugelach, and Hanukkah sufganiyot. After the Hamas Oct. 7 attack, locations sold heart-shaped challahs as a fundraiser for Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross. Otherwise, while the bakery is identifiably Jewish and Israeli, it does not regularly display flags or political messages.
“We make babka, we don’t engage in politics,” the bakery said in a statement on Jan. 14. “We celebrate peace and embrace people of all cultures and beliefs. We’ve always been a workplace where people of all backgrounds and viewpoints can come together around a shared purpose, the joy found at a bakery, and we find it troubling that divisive political issues are being introduced into our workplace.”
But some may find the philanthropy of the bakery’s leadership difficult to separate from supporting Israel’s actions in Gaza. Floman and Breads Bakery are listed as sponsors of an October 2024 fundraising gala on the Facebook page of American Friends of Unit 669, which supports the elite Israeli Air Force’s combat search and rescue unit that extracts downed pilots and other soldiers in distress behind enemy lines. Peleg actively supports and previously served as a committee chair for American Friends of Rabin Medical Center, which raises funds for an Israeli hospital that, in addition to civilian care, treats soldiers wounded in combat. Neither cause is unusual among pro-Israel Jewish Americans, but for some who view the Gaza campaign as a genocide, even well-intended support of Israel is unacceptable.
The Breaking Breads campaign reflects a split within the UAW. Graduate students now account for a quarter of the union’s membership, and Region 9a, which includes Local 2179 and represents workers at Columbia, Harvard and other elite universities, has become a base for pro-Palestinian activists. In 2023, members from the northeast formed UAW Labor for Palestine, pushing the union to cut ties with Israeli unions and divest over $400,000 in Israeli bonds. The national leadership has resisted. When the UAW endorsed President Biden in 2024, King-Slutzky and other activists disrupted his UAW convention speech with chants of “Ceasefire Now!” and were dragged off the floor.
Not every Breads worker is galvanized by Gaza. Two Ecuadorian workers who don’t speak English told me that other Latin American coworkers had talked with them about the union, but the Middle East conflict was never mentioned. Ellie doesn’t think it’s a union issue. “I’ve worked for evil corporations,” she said, “You never know where the money goes.” In her months on the job, she hasn’t been asked to do anything that may directly support Israel.
“Once you start bringing in politics that divide people, you’re taking away from what you’re actually trying to do, which is to unify the workforce and get better wages,” said Milner. He believes it will also make it harder to gain the support of customers.
Still, for some workers, even if a union contract can’t change their bosses’ politics, they think it’s worth taking a stand and making a statement.
“I support the Union efforts and I support Palestine,” the counter worker I spoke to about tensions between staff and customers texted me. “I also know that the owners’ support of Israel is deeply rooted and pretty unlikely to budge.”
The post How the push to unionize at Breads Bakery became a debate over Israel/Palestine appeared first on The Forward.
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Irish Jews report 143 antisemitic incidents in 6 months through a new reporting system
(JTA) — Jews in Ireland reported over 100 antisemitic incidents through a communal reporting system within six months after it launched, according to a new report.
The findings published early Monday by the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland constitute the first attempt to document antisemitic incidents in Ireland.
Irish Jews, a small community of about 2,200, reported 143 incidents between July 2025 and January 2026. These were dominated by verbal abuse, vandalism, threats, exclusion or discrimination and direct digital hate messages. Physical assault was less common, with only three instances reported.
All incidents were self-reported to the JRCI, which cannot independently investigate or adjudicate them. Ireland does not have an official state mechanism for recording antisemitic incidents, the group said. And while the police record hate crimes based on nationality, ethnicity or religion, they do not isolate crimes motivated by antisemitism.
The JRCI said that 30% of incidents were triggered by cues of Jewish identity or Israeli origin, such as a Jewish symbol, an accent or speaking Hebrew in public. Such patterns often crossed the boundaries of hate driven by nationality, ethnicity and religion.
