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Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world
(JTA) – Israel Mizrahi joined dozens of fellow connoisseurs of rare Jewish books last December to watch the livestream of Genazym, the hottest auction house in the market. A bookdealer by trade, Mizrahi was also on the phone being paid to advise a wealthy client who had signed up to make bids.
But as the auction proceeded, Mizrahi’s advice had little use. His trigger-happy client didn’t seem to care about established valuations: He ended up paying about $50,000 for a book estimated at half that price. “He just pressed the button and kept on bidding until the bidding was over,” Mizrahi said. “There was no convincing him out of it. He spent nearly $600,000 that day and there was no sense to it.”
Behavior that confounds veterans of the rare Jewish book market has become routine at auctions organized by Genazym.
Mizrahi recalled the sale in 2021 of a Passover Haggadah printed in the 1920s in Vienna. With attractive illustrations of a prominent 19th-century rabbi named Moses Sofer and his family, the book makes for a nice addition to a collection. It also happens to be very common.
“I sell copies for $100, and I have probably sold 150 copies in my life,” said Mizrahi, whose shop in Brooklyn is a mecca for Jewish book lovers. “It sold for about $5,500 at Genazym’s auction. I currently have it on sale still for $100.”
At the highest end of sale prices, a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, commanded $620,000 at a Genazym auction last September, while a copy of Noam Elimelech, a classic rabbinic treatise, printed in 1788, fetched $1.4 million four months later — in both cases at least doubling or tripling what experts thought the items were worth based on past sales of the same texts.
“Genazym has come on like a freight train into the world of Jewish auctions. Some of the prices realized are far beyond what this market has seen before,” said David Wachtel, the former Judaica consultant for Sotheby’s auction house.
Since Genazym’s first auction in 2017, it has sold some 1,900 books, manuscripts and other collectible documents for about $26 million plus commission, roughly $12 million above total starting prices, according to an analysis by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of auction records on Genazym’s website. Genazym has increasingly outperformed the longest-standing Judaica auction firms in New York and Jerusalem.
A page from an illustrated Passover haggadah printed in Vienna in the 1920s. (Courtesy of Genazym)
It’s hard to tell exactly what’s driving the boom because the identity of Genazym’s customers is confidential and few flaunt their collections widely. One of the auction house’s owners, in a rare public comment, ventured that Jewish buyers are craving a connection with their heritage. What’s clear is that at a time when traditional libraries are cutting back on buying Jewish texts, Genazym is tapping into an emerging luxury market among Orthodox Jews — and fueling the rise of religious texts as both a status symbol and investment vehicle in some communities.
“I know the sellers, the customers and everybody involved and there is a new wealthy class of Orthodox Jews that have a limited range of things they can splurge on,” Mizrahi said. “They don’t go to Vegas, they don’t do crazy vacations. They keep kosher. So this is a way that they can splurge and show off.”
Rabbi Pini Dunner, who collects rare Jewish books, said investing in Judaica is likely attractive for some in the Hasidic community, whose religious observance is stricter than that of congregants at his Modern Orthodox synagogue in the Los Angeles area.
“There are people I know here in Beverly Hills who’ve got car collections worth tens of millions of dollars,” Dunner said. “In the Hasidic world that has no currency, just as the wow factor of a Picasso has no currency. An original manuscript or first-edition of the Noam Elimelech has a real wow factor, particularly if you can tell people the book sold for more than a million dollars at a Genazym auction.”
The impression that the Hasidic world has grown wealthier over the last decade or two is widespread and based, at least in part, on the proliferation of luxury products and services tailored for the community in places like Lakewood, New Jersey, and Kiryas Joel, New York. Weddings have become increasingly expensive and elaborate, fine dining options are common, and high-end kosher wine and liquor are more readily available.
“It wasn’t that long ago that sit-down dining was looked down upon or not even available. Now there are a plethora of options,” said Chaim Saiman, a law professor at Villanova University who studies the intersection of commerce and Jewish law. “It’s no secret that $200 bottles of Scotch appear at kiddush clubs all the time. $50 used to be a big deal, then $100 was a big deal, now we are at $200.”
