Days after a Park Slope Food Coop member drew backlash for declaring at a community meeting that “Jewish supremacism is a problem in this country,” the grocer’s general manager has issued a statement denouncing the remarks.
Joe Szladek, the general manager of the grocer in Brooklyn, wrote in an email to members Monday morning that the statement, as well as the applause it had received from other meeting attendees, had “not only hurt our community but attributes harmful, false characteristics to an entire group of people and reflects widely recognized antisemitic tropes.”
Szladek added that the member who made the statement would be “formally investigated through the Coop’s dispute resolution process.”
He said, “The Park Slope Food Coop does not tolerate hatred or discrimination of any kind. Antisemitism is no exception.”
Szladek’s email came days after the CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, Mark Treyger, called on city and state human rights commissions to investigate the incident, describing the remarks as “textbook antisemitism.”
The row was not the first time that the member-owned and -operated grocer has faced accusations of antisemitism, with a group of Jewish members filing a state human rights complaint alleging antisemitic and anti-Israel harassment there in October 2024.
Following Treyger’s condemnation, the group Park Slope Food Coop Members for Palestine defended the remarks by the member, identified as Michael Huarachi by the New York Post, in an email sent to the coop community.
While the “Members for Palestine” group acknowledged that the term “Jewish supremacy” could “call to mind harmful, centuries old conspiracies portraying Jews as a coordinated group seeking power over politics, finance, or public life,” it argued that the term had a distinct meaning in discourse surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“In the context of Israel/Palestine, this term is used by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, human rights experts, and political leaders to describe the racist belief that Palestinian people are inferior or less than human, which motivates Israeli apartheid (including the 2018 Nation-State Law and the 2026 death penalty for Palestinians) and the Israeli genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza,” the email read.
Huarachi was not the only coop member who drew criticism from Szladek in his email.
Another member of the coop, who was not identified in the email, separately used the phrase “Arab supremacy” within “a statement referencing the events of October 7th, 2023 and the Muslim Brotherhood,” Szladek wrote.
“Again, assigning supremacist characteristics to entire groups, whether based on religion, ethnicity, or identity, contributes to division and can leave members feeling targeted or unwelcome,” Szladek continued. “Anti-Arab sentiment, like antisemitism, has no place at the Coop.”
For coop member Ramon Maislen, who condemned the comments allegedly made by Huarachi last week, Szladek’s email created a false equivalency between the two remarks.
According to Maislen, the member’s remarks referencing “Arab supremacy” were made during a discussion about a proposed amendment to adopt a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, policy against Israel.
“I think it would be fair if once in a while, you mentioned the rockets and terrorist attacks/massacres on Oct. 7 against Israeli civilians, and Arab supremacy in the Muslim Brotherhood and the other half of this conflict,” said the member, who declined through Maislen to be identified or interviewed.
Maislen said he believed Szladek’s email “completely minimizes what Jewish people are feeling at the coop.”
“I don’t think there’s much coded language around Arab supremacy that I’m aware of,” Maislen said. “So I think it’s very, very disappointing when you see an email go out after such a mask-off moment for the hatred within the anti-Zionist movement, and to have the general coordinators basically, completely, make it some sort of like equality between the two statements.”
On Thursday, Coop4Unity, an anti-BDS coalition at the coop that Maislen serves as an organizer of, issued a press release calling on Szladek to “issue an unequivocal condemnation of antisemitism,” arguing that his previous email created a “false moral equivalence that members say dilutes the gravity of what occurred.”
“In his statement, General Manager Szladek cited a separate member’s use of the phrase ‘Arab supremacy’ — offered in the context of referencing October 7th and the Muslim Brotherhood — and presented it as a parallel offense to the ‘Jewish supremacy’ remark that drew crowd applause,” the release read. “Coop4Unity argues this is a false equivalence that obscures rather than addresses what took place.”
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