A community meeting at the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn erupted into controversy Tuesday night after a member declared “Jewish supremacism is a problem in this country” and compared Jews to Nazis, according to a recording obtained by the New York Post.

The remarks were made over Zoom by a coop member identified by the screen name Michael Huarachi, and drew applause from at least 50 people attending the meeting in person, multiple witnesses told the Post. “We can’t keep making the same mistakes between what we did with the Nazis and what we did with other hateful, racist groups,” Huarachi said on the recording.

Huarachi made the comments with his camera off, which is typically against coop regulations.

The monthly meeting had been called to discuss whether the socialist-leaning grocery store should lower the voting threshold required for a boycott of Israeli goods from 75% to 51% — a change that would make it easier for supporters of the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement to push through a ban on Israeli products. The debate centers on roughly 10 Israeli-sourced products carried by the store.

The antisemitic remarks sparked immediate condemnation from Jewish coop members in attendance. Longtime member Ramon Maislen told the Post he took to the floor to confront the hostile crowd directly. “I stood up onstage at the meeting, facing a hostile crowd, and said, ‘Applauding a speech that labels Jews as supremacists is not principled. It is wrong,'” Maislen told the Post. “You could hear a pin drop when I called everybody out. It was silent.”
“It was shocking,” Maislen added. “That’s not who we are.”

Another attendee, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Post they were troubled by the moderators’ muted response. “They just said, ‘Thank you for your comment. Please don’t clap.’ They didn’t step in and say, ‘Hey, this is out of balance,'” the attendee said.

Barbara Mazor, a coop member since 1989 who is currently running for the board in order to better fight antisemitism at the store, told the Post the boycott campaign has consumed monthly meetings and turned the institution into a political battlefield. “It’s just, let’s get our Jew hate on,” she said. “And we saw it unabashed last night.”

The incident is not the first of its kind at the coop. In 2024, Maislen filed a formal complaint with New York State’s Division of Human Rights citing harassment of Jewish members who opposed boycott efforts. According to the complaint, a Jewish member standing outside the store was confronted by a shopper who called her a “Nazi” and shouted “Sieg Heil” at her as he walked away. In a separate incident detailed in the complaint, a worker allegedly told a shopper she could not stand next to her because she smelled “of Palestinian blood.” The state investigation was later dropped without explanation, Maislen told the Post.

According to one member who asked not to be identified, tensions at the coop over the Israel debate have been building since 2012, fraying a community whose stated purpose is to work together in a “positive and productive” way.
The Park Slope Food Coop, founded in 1973, has roughly 16,000 members who work shifts in exchange for discounted groceries and a say in store policy.

Mazor told the Post that most shoppers are simply unaware of the internal politics roiling the institution. “There are roads to coexistence, and this BDS effort is very misguided and prolongs the conflict,” she said.

For Maislen, the episode reflects a broader breakdown. “I’m very pro-peace, but I don’t think that these people are pro-peace at all. I think they have an agenda and it’s pretty extreme,” he told the Post. “It was really disturbing seeing all the toxicity that I feel online, feeling it in person.”