Where the new wealth is coming from is not totally clear. Limited survey and U.S. Census data suggests that Orthodox Jews feel crunched by costs associated with practicing religion and that there are large pockets of poverty among them, particularly in Hasidic communities, according to Mark Trencher, the founder of Nishma Research, a nonprofit dedicated to studying the Orthodox Jewish community. The prevalence of large families also means that generational wealth can be harder to accrue for Orthodox Jews.
But there have always been high earners whose philanthropy has buttressed their communities, Trencher noted. “There are a lot of people in that community that are very successful in their businesses and they have large amounts of wealth,” he said. “Those people generally are huge donors to charities. From a financial perspective, those communities are probably doing much better than you would expect them to.”
Many of those high earners make their money through entrepreneurship rather than professional success in the white-collar world. Many nursing home chains — an industry valued at an estimated $171 billion and where growth is expected — have Orthodox owners. Amazon has also created new opportunities for Orthodox businessmen. Orthodox landlords, meanwhile, have benefited from skyrocketing real estate prices in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
A page from a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, which fetched $620,000 at a Genazym auction. (Courtesy of Genazym).
Recent reporting in The New York Times about the Hasidic education system has provided a window into another stream of revenue for private businesses in the community. Entrepreneurs in the community have responded to the increased availability of government funding for special education in New York in recent years by establishing companies to service Hasidic schools, with the government footing the bill. In one example highlighted by the Times, a married Hasidic couple opened such a business in 2014 when they were 21 and 19 years old; in 2022, their company received more than $38 million in government funding.
The owners of another set of companies providing services to Hasidic schools appear to have used their windfall to purchase rare books through Genazym. The owners were indicted in January for allegedly billing the government for more than $1 million in childcare services that they never provided and otherwise defrauding the government out of more than $2.8 million.
Prosecutors are seeking to have the alleged fraudsters forfeit seven books and other documents as listed in a federal indictment. They include manuscripts with a rabbinic signature and rare books of blessing and Jewish law, all of which match items listed on Genazym auctions, where they sold for a total of about $274,000.
Buying Jewish texts at auction can seem like a savvy investment for buyers seeking to safeguard or grow their wealth. Before Genazym launched, a typical Genazym buyer might have invested in U.S. Treasury bills or the stock market, according to Wachtel, the former Sotheby’s consultant.
“I think Genazym has been able to convince people that this is a good vehicle for establishing and growing wealth,” he said. “That also dovetails with your ability to, let’s face it, show off. Somebody comes to your house, you can show them a first-edition Shulchan Aruch. But you’re not going to say, hey, come look at my T-bills.”
The auction house’s tactics appear tailor-made for this growing market. Its motto is “Own your heritage,” and it’s printed on the catalogs the company distributes through popular Orthodox magazines like Ami or Mishpacha or podcasts, places where people with no prior interest in books might encounter the hype. The catalogs also appear in synagogues in heavily Hasidic areas like Brooklyn or Lakewood, but without the prices printed on them so as not to violate a Jewish prohibition against discussing financial matters on Shabbat.
The descriptions in the catalogs emphasize any links that exist between the items for sale and notable rabbis from history, especially figures who established rabbinic dynasties that continue to exist today and who are revered by yeshiva-educated Orthodox Jews. The link might be a signature of a rabbi in a ledger from an old fundraising tour that took place 200 years ago. Or it might be that an important rabbi owned the book in question or even prayed out of it. Like a pair of pants of a prominent Israeli rabbi that drew widespread attention when they briefly went up for auction last month, these texts are seen by some as conferring holiness onto those who possess them. By virtue of their pedigree, these artifacts might even be seen as a segula, or Jewish protective charm.
In its promotional materials and live auctions, Genazym also uses more colloquial and hyperbolic language to describe its items than traditional auction houses, which tend to stick to the kind of terminology used by academic scholars.
“Genazym found a formula to make books and manuscripts really exciting for the layperson, especially in the Orthodox community,” said Yoel Finkelman, a former curator of the Judaica Collection at the National Library of Israel. “They are not using the vocabulary of experts, they’re using plain ordinary language, like ‘very old’ or ‘very rare.’ No one at Sotheby’s would ever refer even to a thousand-year-old book that way.”
