“Take a carrot,” instructs the entrance worker as you swipe your membership card at the Park Slope Food Coop. As a loyal member of the Coop for 20 years, I would dutifully take a laminated orange card depicting a carrot, hang it on my shopping cart and head into the store to shop.

The carrot card is one of the many quirky policies and rituals that makes the Brooklyn-based Coop unique. With 17,000 members, the Coop is the largest cooperative grocery store in the country that requires members to work in the store in order to shop. And now, because of a recent vote to boycott products made in Israel, it is perhaps the most controversial.

As any member will tell you, the Coop’s success lies mainly in its produce aisle, which features a selection of gorgeous fresh fruits and vegetables, most organic, most locally sourced, at reasonable prices.

To become a member, you need to pay a one-time $25 joining fee, a $100 refundable equity investment and work in the Coop for approximately three hours every few weeks. For the past few years, I have been a check-out worker, scanning UPC codes, weighing veggies and tallying the bill. 

Although I, like most Coop members, grumbled about doing my shift, it was worth it. And not just because the tomatoes were like sugar and the organic avocados were cheap. A guiding principle of the Coop is “to make the Coop welcoming and accessible to all and to respect the opinions, needs and concerns of every member.” And I believed that.

The Coop felt like a small town where people wanted to help one another. Forgot your debit card? A fellow shopper-member will immediately volunteer to pay for your groceries. Not sure how to prepare that weird-looking mushroom? Ask the woman who has one in her cart. Shopping at the Coop made me feel like I was part of a community working together to do the right thing.

The Coop’s idealistic culture also makes it the object of much eye-rolling in my neighborhood and satire in the media, especially when real world problems clash with the Coop’s progressive ideals. But debates over unionization, recycling and the pension fund were just background noise to me.

There was, however, one issue I could not ignore: the growing drumbeat of members pressuring the Coop to adopt the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) platform. Flare-ups of anti-Israel agitation erupted every few years, but they were always squelched, much to my relief.

Everything changed after October 7, 2023. Newly emboldened and riding the wave of intense antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment, a group called the PSFC Members for Palestine implemented a campaign to sway opinion within the Coop. They took over the Coop’s key committees, allowing them to elevate and pursue their agenda through the Coop’s complicated decision-making processes.

My shopping trips became stressful affairs. Instead of feeling community, I felt unwelcome and uneasy. People wearing keffiyehs and shirts with anti-Israel slogans became commonplace. I felt the need to broadcast which side I was on, since there were now “sides” at the Coop. I began to wear a shirt emblazoned with a huge Star of David whenever I shopped or did my check-out shift. Some people called me brave and whispered that they liked my shirt. Others gave me dirty looks.

I joined Coop for Unity, a group of members formed in response to the boycott threat. We pleaded for respect for all members, pointing out that the boycott group was tearing the Coop apart. We wore “Save Our Coop” buttons picturing a little heart shaped out of two intersecting carrots. A core group organized and strategized. Our WhatsApp chat exploded as our concerns mounted.

In the last few months, the situation worsened. At a recent general membership meeting, someone spoke of Jewish supremacy and was cheered. BDS supporters stood outside the Coop daily and yelled “you support genocide” at those of us handing out flyers against the boycott  

The issue finally came to a head at the membership meeting on May 26, where the vote to boycott Israeli products was on the agenda. The three-hour Zoom meeting was painful. The anti-Israel group presented its lies and distortions about Israel unchallenged because no counterproposals were permitted. All we could do was furiously text one another in our WhatsApp chat. About 8,000 people registered for the meeting, but there were significant technical glitches, and hundreds of people dropped off or perhaps were unable to vote. When the votes were finally tallied, it wasn’t even close: 4,551 in favor of the boycott, 2,083 opposed. I felt physically ill. 

That night, I resigned from the Coop and asked that my initial $100 investment, given 20 years ago, be returned. By the next day, the Coop’s shelves were stripped of the handful of Israeli products that it carried, mostly Bamba, a couple of haircare products and a few brands of tahini, including one brand owned by an Arab Israeli woman and another that employs a diverse workforce of Muslims, Jews and Druze. All that effort to remove so few products. But it was never about the products themselves. It has always been about the delegitimization and erasure of Israel.

The boycott may have long-term financial consequences for the Coop. Members unhappy with the decision are considering their next steps, whether that is resigning, suspending their membership or staying to fight to overturn the boycott. The Coop, already facing New York State discrimination complaints and a cease-and-desist letter, may face lawsuits for potential violation of human rights laws.

As for me, the boycott vote was a watershed moment. I feel sad and deeply unsettled by the effectiveness of the anti-Israel rhetoric and how little my fellow Coop members cared about their Jewish neighbors.

Lisa Smith is the Chief Planned Giving & Estates Officer at Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. An attorney by training, Smith is a dual American-Israeli citizen and has worked for Hadassah since 2008. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with her family.