A well-known cooperative grocery store in Brooklyn voted to reject a boycott of Israeli goods.

At a special meeting Tuesday night, members of the Park Slope Food Coop rejected by a vote of 1,005 to 653 a proposal to hold a mail ballot referendum for all members on whether to stop selling Israeli goods.

The meeting was held at an area high school to accommodate the expected crowd, which ended up exceeding in size any previous co-op meeting, The New York Times reported.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

The co-op, founded in 1973, is well known in New York City as a bastion of socially conscious consumerism. Each member is required to do a work shift of 2 hours and 45 minutes every four weeks in order to shop at the coop, which offers a wide selection of organic and other goods at significant discounts.

Supporters and opponents of a boycott had campaigned aggressively in the run-up to the vote at the co-op, which has a large number of Jewish members.

The call to boycott Israeli goods had been percolating for several years, the subject of vigorous debate in the co-op’s newsletter.

The issue garnered substantial media attention. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other elected officials strongly criticized the boycott proposal.

“I think it has nothing to do with the food,” Bloomberg said Monday when asked about the boycott at a news conference. “The issue is there are people who want Israel to be torn apart and everybody to be massacred, and America is not going to let that happen.”

The co-op’s general manager and one of its founders, Joe Holtz, urged members to reject the boycott call, calling it “divisive.”

The co-op reportedly sells only a handful of Israeli-made products.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

$90 → $180 $180 → $360

$360 → $720

Other amount