A Seismic Election Hits June 24—At the Park Slope Food Coop

On June 4, Joe Holtz, the Park Slope Food Coop’s top executive, sent out a lengthy, urgent email to the organization’s approximately 17,000 members. In it, Holtz painted a picture of an institution in crisis—and a membership roiled by the idea of allowing virtual attendance to the co-op’s monthly general meetings, and, even more, a boycott of Israeli products. Those ostensibly separate issues have become increasingly enmeshed since October 7, 2023. “I’m asking all of you, Coop members, to vote in the upcoming Coop Board election,” he wrote. “This election could shape the future of our Coop.”

Holtz, the co-op’s general manager and one of its cofounders, proceeded to discourage co-op members from voting for Dan Kaminsky and Taylor Pate, two candidates for the co-op’s unpaid board of directors who are also organizers with PSFC Members for Palestine, a group of co-op members promoting a proposal for a boycott of Israeli goods. “The Coop is an amazing institution,” Holtz elaborated. “Where else do nearly 17,000 people share labor to run a store and keep prices low, support small farms, and make decisions together? But that only works if we have leaders who keep the Coop’s core work of running the store front and center. We need Board members who prioritize the health and function of the Coop itself, not those who use their position to advance outside political agendas.”

He went on to describe what he said was PSFC Members for Palestine’s plan to enact their agenda: “PSFC Members for Palestine, and the Board members they support, have a clear strategy,” he wrote. “First, to pass hybrid meetings; then, to lower the boycott threshold from 75 percent to just 51 percent, abandoning the long-standing tradition of broad boycott support that reflects Coop tradition.” Then, he warned somewhat darkly, “the final step in this plan is to bring the Coop into the BDS movement.”

“This isn’t about silencing anyone,” he added. But the email arrived in members’ inboxes at a critical time for the co-op: Just a few hours later, the ballot to vote on whether to reinstitute hybrid meetings, which the co-op had adopted during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, went out to the entire membership as well—and the results of that vote, as well as the vote for the new board of directors, will be revealed at the co-op’s next monthly meeting on June 24.

To PSFC Members for Palestine organizers like Tess Brown-Lavoie, who’s also a current member of the board of directors, Holtz’s email was an anti-democratic slap to the face, just one more obstruction in 18 months of obstructions. “There’s a kind of McCarthyist bent to it,” she said of Holtz’s counter-endorsements—and his dogged opposition to a boycott.

Holtz’s email might have been the first time many co-op members heard about hybrid meetings, or their ties to an Israeli goods boycott. But for a passionate and activated minority, it was a stark escalation in a heated, all-consuming battle for the co-op’s soul—one waged outside the grocery store with competing canvasses, via email and voicemail, in the pages of the co-op’s newspaper, on social media, during the co-op’s various meetings, and through its various leadership structures. Whose deeply held values would PSFC reflect: The pro-Palestinian co-op members looking to take a stand against genocide vis-a-vis their beloved grocery store, or the pro-Israel members, who view a potential boycott from that same store as tantamount to the vilest form of antisemitism?

This conflict has already attracted outside attention from New York’s elected officials that could set a precedent for silencing pro-Palestinian political organizing, with implications that go beyond the Union Street grocery store’s walls.