Genazym’s unique approach extends to the delivery of items to buyers. A traditional buyer in the rare Jewish book market, like Michelle Margolis, Columbia University’s Jewish studies librarian, might only care that the book they bought is safely delivered. But with Genazym, the books come wrapped in a proper clamshell and velvet bag. “I rolled my eyes when my delivery arrived, but at the same time that’s a lot of investment,” Margolis said, adding that many other auction houses have been cutting costs, for example, by doing away with their customary printed catalogs.
Jacob Djmal, who lives in Brooklyn, has dabbled in Judaica collecting for many years, an interest he picked up from his grandfather. He remembers suddenly seeing Genazym’s advertising everywhere. “They started reaching out to you in every way possible, finding a demographic that wasn’t aware before. Every Genazym auction I have people texting me — ‘Did you hear about this? Did you hear about that?’ — as if something is happening that had never happened before.”
Sometimes, that is true. A breakout moment came during the December auction, when Genazym cleared $4.4 million in sales, about $2.6 million above total starting prices.
“If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on Earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for at least twice [the estimated amount],” a major British book collector living in France said on his anonymous Twitter account, which has around 110,000 followers, in December.
If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for *at least* twice estimate…. 1/https://t.co/iAC4sQudIz pic.twitter.com/eeunjqWzAs
— Incunabula (@incunabula) December 13, 2022
It remains to be seen whether Genazym can challenge Sotheby’s Judaica division as the destination for sellers with the rarest and most valuable books. Last year, a medieval prayer book sold for $8.3 million at Sotheby’s and this year, the New York auction house is accepting bids for the oldest known copy of the Hebrew Bible, which is expected to fetch as much as $50 million.
But Djmal considers especially remarkable about Genazym is not just the high prices but also the way in which rare books have caught on among Orthodox youth as something cool. “My son and his friends in yeshiva are talking about these items,” Djmal said. “These books represent rabbis they have heard about from a young age.”
The team behind Genazym’s success is led by three brothers from the Stefansky family who live in Jerusalem and New York. Before starting an auction house they worked for many years as private dealers in the rare book market. Their names, Chaim, Moshe and Bezalel, rarely appear anywhere and they almost never grant interviews. Chaim Stefansky made an exception for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and requested that this article not put him in the spotlight nor portray Genazym’s success as a product of his business acumen.
Stefansky said Genazym has tapped into a universal and deep-seated desire of people to strengthen their identities by connecting with the past. The Jewish community, he said, has been poorly served by an emphasis on historical and even current persecution.
“Always, we are victimized and we cry,” Stefansky said. “What we have in common maybe is that your grandmother and my grandmother were sharing the same bed in Auschwitz. Give me something positive of my past to be proud of. Your heritage has not only sorrow but also a happy, rich, and huge intellectual tradition. So Genazym comes and tells people about their heritage. It’s yours. It belongs to you.”
He said the same thing can be done with any ethnic or religious group.
“If you go to the Irish community and press the right buttons in terms of what you know that every Irish person is extremely proud of, I think you’ll be very successful,” Stefansky said.
He rejected the impression that Genazym’s buyers come primarily from the ranks of the nouveau riche in the Hasidic world.
“It’s coming from all sections,” Stefansky said. “People will say that there’s a lot of fresh money in the market. But we also have very good old money. We have institutions. And, also, the regular man. Mostly, the regular man, who never knew he could have access to any of this.”
One of the only customers who agreed to be identified and interviewed for this article is Rick Probstein, who says he’s spent more than $100,000 at the company’s auctions. He can’t remember when he started seeing Genazym catalogs but he had never collected Judaica before, which is perhaps surprising given that he’s an Orthodox Jew who’s been working in the collectibles business since he was a child trading baseball cards.
Today, at 53, Probstein is one of the largest sellers of sports collectibles in the world, operating through a dedicated account on eBay. “I run a humongous business — I am doing something like $160 million a year,” he said of his sales volume.
Probstein, who lives in Passaic, New Jersey, had long felt a pang of guilt about the lack of Jewish content in his collection. “I collect things but what do I have of my own heritage?” he recalled thinking to himself. “So when I started getting the catalogs, I said, ‘I gotta be a good Jew.’ I started bidding on things and I got really into it.”
