“We see our struggles for fair pay, respect, and safety as connected to struggles against genocide and forces of exploitation around the world.”

So declare the voices behind Breaking Breads Union, a newly-declared organization of workers at the Breads Bakery chain in New York City. Why, you might wonder, would someone unhappy with their working conditions at an American food service job see this as related to war abroad? One might imagine the larger fight would have something to do with labour struggles globally, or with ICE crackdowns on immigrants real and perceived, at home. But why be mad at America when there’s Israel?

Wait wait, I know, I know! And I think you do, too.

If antisemitism is the socialism of fools, then whatever is going on in New York City at the moment is more like the anti-Zionism of the clever. If you have a righteous cause (or political platform) it will, at this point in time, play better if you link it to pervasive, cross-ideological anti-Israel sentiment.

Normally, in a conflict between food service employees and store ownership, I’d sympathize with the workers. If my own brief stint in New York City coffee shop employment (not Breads, nothing Jewish-themed nor to my knowledge Jewish-owned) was any indication, these are not easy jobs, nor well-compensated. That much is also just obvious even if you’ve never had that kind of job yourself.

But where the unionizing workers have lost me—and where they’ve made me wonder if the Mamdani doomers are right—is their demand that this Israeli food establishment knock it off with all the Israel stuff.

As it generally goes, in such cases—and there are so, so many, including in Canada and beyond—you’d need a conspiracy theorist’s chart to make sense of the mechanism by which a Jewish food establishment in the diaspora is meant to be connected to the Israeli government. The union demands “an end to this company’s support of the genocide happening in Palestine,” but even if you were 100% on board with that classification of the Gaza war, you’d be stuck trying to make sense of how Breads Bakery is implicated. They bake Israeli flag cookies for private events. They participate in some broader Jewish community activities which lo and behold put them in contact with the UJA and other Jewish organizations. The Jewish bakery is a Jewish........

© Canadian Jewish News