Illustrative: Park Slope, Brooklyn. Photo: Gabriele Holtermann-Gorden/Sipa via Reuters Connect

A New York area advocacy group has filed a discrimination complaint against the Park Slope Food Co-op after the Brooklyn grocery passed a measure to ban sales of Israeli products.

The boycott passed on Tuesday night by a vote of 67 percent in favor to 31 percent against. The remaining two percent abstained. According to the text of the approved measure, the co-op will “not sell goods produced in Israel (pre-1967 borders) or in Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Fewer than a dozen Israeli-made items sold in the co-op will be affected.

Following news of the boycott’s passing, Jewish groups decried what they said is another example of rising antisemitism in New York City. Several groups promised legal action, and on Wednesday a group which calls itself “SAFE (Students, Alumni, and Faculty for Equality on Campus)” became the first to do so by reporting the incident to the New York State Division of Human Rights, an agency created in 1945 to investigate discrimination based on protected characteristics such as gender and race.

“SAFE Campus will not stand by while antisemitism and national origin discrimination are disguised as political activism,” SAFE founder and City University of New York law professor Jeffrey Lax said in a statement. “The Park Slope Food Co-op’s vote singles out Israel’s purported wrongdoing while ignoring incomparable, far worse atrocities elsewhere. We have filed this complaint to hold them accountable and to affirm that discriminatory boycotts have no place in New York.”

SAFE joins a chorus of other Jewish advocacy groups which said that the Park Slope Food Co-op is normalizing assaults on Jewish identity.

“This does nothing to help Israelis and Palestinians make peace,” said Avi Posnick, executive director of the northeast office of StandWithUs. “Instead, it actively promotes the agenda of violent extremists, while fueling hostility and division among members of the co-op. We stand with Co-op 4 Unity, who worked tirelessly to stop their co-op from being co-opted by a global hate movement.”

He added, “We encourage all people of good will to reject campaigns of hate and instead support genuine efforts toward justice and peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”

Before the vote, Jewish membership at the co-op complained for several weeks of increasing hostility that became so severe it prompted a demand letter by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. The letter cited examples of antisemitic rhetoric and intimidation directed at Jewish members, including one in which an activist declared during a committee meeting that “Jewish supremacism is a problem in this country” — language Jewish advocacy groups have long associated with antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and influence.

The Brandeis Center further alleged that Jewish co-op members were intimidated during meetings that became increasingly “tense” and “combative,” causing some members to avoid deliberations surrounding the proposal because of what they described as a hostile atmosphere.

On Wednesday, the Brandeis Center denounced the boycott of Israel, noting its origins in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.

“BDS is an inherently antisemitic and discriminatory campaign whose purpose is the isolation and ultimate elimination of the Jewish state – and as we have seen time and again, it does not stay contained to Israel,” said Brandeis Center founder and executive director Kenneth Marcus. “It metastasizes into open hostility toward Jewish people everywhere, even those with no connection to Israel. This is the kind of hostility the co-op’s own leadership has acknowledged was already happening within its walls. A grocery store should never become a springboard for extremist political campaigns.”

Jewish New Yorkers fear that the city is changing dramatically for them under the administration of its new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Since his election, the municipality has seen an explosion of anti-Jewish hatred.

Earlier this month, masses of anti-Israel demonstrators marched through the heavily Jewish Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and protested outside Young Israel of Midwood synagogue over its involvement in selling land they say is “stolen” for being located in West Bank.

Video circulated online from the protest appeared to show a female demonstrator, wearing a surgical mask and a red keffiyeh scarf around her shoulders, assaulting a Jewish girl by grabbing her hair from behind as she attempted to move through the crowd to get home. When a group of teenagers near the incident decried the assault, a swarm of hooded protesters confronted them, pushing and squaring shoulders in an apparent effort to dare a response and threaten more force.

Meanwhile, according to recently released New York City Police Department (NYPD) statistics, Jews were targeted in roughly 60 percent of confirmed hate crimes in the city last month despite comprising approximately 10 percent of the population.

The city has also experienced a series of recent antisemitic vandalism incidents, including swastika graffiti discovered in Queens parks and on Jewish-owned properties.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.