Once Probstein got started, the Stefansky brothers began checking in on him, providing concierge service and cultivating him as a client.
“This is a boutique run by a Jewish family with a personal touch,” Probstein said “They call me on the phone, saying, ‘Rick, did you get the catalog? What did you think? Here are some items that you could really like.’”
Bidding on Genayzm items is not purely sentimental for Probstein. “I’m putting real money into it because I think that from an investment standpoint, it has a lot of upside,” he said.
Still, the items he buys tend to have personal significance.
“I am partial to items relating to the Chofetz Chaim,” Probstein said, referring to the rabbi and Jewish scholar Yisrael Meir Kagan, who died in 1933. Probstein’s oldest son is named Yisrael Meir in his honor. The Chofetz Chaim also appeals to Probstein because of his writings about lashon hara, the prohibition in Jewish law against speaking evil of people. “I think that speech is important and he’s sort of the embodiment of that,” Probstein said.
Genazym has sold six letters and a handwritten blessing signed or written by the Chofetz Chaim at prices ranging from about $16,000 to $68,000.
Ever since Probstein started collecting Judaica, these items have served as a draw for family and friends visiting his home.
“People in my community that come over for kiddush [refreshments after Shabbat service] know that I have this stuff and they always want to see it,” Probstein said. “Nobody ever looks at my sports memorabilia collection because it’s in my office but my Judaica stuff is in my house. They look at the letters and talk about the historical context. People love it.”
The revelation that so many Jews appear fascinated with their own history and want to engage with scholarly tradition comes at a time when many Jewish libraries have been struggling.
The library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, which has the most comprehensive and significant collection of Jewish books outside of Israel, has seen its footprint downsized amid budget cuts at the Conservative movement seminary. Also under financial pressure, American Jewish University was forced to sell its Bel Air campus in Los Angeles, which housed a library. Hebrew Union College, meanwhile, opted to end its Reform rabbinical training program in Cincinnati and even though the campus library has survived the cuts, financial uncertainty remains.
Genazym’s populist approach might hold lessons for Jewish institutions and university libraries with significant Judaica collections that hope to engage the public around books.
“The lesson is to lay off the snobbery a little bit,” said Finkelman, the former Judaica curator at the National Library of Israel, which is slated to reopen in a new and more accessible space later this year. “The goal of public institutions is to enable preservation but also to enable public access and public education. There are great stories in books and archives.”
Finkleman said he has encountered sneering reactions to the way Genazym promotes books, and they are similar to the response in the United States when the pop star Lizzo played a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison on stage at the Library of Congress.
“There are echoes of the same thing here,” he said. “Get out of the snobby ivory tower and realize you are preserving history for people.”
—
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In Israel, an Arab-Jewish youth orchestra builds a new ‘East-West’ sound together
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — A raucous crowd of football fans filled the narrow strip of grass between Tel Aviv’s music center and Bloomfield Stadium, home to the Maccabi and Hapoel Tel Aviv soccer teams. Threading their way through them toward the concert hall was an incongruous procession of young musicians in eveningwear, lugging cases of every shape and size for contrabasses, violins, ouds, cellos and darbukas.
Inside the concert hall, a small audience of friends, siblings, parents and music lovers let out a swell of whoops and claps more in keeping with a soccer game than the polite demeanor usually reserved for orchestras.
The concert was the public culmination of a youth project composed of Jewish and Arab performers run by the Jerusalem Orchestra East & West, known as TJO, the Israeli orchestra led by conductor Tom Cohen that blends Western orchestral music with Middle Eastern, North African and Andalusian traditions. TJO has shared the stage with major Israeli artists including Matti Caspi, Danny Sanderson and Ehud Banai, and is due to perform at the Concordia Summit in New York in September.
The program brings youth orchestras from across the country under TJO’s guidance, training young musicians to carry forward the musical language Cohen has spent years developing. He describes that language as part of an evolving “Israeli sound,” made up of “everything that began with our grandparents in the various diasporas around the world and arrived with them here in waves of immigration.”
It grew out of his own journey from Western classical music into the music of the Maghreb and the Middle East, and “brings together elements from East and West without losing the identity and distinctiveness of either one,” he said.