“These dynamics cannot be adequately addressed through generalized anti-racism frameworks alone,” JRCI chair Maurice Cohen said in a statement. “Antisemitism presents distinct characteristics requiring targeted policy responses.”
Cohen called for “a dedicated, standalone national plan to combat antisemitism in Ireland.”
Of the reported incidents, 25 included “Holocaust distortion” or antisemitic conspiracy theories. These findings add to a Claims Conference survey in January, which said that 9% of Irish adults believed the Holocaust was a myth, while another 17% believed the number of Jews killed had been greatly exaggerated. Half of Irish adults did not know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
At the same time, a November 2025 survey by the European Commission surfaced broad recognition of antisemitism in Ireland. 41% of respondents said that antisemitism was a problem in the country and 47% said it had increased over the past five years.
At a ceremony for International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, Ireland’s taoiseach (or prime minister) Micheál Martin said, “I am acutely conscious that our Jewish community here in Ireland is experiencing a growing level of antisemitism. I know that elements of our public discourse has coarsened.”
Martin has strenuously criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza, saying at the United Nations last year that Israel committed genocide and demonstrated “an abandonment of all norms, all international rules and law.” Catherine Connolly, a socialist politician who has faced backlash for saying Hamas is “part of the fabric of the Palestinian people,” was elected as Ireland’s president in October.
Ireland has historically supported the Palestinians, a stance often linked to the country’s own history of British imperial rule, and formally recognized a Palestinian state in 2024.
In Martin’s Holocaust commemoration speech, he also condemned the most recent event to inflame the Irish Jewish community. Late last year, a proposal to rename Herzog Park in Dublin — named for Chaim Herzog, the son of the first Irish chief rabbi who became Israel’s sixth president in 1983 — was decried by Irish Jews who said it would erase Irish Jewish history. The proposal was later tabled.
Martin, who also denounced the proposal when it was active, said the Jewish community “has every right to be deeply concerned and to express that concern.”
Gideon Taylor, president of the World Jewish Restitution Organization and an Irish Jew who grew up in Dublin, said the JRCI report showed a picture of antisemitic incidents that were separate from “a debate about the policies of Israel or a debate about the Palestinian state.”
“When you have discontinuation of service because somebody is heard speaking Hebrew, or has a Jewish-identifying symbol on them, that’s not about a political position on the spectrum towards Israel,” said Taylor. “That’s something that crosses into antisemitism.”
Ireland’s chief rabbi Yoni Wieder said the report reflected experiences he already heard from his congregants.
“The report does not claim that antisemitism has become a daily reality for all Jewish people in Ireland — it has not,” said Wieder. “What it does show is that antisemitism surfaces often enough, and in ordinary enough settings, that it cannot be dismissed as rare or confined to the margins of society. This means that for many, Jewish belonging in Ireland feels more fragile than it should.”
The post Irish Jews report 143 antisemitic incidents in 6 months through a new reporting system appeared first on The Forward.
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Yet again, Israel’s public shelters become sites of camaraderie amid steep danger
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Spirits ran high inside a large public bomb shelter in the Israeli coastal city of Jaffa, with loud chatter, singing and greetings of “Happy Iran Holiday,” an incongruous soundtrack to the joint U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran and the hundreds of missiles that followed.
The room itself looked much cheerier than most shelters, with a ball pit and bright Gymboree mattresses left over from its other job in peacetime, when it doubles as a kindergarten.
A day earlier, the shelter became the accidental venue for a bar mitzvah celebration, when worshipers from the synagogue across the road took refuge there.
One particularly raucous group was made up mostly of American-Israelis from the neighborhood. One of them, Steph Graber, said she was in a good mood despite being exhausted from middle-of-the-night runs to the shelter.
“I’m not sure why, maybe it’s the adrenaline of war or something,” she said on Sunday morning. “But also it’s amazing to see the U.S. and Israel as allies working together to reduce the threat from Iran.”
