On June 24, the eve of the Democratic mayoral primary, a group of New Yorkers were briefly focused on another kind of election: the one for the Park Slope Food Coop's 2025 board of directors. Hell Gate previously reported that the election—and another vote, on whether to hybridize the co-op's monthly general meetings—had turned into a proxy fight over the potential for an Israeli goods boycott at the grocery store. That night, around 6 p.m., the results of both votes came in at the co-op's annual meeting: The hybrid meetings proposal failed by an incredibly slim margin, garnering 66.4 percent support when 66.7 percent was needed, and the two board candidates aligned with the boycott, Taylor Pate and Dan Kaminsky, lost by a wide margin.
On one side, the tightly organized and devoted group Park Slope Food Coop Members for Palestine pushed for hybrid meetings in person and on Zoom, in part to pave the way for a vote on a boycott. On the other side, pro-Israel Coop4Unity members pushed back—as did co-op leadership, including outgoing general manager Joe Holtz, who called the organizing around the boycott "anti-democratic" in co-op newsletter op-eds and a mass email to members urging them to vote against the pro-Palestine board members and discouraging a boycott.
Keyian Vafai, a board of directors member and a PSFC Members for Palestine organizer, said he and his fellow pro-boycott members were shocked to learn how many people received Holtz’s email: not just the 17,000 active PSFC members, as the group initially believed, but a larger pool of 42,500 members who still hold stock in the co-op —even if they no longer shop there, attend its meetings, or work their mandatory shifts. According to Vafai and his fellow organizers, sending an email that called for inactive members to vote for "board members who prioritize the health and function of the Coop itself, not those who use their position to advance outside political agendas" amounted to putting a finger on the scale.
By contacting members who Vafai and his comrades couldn’t reach by canvassing at the co-op, he said, Holtz's email was responsible for Pate and Kaminsky's resounding defeat.
"Joe Holtz kind of violated basic election principles in sending out a disturbing personal and political email," Vafai told Hell Gate a few days after the election. (He added that because the hybrid meeting proposal lost by such a slim margin, a recount is already underway.) We talked to Vafai about PSFC Members for Palestine's loss—against the backdrop of a massive win for pro-Palestine New Yorkers—and what comes next.
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