“We’re creating something new that is greater than the sum of its parts,” Cohen said. Still, he was careful to add that the sound was not his orchestra’s invention, but part of “an evolution, not a revolution that erases what came before it.”
Last week’s concert brought together 80 musicians, ages 9 to 20, from half a dozen youth orchestras around the country, with some ensembles numbering in the dozens and others only a handful. Cohen said the project is meant to train a next generation of musicians who could one day join TJO, named the country’s leading orchestra by the Culture Ministry in 2022, while also sending them out as “ambassadors of its language” in their own work.
“Throughout the process, we placed special emphasis on artistic excellence, direct professional encounters and a connection to the adult orchestra as a mentoring body that sets the path,” he said of the youth project.
Ensemble Sdot, a nine-member group from the Sdot Negev Regional Council in southern Israel whose players mostly wore kippot, took the stage first to perform a reworked song by the late Israeli singer-songwriter Meir Banai. In the audience, waiting for his own performance, Youssef Sarhan, a 9-year-old violinist from Majd al-Krum, an Arab town in northern Israel, bobbed his head along from his seat. He had begun studying a year and a half earlier with Fadel Maana, a veteran violinist in the Arabic tradition from the same town and one of TJO’s senior musicians, who later brought him into the youth orchestra.
Addressing the young musicians from the stage, Cohen said he usually resists the familiar exercise of identifying who came from which community.
“This nonsense of saying who’s from where, it’s so unnecessary,” he said. But the mix was part of what made the music work, he told them, with Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze youth “backstage trading information about Umm Kulthum,” the revered Egyptian singer; maqams, the melodic modes used in Arabic and other Middle Eastern music; and other musical references.
“Even if you’ve never spoken to each other in your lives, when two children sit together on stage, catch each other’s eyes while they’re playing and creating something together, the connection that’s forged there is as deep as family,” Cohen told them.
Cohen, who lives with his family in Brussels, said the years of war had changed his relationship with his work, which had always been his greatest source of joy.
“It’s a feeling I can’t describe, a feeling of being outside of time,” he said by telephone after the concert. “But the last three years took that away from me.”
As an Israeli conductor who plays Arabic music, Cohen said, his international career went quiet amid growing hostility toward Israel abroad, while in Israel it became harder to enjoy performing when, as he put it, “half an hour away, the world is falling apart.”
The youth project offered a way back. Cohen said he found comfort in the connection between musicians “who come from completely different religions, backgrounds and places,” and came to see the orchestra as “a symbol of real hope, not just a professional artistic institution.”
Malak Aboufdaly, a teenage bassoon player from Acre, said that after years of war, she felt a responsibility to give the audience a measure of relief.
“It’s my job to make you feel how I play. Sad or happy,” she said. “But I think it’s really important that we can make people happy after two or three years of war.”
Outside the concert hall, 17-year-old Shoval Hayak, wearing a black evening gown, was being scolded to go back inside. She was excitable and effusive, not long removed from being a regular high school student in Moshav Hosen, near Israel’s northern border. After Oct. 7, her family was evacuated to Tel Aviv, where she threw herself into singing. She joined the youth orchestra framework and later performed with the Israeli hip-hop and funk band Hadag Nahash.
At the concert, she was preparing to sing “Hallelujah” with Nihaya Safadi, a singer and viola player also from Acre, in an arrangement Cohen wrote during the orchestra’s first summer seminar.
“I didn’t believe I could ever be a singer,” she said.
Some of her peers, she said, tried to escape the reality of war and displacement through recreational drugs. Hayak found her escape in music.
“I gave my heart and soul to this project. I got sucked into it more and more,” she said. “I truly believe that if I give my whole heart, all the small details that make everything shine come to the surface. Each time I go on, there are tiny improvements that I’m not even aware of at the time.”
She spoke quickly and warmly about the people around her: her mother, who she called “my support system”; Cohen, who she said had become like a father to her; and her boyfriend Yair, who could not attend because he was observing the Omer, the traditional mourning period between Passover and Shavuot when many observant Jews avoid live music. “Bless his soul, I adore him,” she said.