Graber said she had been sheltering elsewhere but had “FOMO” about not being with her friends, so she switched over in the brief lull between sirens.
Martine Berkowitz, a friend of Graber’s, also said the community around her was what made the disruption feel manageable. Sirens kept interrupting even basic tasks, she said, including her attempt to take a shower, which she tried five times.
“My friends live on my corner, so I’m doing great. We’re all together all the time,” she said. During the last Iran flare-up in June, she didn’t have that kind of built-in circle nearby, she said. “Being alone then was really rough.”
The mood wasn’t confined to Jaffa. Across the country, similar scenes played out in shelters and spread on social media, including one from Nachlaot in Jerusalem of people singing “For the Jews There was Light and Joy,” a Purim song marking the story’s turn after Haman’s plot to kill the Jews was thwarted. The parallel to the current moment, as the Jews once again sought to topple a Persian rule who had called for their death, was not lost on anyone.
In a sprawling underground parking lot turned shelter at Dizengoff Center in central Tel Aviv, Shabbat prayers gave way to dancing and songs of “Don’t Be Afraid, Oh Israel” and “Am Yisrael Chai.” Saul Sadka, who was there, posted a video of the revelers, captioning it “joy and stoicism.”
Sadka later said he was struck by the “sense of solidarity,” and noted that it was Shabbat Zachor, when Jews read the passage about Amalek, a nemesis that they are commanded never to forget. “People seem willing to suffer for a while if it means the defeat of the IRGC,” he said.
Another bomb shelter in Tel Aviv struck a less pious tone, turning into a makeshift night club with red lights, a DJ and people dancing.
In one video, one of hundreds of comedic shelter clips circulating online, a comedian quipped, “The nation of Israel lives” — but only as long as the shelter “has wifi and the iPads have battery.”
Natalie Silverlieb was in the mamak, the communal reinforced safe room on her building’s floor. She said the logistics of repeated alerts had become harder since she became a mother.
“Doing this with a baby is crazy,” she said. The room was packed, including other babies and dogs, and she and her partner tried to follow a system that would get their baby back to sleep quickly.
“I’m so, so, so exhausted,” she said. “When I was doing this on my own the last time, I could at least come back to my apartment and just lay on the couch. But now there’s no laying on the couch. It’s go, go, go.”
For Silverlieb, the uncertainty of the past few weeks hadn’t disappeared so much as changed shape. “The waiting for it to end is more stressful than the waiting for it to begin,” she said. “I just hope it ends quickly. It’s a lot, period.”
In a nearby grocery store, another siren, the 30th or so in as many hours, sent shoppers scrambling. In the residential building next door, the shelter downstairs was decrepit and doorless. Children played limbo with a strip of red cloth. One woman began pitching HAAT, a new, mostly Arab-run delivery service she said was giving Wolt a run for its money. A few people pulled out their phones to download the app, trading jokes about whether it would deliver to shelters, and during sirens. Because it is Ramadan, Muslims in Israel are doubly on edge, from fasting on top of the missiles.
Sasha, who lives in the building, said she was “half happy” the waiting was over. The repeated dashes up and down the stairs, she joked, were at least getting her to her daily goal of 10,000 steps. Still, she said, it “won’t help us if the [Iranian] regime doesn’t fall.”
A Ukrainian who grew up under Soviet rule, taught her what it meant to live without freedom, she said. “We want to see the Iranian people free and a better Middle East for everyone.”
Evyatar said he doubted the regime would fall “unless the Iranian citizens themselves finish the job.”
Ma’or, another neighbor, said he would “happily sit in my bomb shelter if it meant giving my Iranian friends, both in Iran and out, a chance at a normal life.” He pointed to a friend in Tehran who works as a tattoo artist, an illegal trade under the regime.
“I mean, he’s not even free to give someone a tattoo without going underground,” he said. “I’m baffled by the people cheering [on] the IRGC. People who say this war is illegal are out of their goddamn minds.”
