{"id":246983,"date":"2026-05-28T22:08:52","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T22:08:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/246983\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T22:08:52","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T22:08:52","slug":"brooklyn-co-op-voted-to-boycott-products-made-by-israeli-arab-owned-factory-tahini-vendor-says-jns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/246983\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooklyn co-op voted to boycott products made by Israeli Arab-owned factory, tahini vendor says | JNS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those who say that they support Palestinians have praised Park Slope Coop\u2019s decision this week to boycott<\/a> Israeli products. But the Brooklyn co-op has also banned the wares of at least one Arab-owned factory, according to Rachel Simons, who sells tahini at Park Slope Coop.<\/p>\n

Simons told JNS that her tahini products are produced by a company that Israeli Arabs own in the northern part of the Jewish state.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn a whim, I decided I would start a little business around sesame seeds, and with the simple goal of just enjoying people, food, the culinary industry, interacting with people from all around the world,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\"Rachel<\/p>\n

Some 20,000 people a day walk through Chelsea Market, where Simons, a Jewish native of Australia, set up shop 10 years ago selling halva, tahini and other products.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Park Slope Coop voted to boycott Israeli products after separately voting to lower the 75% threshold required to institute such a ban.<\/p>\n

Simons\u2019 company, Seed + Mill, sources its products in Israel, where she lived for a year. It does so \u201cnot necessarily for ideological reasons but simply because they make excellent tahini and halva, and their products and ingredients and conceptions that are difficult to source and produce domestically,\u201d she told JNS.<\/p>\n

Her New York team handles sales, marketing, consumer education and recipe development.<\/p>\n

Over time, her products became popular enough to be sold in hundreds of stores around the United States, including the Park Slope Coop for the last six years, Simons told JNS.<\/p>\n

That has produced \u201cmeaningful revenue\u201d for Simons, who told JNS that she has dealt with a \u201cfair share\u201d of emails, comments and social media engagement after Oct. 7 that \u201cwasn\u2019t particularly pleasant.\u201d<\/p>\n

She has otherwise avoided efforts to boycott Israel until now, she told JNS.<\/p>\n

She is generally sad about the co-op\u2019s vote and is disappointed that \u201cI\u2019ve had no opportunity to talk to the co-op membership,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I had been given that opportunity, one of the things I would have loved to have shared with them is to put a face and names and stories to the people who make our products,\u201d she told JNS.<\/p>\n

She declined to name the factory in northern Israel which produces Seed + Mill\u2019s products and which she said is owned by a family of Muslim Israeli-Arabs. (JNS independently verified the company and its connection to her company.)<\/p>\n

The company \u201cworks extremely harmoniously\u201d and hires Jews, Christians, Druze and Muslims, Simons told JNS.<\/p>\n

\"Seed<\/p>\n

\u201cThey work together, they put food on their families\u2019 tables, they are running a food business,\u201d she said. \u201cFor the co-op to have put in place a boycott that is supposedly intended to address allegations of apartheid, I just can\u2019t think of a better example of how Israel is not an apartheid state when you look at the people who are actually making our products.\u201d<\/p>\n

If she could have addressed co-op members prior to the boycott vote, she would have told them that \u201cmy partners in Israel are a combination of all sorts of colors and religions and faiths and geographic history,\u201d she told JNS.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is exactly what Israel is, which is a diverse multicultural country,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s the way I\u2019ve always appreciated Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

She would have made her view clear that \u201cI don\u2019t see this as a constructive or as a meaningful way to deliver peace and prosperity to people of all faiths in Israel,\u201d she told JNS.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy passions in life are just talking to people about food and recipes and cooking at home, not talking about how little, tiny tahini brands are going to solve a complicated war in the Middle East,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Those who say that they support Palestinians have praised Park Slope Coop\u2019s decision this week to boycott Israeli…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[3862,96544,2594,98,100,99,60,58189,2597,2601,164,9,24,63,663,45176,94620,2593,2596,2602,45173,96543,96301,421],"class_list":["post-246983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-antisemitism","tag-arab-citizens-of-israel","tag-arab-israeli-conflict","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-israel","tag-israel-related-controversies","tag-israeli-palestinian-conflict","tag-jews-and-judaism","tag-middle-east","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-palestine","tag-palestine-region","tag-park-slope-food-coop","tag-politics-of-israel","tag-politics-of-palestine","tag-politics-of-palestine-region","tag-politics-of-the-middle-east","tag-society-of-west-asia","tag-tahini","tag-u-s-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}