The same affection extended to the other young musicians she performed with. “They’re the best family I could ever ask for,” she said.
Cohen said watching young musicians like Hayak “become professional and be captivated by the magic of music” is part of what kept him invested in the project, which he took on as a volunteer effort. The next step, he said, is to give the program a larger stage and bring in more students.
The adult orchestra returned to the same East-West language last week in a concert about mixed identity at the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv, with additional performances scheduled elsewhere. The program centered on “matrouz,” Arabic for “interweaving,” a Judeo-Arabic tradition of placing Hebrew lyrics over Arabic melodies billed by the orchestra as the “original Jewish mash-up.”
Its pre-recorded guests included Dana International, the Israeli pop star who became the first transgender singer to win Eurovision in 1998, and Yousef Sweid, the Arab Israeli actor – performers who mirror the orchestra’s interest in what it calls “both/and” identities that can be Arab and Jewish, left-wing and right-wing, religious and secular.
The youth evening ended with all the young musicians together playing “Fatouma,” a Lebanese piece arranged and led by Cohen, who bounced on the balls of his feet, twirled on stage and flashed theatrical expressions at the players as he conducted.
“I was looking for a way back to my happiness and I found it in this world of children,” he said. “When I’m with them and making music, I go back to real, deep joy. Like a child.”
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Brooklyn grocer’s boycott of Israeli products spurs celebration and talk of lawsuits
The move by a members-only New York City grocery to ban products from Israel achieved a long-sought goal for a boycott movement, while leaving open questions about what happens next — including possible lawsuits.
Members of the Park Slope Food Coop voted Tuesday night to boycott Israeli products, with 67% of 6,772 votes cast in favor of the boycott and 31% against, following a related vote to lower the threshold for approving boycotts from 75% to 50% plus one vote. The measure specifies that the ban will continue “until Israel complies with international law, including by ceasing unlawful discriminatory practices, in its treatment of Palestinians.”
The co-op had debated a boycott for more than a decade, aligned with a global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Some longtime members and staff objected, voicing concerns about dividing a usually cohesive community where members must volunteer their labor and work in teams in order to shop. Tensions flared in the run-up to Tuesday’s vote, drawing in condemnations from a local rabbi and congressman.
But the only words on the measure itself Tuesday night came in the presentation from its sponsors, which cited “Israeli occupation and apartheid” and “genocide in Gaza” — followed by a successful motion to preempt discussion before the vote.
“Tonight’s win is proof that cooperative movements are powerful models for exercising solidarity and participatory democracy,” said PSFC for Palestine member Taylor Pate, who is running for the coop board. “I am so proud to be a member of the world’s largest member-labor-required food coop that has decisively voted no to supporting a country that has carried out genocide, occupation, and apartheid in Palestine.”
The campaign’s work is not finished. All Park Slope Food Coop boycotts — which historically included South Africa and Chile — must come up for an annual renewal vote.
Alyce Barr, a veteran Jewish coop member who introduced the ban proposal Tuesday night, says future efforts will involve “work with the members of our coop to make sure that our coop is everything we want it to be — welcoming, available to people across economic levels and ethnicities” as well as working “to get more people involved in the democratic effort.”
But some attorneys monitoring the vote and its aftermath suggest talk of democracy does not change an outcome they consider discriminatory.
Kenneth Marcus, CEO of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law — which helped negotiate a settlement in 2022 that prevented Ben & Jerry’s from refusing to sell its ice cream in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — said in a statement to the Forward the group “is actively evaluating all available legal claims arising from the discriminatory nature of this boycott and the procedural irregularities that allowed it to pass.”
Coop4Unity, a group of members who opposed the boycott, said in an email that they had already retained legal counsel and begun to develop a litigation strategy.
New York City and state Human Rights Law prohibit boycotts that discriminate against someone because of a protected class, such as race or national origin. Groups including the Lawfare Project have argued that provision makes it illegal to engage in boycotts of Israeli goods, which they view as a form of discrimination based on national origin.
Craig Gurian, executive director of the Anti-Discrimination Center — which helped draft parts of New York City’s human rights law — said he believes a suit could be brought that alleges the coop is unwilling to do business with vendors based on their national origin or religion.