Evyatar said he began Saturday uneasy, but grew calmer as the hours passed and he gauged the pattern of the strikes. The alerts came far more often than the 12-day war, but the blasts felt less intense. “At the beginning I felt scared, like it was June all over again.” Over time, he said, he has learned to tell the difference between the sounds of interceptions, shrapnel and direct impacts.
As he spoke, a loud boom hit outside, rattling the shelter and stopping the conversation. “That, for example, was a June sound,” he said.
It turned out to be shrapnel coming down not far away. The impact was part of a wider series of strikes across central Israel, including one that turned lethal in Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem, when a public bomb shelter was hit. Nine people were killed including multiple from the same family. Dozens more were wounded, and others still were unaccounted for.
In Beit Shemesh, the strike changed the atmosphere in a city that had so far heard only occasional sirens, during both this round and the last one.
Netanel Alkoby, a Beit Shemesh resident who spent 12 years in the reserves with the Home Front Command, said he has always taken alerts seriously, but that over time a degree of complacency still set in. The strike, he said, “changed our perspective a lot,” forcing him to be more careful, more on guard, and to treat every warning “with the utmost seriousness.”
In the underground shelter at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, a sign overhead read “the safest shelter in existence.” Patients hobbled in, some with casts and crutches. With doctors also sheltering there, patients used the moment to buttonhole them with questions.
One staffer watched a line of women form to speak to a physician. “Poor thing, he can’t even enjoy the siren in peace,” she said.
Back in the central Jaffa shelter, a couple in black leather and dark glasses stood apart from the banter around them.
“Any fear and terror that Israeli citizens are feeling right now is a direct result of this violent racist Islamophobic power hungry greedy fascist government,” said the woman, who declined to give her name, referring to the Netanyahu-led coalition.
Asked whether she thought attacking Iran was a bad idea, she said: “I think it’s a bad idea to attack anyone in 2026. We teach toddlers not to fight and here we have fully grown men doing this, dooming all of us.”
“It’s time we take the power from aging white men,” she said.
Nearby, Martine Berkowitz agreed — in part. “Yep, they are behaving like toddlers. And they are aging white men. Who are fighting evil brown men. If it brings freedom to Iran then it was worth it. But if it doesn’t, then it was all for nothing.”
The post Yet again, Israel’s public shelters become sites of camaraderie amid steep danger appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu: ‘Our Forces Are Striking the Heart of Tehran With Increasing Strength’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu participates in the state memorial ceremony for the fallen of the Iron Swords War on Mount Herzl, in Jerusalem, Oct. 16, 2025. Photo: Alex Kolomoisky/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Israeli forces had “eliminated the dictator Ali Khamenei” along with dozens of senior officials of Iran’s regime during a statement delivered from the roof of the Kirya, Israel’s defense headquarters.
“Yesterday, we eliminated the dictator Khamenei. Along with him, dozens of senior officials from the oppressive regime were eliminated,” Netanyahu said after a meeting with the Minister of Defense, the Chief of Staff, and the Director of Mossad. He added that he had issued instructions to continue the offensive.
According to Netanyahu, Israeli forces are “now striking at the heart of Tehran with increasing intensity,” a campaign he said will “increase further in the days to come.”
The Prime Minister also acknowledged the toll of the conflict on Israel, calling recent days “painful” and offering condolences to the families of victims in Tel Aviv and Beit Shemesh, while wishing a speedy recovery to those injured.
Netanyahu emphasized that the operation mobilizes “the full power of the Israel Defense Forces, like never before,” in order to “guarantee our existence and our future.” He also highlighted US support, noting “the assistance of my friend, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, and of the American military.”
“This combination of forces allows us to do what I have hoped to accomplish for 40 years: strike the terrorist regime right in the face,” Netanyahu concluded. “I promised it — and we will keep our word.”