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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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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By the time the children began singing in Yiddish on their own at a playground in Rio de Janeiro, Sonia Kramer realized something important had changed.

The songs were not part of a formal lesson. No teacher had prompted them. The children — classmates from a Jewish day school — simply started singing melodies they had learned in workshops organized by Viver com Yiddish (“Living for Yiddish”), the educational and cultural initiative Kramer founded a decade ago.

“For me, that was the moment the language felt truly alive,” she said. “Maybe later they will forget some of it. Maybe not. But at that moment, the songs became part of their memory.”

In Brazil, where Yiddish disappeared from Jewish day schools by the early 2000s (they used to teach the language once or twice a week), such moments are rare enough to feel historic.

Kramer, an emeritus professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and a daughter of an Auschwitz survivor from Ostrowiec, Poland, doesn’t describe what’s happening as a “revival.” The word feels too grand for Rio’s context. There are no Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods anymore, no immersion schools, no daily life conducted in the language.

Something else, though, is emerging: a cultural rediscovery led through music, literature and children’s education. Yiddish is circulating again — at shows, at parties, in university classrooms. It’s not yet a revival, but Yiddish is undeniably alive.

“We skipped a generation,” Kramer said. “The immigrants wanted their children to learn Portuguese. Yiddish reminded many people of sorrow and survival. But now we are beginning to value what was created in that language — the literature, the songs, the poetry, the theater, the cinema.”

A spark that grew into a program

The roots of Viver com Yiddish reach back to 2016, when Kramer attended the annual Yiddish immersion retreat, Yiddish Vokh.

“For the first time in my life, I was in a place where 150 people were speaking and singing in Yiddish — every day, all week,” she recalled. “Not as nostalgia. As a language that is alive.” One day at the event, an educator familiar with Kramer’s work in childhood education encouraged her to create Yiddish workshops for children in Brazil.

Back in Rio, Kramer approached several progressive Jewish schools with a proposal: Not traditional language instruction, but cultural workshops built around shmuesn (daily conversation), Yiddish songs, stories, games and children’s literature. One school, Escola Eliezer Max, agreed to join the project.

Today, the initiative encompasses university classes, research projects, a musical ensemble and workshops that reach 400 to 500 children annually.

Some of the educators came through those university courses. Alice Fucs began studying Yiddish through Kramer’s courses at PUC-Rio and has taught in the children’s workshops ever since.

“I started studying Yiddish in 2020 and soon realized I would never stop,” she said. “It connected me with my family’s past and opened up a new and amazing world. The workshops with the children are both a chance to pass on what I’ve already learned and a chance to learn more every month.”

Teaching has its own challenges. “Some of the children find it hard to grasp a language that isn’t tied to a country,” Fucs said. “We bring in contemporary Yiddish work to try to build that bridge.”

The workshops run once a month, preschool through fifth grade — far from enough to create fluency. But fluency isn’t the immediate goal.

“Our first objective was to create an emotional memory,” she said. “Positive feelings connected to Yiddish.”

 

Teaching a language that “disappeared”

A couple of years ago, one encounter crystallized the challenge: During a workshop, a 10-year-old boy told the teachers that learning Yiddish was pointless.

“My parents told me not to pay attention to this,” he said. “The language disappeared from the world.”

The comment deeply affected the workshop educators who decided to respond not with argument, but with evidence.

A month later, they returned carrying a large bag of Yiddish children’s books; many bilingual.

The children protested immediately.

“But we can’t read Yiddish,” they told her.

“You can read some of it,” Kramer replied.

Kramer showed them Yiddish interviews produced by the Yiddish Book Center and Yiddish music clips performed abroad, explaining that the language is alive in many countries. The children seemed impressed.

For Kramer, moments like this counter a familiar misconception: that Yiddish belongs only to the past, or that it was merely a “dialect.”

“People still say that it’s not really a language, then you have to explain: No, it has literature, poetry, theater, philosophy. It developed across centuries.”

 

Growing seeds through music and stories

The workshops at Eliezer Max begin with four-year-olds. Meeting only once a month, teaching grammar isn’t the goal. Instead, the project meets children where they already are: in songs and stories. Before launching the workshops, Kramer noticed that Yiddish songs had virtually vanished from Rio’s Jewish schools. “In my childhood, Yiddish music was everywhere,” she said. “And suddenly there was nothing.”

So the workshops focus on repertoire: songs, stories, emotional connection. Teachers explain who wrote the lyrics, introducing children to Yiddish poets and writers. “What is extraordinary in Yiddish culture,” Kramer said, “is how deeply literature lives inside the music.”

The approach resonates. The school coordinator now includes Yiddish songs at school events, alongside the Portuguese, Hebrew, and English repertoire. Music teachers prepare children to perform them; families hear the music at holiday celebrations; classroom teachers incorporate elements into broader cultural programming.

Sometimes the songs travel home. “Is there a greater fargenign (joy) than receiving a video of my 12-year-old granddaughter and 9-year-old grandson spontaneously singing Tumbalalaika before bed?” said Sonia Tucherman, grandmother of two children in the workshops. “It was a seed planted by my grandparents, and I see it bearing fruit in my grandchildren.”

Still, the program’s reach has clear limits. Yiddish isn’t part of the school’s curriculum — the workshops sit alongside it, not within it. They end at fifth grade, which means older children often drift from the songs they once knew. And one meeting a month, said Kramer, isn’t enough to anchor a language.

 

Building something to last

For all that it has built, Viver com Yiddish still rests on a fragile structure.

Most of the educators and musicians involved work multiple jobs. Much of the organizational labor — translating materials, adapting books, preparing lessons — falls to volunteers. Kramer herself works largely as a volunteer, but that arrangement isn’t sustainable for the younger teachers and musicians who built the project into what it is.

Viver com Yiddish’s current fundraising campaign aims to train a new generation of Yiddish educators and create paid positions to coordinate educational materials and programming.

“You cannot sustain this on passion alone,” Kramer said. “We have to train the next generation, and give the people already doing this work the conditions to continue.”

“We’re trying to bring back a language and a culture considered lost by our generation, and pass it to another generation,” she said. “That feels deeply Jewish to me: taking something from the past and carrying it into the future.”

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