“If anybody on the pro-boycott side is thinking, ‘Oh, this is a slam dunk, there’s no risk of liability here,’ they’re being imprudent,” Gurian told the Forward.
But legal advocacy groups including the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal have argued boycotts are protected under the First Amendment because they target the policies of the Israeli government, not Jews or Israelis because of their religion or nationality.
A food coop in Olympia, Washington, successfully fought off a lawsuit after it approved an Israeli products ban in 2010.
Meanwhile, U.S. food companies that import products from Israel are waiting to hear what happens next.
One is Seed + Mill, a Manhattan-based sesame and halva brand. Australian co-founder Rachel Simons said she hasn’t heard from the coop, but she assumed after yesterday’s vote that the company’s products would no longer be stocked.
The Park Slope Food Coop has been one of the company’s largest, most high-profile retail outlets, Simons said, accounting for thousands of dollars in sales. She said that the company works with a tahini factory in Israel owned by Arab Israelis, and that her team in New York employs people of many different nationalities and religions.
“I feel a tremendous responsibility to humanize the entire business, the supply chain, the people who are being hurt and harmed by this decision,” Simons told the Forward. “The people who voted against our products, I don’t know how much they really know about who they’re hurting.”
Park Slope Food Coop for Palestine responded with a statement: “Our Coop’s boycott policy is a response to genocide and apartheid, consistent with our values and past boycotts including apartheid South Africa.”
Fresh Traction
The Park Slope Food Coop ban comes as the larger BDS movement is finding fresh traction following the Gaza War.
Bestselling Irish author Sally Rooney, who long refused to work with Israeli publishing houses in compliance with the boycott, recently announced plans to publish her latest novel in Hebrew through an Israeli publisher that now complies with specific tenets of BDS by accepting the movement’s central three demands — “an end to Israel’s occupation of territories captured in 1967, full civil equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the implementation of the Palestinian right of return” — and not doing business in West Bank settlements or receiving money from the Israeli state.
In the U.S., opposition to Israel boycotts attracted bipartisan consensus even relatively recently. In 2019, Congress passed a resolution condemning the boycott, divest and sanction movement by an overwhelming margin of 398-17, and nearly two dozen states have their own restrictions.
But that consensus is breaking down as the conflict in Gaza and war with Iran has brought the movement to boycott Israel to the fore, such as when BDS advocates last October claimed victory for the closure of a popular Israeli restaurant chain in Washington, D.C.
BDS activists are also renewing efforts to repeal legislation or executive orders aimed at limiting boycotts against Israel. Illinois was one of the first states to pass legislation banning the state’s public pension funds from investing in foreign companies that boycott Israel in 2010. The law passed unanimously.
Now, State Rep. Abdelnasser Rashid has introduced legislation to repeal the law. He has found support from Daniel Biss, the Jewish mayor of Evanston, Ill., who is now a Democratic nominee running for Congress.
Biss voted for the anti-BDS law when he was a state senator in 2015, but now he says he’s changed his mind.
“We should all be able to agree that our government must not be wielded to stop people from using their economic agency to advocate for their values,” Biss wrote in a Substack post.
Similar efforts to repeal laws or executive orders that bar state transactions with companies that boycott Israel are ongoing in Maryland, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
“People in other states have reached out to us,” Rebekah Levin, a Jewish Voice for Peace member in Illinois, told the anti-Zionist news site Mondoweiss. “They want to know what we did and how we did it. If we overturn this it would be a boost to other states. It’s a powerful message. This is why pro-Israel groups are afraid of this passing. It’s about more than just Illinois.”
Supporters of the Park Slope Food Coop boycott also see their effort as the beginning of a broader fight.
“The Park Slope Food Coop has inspired and facilitated the growth of co-ops in New York City and around the world, and organizers hope that tonight’s victory will resonate in a similar way,” Park Slope Food Coop Members for Palestine said in a statement.
Sarah Diaz contributed research.
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Mamdani has made ample efforts for Jews. How come no one is telling that story?
There is a familiar feeling I get these days when I hear about the supposedly unraveling relationship between New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the city’s Jews. It is the same feeling I remember from the early days of the campus encampments protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, when a certain media narrative of out-of-control friction and my own lived experience felt as though they were taking place on different planets.
I remember reading alarming reports about campuses becoming hotbeds of violent division in late 2023. Jewish students, some pundits said, were allegedly under siege at every moment. Then I went to a nearby campus myself. What I saw was not a utopia. It was not an environment free of tension, politics, anger, confusion or pain. But nor was it a match for the apocalyptic portrait being painted over and over again in public discourse.
I saw young people trying, awkwardly and imperfectly, to navigate one of the hardest issues imaginable. I saw some Jewish students wearing watermelon kippahs, and others reciting Birkat Hamazon after a meal. I saw kaffiyehs and Free Palestine posters. I saw disagreement and activism, but also, on all sides, earnest engagement.
Multiple realities can exist simultaneously. I did not visit every campus in the United States, andI know there were genuinely frightening incidents in some places. But the disconnect between what I was repeatedly told I should be seeing and what I actually witnessed left me asking a question I still cannot shake: What does our community lose by constantly buying into a narrative of inevitable Jewish peril and division?
I find myself asking the same question now, as some New York City Jews accuse Mamdani of abandoning our community — as hundreds did during a Tuesday protest — and the New York media obsessively problematizes the relationship between Gracie Mansion and New York’s Jewish community.
Last week, I attended Mamdani’s Shavuot gathering honoring Ruth Messinger, an event that sparked yet another media furor over Mamdani’s relationship with his Jewish constituents, after some leaders boycotted the gathering. What much coverage missed: the event felt exactly like every other official Jewish gathering I have ever attended. There were rabbis, nonprofit leaders, Israeli and American Jewish activists, funders, organizers, old friends, awkward networking moments, mediocre wine, decent bagels and small talk.
And there was, above all, the deep sense of a genuine relationship. When the mayor roared “chag sameach!” into the room, smiling broadly, it did not feel performative to many of us because many of us actually know him. Personally. Through him showing up in Jewish spaces across New York over these past few years.
I have run into Mamdani on Yom Kippur. At Oct. 7 vigils. At Passover events. And looking around that room, it seemed many others shared that experience.
Why is our experience treated as somehow less significant when it comes to assessing how Mamdani stands with the Jewish community?
Why are we hearing so much more about the Jews who object to Mamdani’s policies than the many of us who embrace them? Last week’s gathering included progressive Jews, anti-occupation Jews, Israeli expats, liberal rabbis, artists, nonprofit workers, old-school establishment figures and more. Are our reasons for joyfully engaging with Mamdani so much less interesting than the boycotters’ reasons for questioning him?
Again, I am not suggesting antisemitism is fictional. It is real. It is rising. I have experienced it both online and offline.
Nor am I arguing that all criticism of Mamdani is inherently cynical or bad-faith. Politicians should be scrutinized.
But there is a meaningful difference between scrutiny and popularizing an incomplete narrative. And increasingly, it feels as though parts of our media ecosystem have become invested in telling a story about Jews and public life that leaves very little room for complexity, coexistence, contradiction or ordinary human interaction.
A story in which Jews are perpetually under threat from everyone around them. A story in which Muslim politicians and Jewish communities are naturally destined for conflict. A story in which any evidence to the contrary must be minimized, reframed or treated as suspicious.
It’s true that at least one poll shows that a majority of New York City Jews remain skeptical about Mamdani. But it’s also true that those views have in part been shaped by breathless coverage that neglects to engage with how much Mamdani’s viewpoint actually reflects that of many American Jews. After all, almost 40% of American Jews believe Israel committed a genocide in Gaza. Is a mayor who has opened the door to those viewpoints — when those of us who hold them have often been excluded from official spaces — neglecting the Jewish community, or just engaging with it in a different way?
I left Gracie Mansion last week wondering whether some people have become so attached to the performance of Jewish communal crisis that moments of genuine civic warmth now feel almost threatening to the narrative itself. I wondered that again, reading about Tuesday’s protest. Mamdani has spent years intentionally building relationships inside Jewish New York; I saw them on display last week, in a way that felt profound and meaningful.
Actual coexistence isn’t just possible; it’s happening. Why not tell that story, rather than endlessly forecast an inevitable fracture?
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