Opinion: A boycott list built on who owns a business, not what it does, crosses a line

Six restaurants near Rittenhouse Square spent Sunday morning as the designated stops on a boycott route. A cycling club calling itself Philly Bike On Your Left, which describes its politics on Instagram as "anti-fascist, anti-Zionist," organized a bike ride timed for 11:30 a.m., circling the park and passing storefronts it had named in advance: Goldie, Dizengoff and K'Far Cafe, three spots tied to chef Michael Solomonov's CookNSolo restaurant group, along with Mac Mart, Huda and Schlesinger's Deli. A flyer promoting the ride declared, "These Zionist establishments must go!" The businesses share one trait that had nothing to do with any ride's politics: their owners are Jewish.

The event, reported in advance by City & State Pennsylvania and PhillyVoice, drew condemnation from officials who rarely agree on much else. Philadelphia's Democratic mayor, Pennsylvania's Democratic governor and the state's Republican attorney general all said the same thing in different words: criticizing Israeli policy is one thing, and a list of businesses to punish because their owners are Jewish is another. What happened in Rittenhouse Square on Sunday is worth examining closely, not because boycotts are new to American political life, but because this one was built, explicitly, around identity rather than conduct.

What the flyer said, and who answered it

The ride's organizers scheduled it for the day before the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the November 9-10, 1938 pogrom in which Nazi-organized mobs burned more than 1,400 synagogues and ransacked thousands of Jewish-owned shops across Germany and annexed Austria, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's encyclopedia entry on the event. Several Philadelphia officials pointed to that timing directly. Mayor Cherelle Parker said she had directed police to monitor the ride to protect the businesses, nearby residents and houses of worship, adding, as PhillyVoice reported, that "everyone has the right to peacefully protest and express their political views" but that "singling out businesses because their owners are Jewish is unacceptable."

"Anyone who engages in threats, intimidation, or unlawful conduct will be held accountable." — Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, as quoted by PhillyVoice ahead of the Nov. 8 ride

Gov. Josh Shapiro's office went further, with a spokesperson calling the ride "nothing more than blatant antisemitism designed to intimidate and drive Jewish businesses out of our communities." Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday, a Republican, called it "deeply unsettling" and said the organizers were "engaging in a form of discrimination that falls back on some of the oldest antisemitic tropes," according to the same reporting. A joint statement from the Anti-Defamation League's Philadelphia office, the American Jewish Committee's regional chapter, the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and StandWithUs called the campaign "Jew-hatred, plain and simple" and urged residents to patronize the targeted restaurants instead, a response detailed by WHYY. The reaction landed against a backdrop the Justice Department itself has been tracking: FBI figures compiled in the department's national hate-crime statistics show 11,679 hate-crime incidents reported to the Bureau in 2024, the most recent full year on record, with Jews again the most targeted religious group by a wide margin. A counter-event, a "food crawl" through the same six restaurants, began at the same hour the ride did, and hundreds of people turned out in Rittenhouse Square to support the businesses, per CBS Philadelphia's account of the day.

Boycotts have legal cover. This one tested its limits.

American law has long protected organized boycotts as political speech. In NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., decided in 1982, the Supreme Court held that the nonviolent elements of a civil-rights-era boycott in Mississippi — speeches, picketing, urging others to withhold their business — were protected by the First Amendment, and that liability could attach only to actual violence or threats, not to the boycott itself. That precedent underlies decades of consumer boycotts targeting companies' labor practices, environmental records or operations in disputed territories. Boycotts of Israeli settlement goods, or of firms doing business in the West Bank, sit inside that tradition: they target conduct, and a company can change the conduct to end the boycott.

The Rittenhouse Square list does not work that way. Mac Mart, Huda, Schlesinger's Deli and the Solomonov restaurants were named not for any documented position on Israeli policy, government contract or settlement product, but, according to every account of the organizers' own flyer, because their owners are Jewish and were labeled "Zionist." No policy change could remove them from such a list, because their disqualifying trait is who owns them, not what they do. That is the distinction officials across party lines pointed to, and it separates a boycott of a government's actions from a boycott of a religious community's commerce — the latter being a tool used against Jewish tradespeople for centuries, most infamously on the nights the organizers' own timing invoked.

Who actually absorbs this

The businesses named are small, local operations, not instruments of any government. Schlesinger's Deli is owned by Allan Domb, a former Philadelphia city councilmember who told PhillyVoice he "almost cannot believe" he and other Jewish entrepreneurs were singled out. Huda's owner, Yehuda Sichel, said he would keep the restaurant open through the ride rather than close for the day, a position echoed by the other targeted owners in CBS Philadelphia's coverage. Employees who have no say in restaurant ownership, and no connection to Israeli government policy, were the ones staffing counters while a flyer told passersby their employer "must go."

There is also a cost to the wider cause the organizers say they represent. Criticism of Israeli government conduct in Gaza and the West Bank is a legitimate, widely held position, and boycotts aimed at that conduct remain protected, arguably effective tools of the kind Claiborne Hardware shields. A campaign that instead runs down a list of local restaurants by the religion of their owners gives officials, including ones sympathetic to Palestinian rights, an easy and accurate way to dismiss the whole effort as bigotry rather than politics — exactly what happened here within a day of the flyer circulating.

The organizers' defense, and what should follow

The strongest version of the organizers' case rests on Solomonov's restaurants specifically, not the other three. Shortly after Hamas's October 2023 attack on Israel, Solomonov and his business partner, Steve Cook, announced a $100,000 donation to United Hatzalah, an Israeli emergency medical service, prompting a sustained "Boycott CookNSolo" campaign. That campaign has run for nearly three years; this past July, when CookNSolo closed six locations of its Goldie and Federal Donuts chains, the boycott account claimed credit, posting "Boycotts work!", according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Cook disputed the connection, calling the closures "an economic decision that goes back many years" tied to inflation and an oversaturated market. Whatever the merits of that dispute, it is at least a boycott tied to a company's specific, documented decision — the donation — which gives the targeted business a policy to point to and, in theory, a way to end the boycott by changing it.

That argument does not extend to Mac Mart, Huda or Schlesinger's Deli. No reporting on the Rittenhouse Square ride ties any of those three businesses to a donation, statement or policy position on Israel comparable to CookNSolo's; they appear on the flyer, by every account of it, simply as Jewish-owned "Zionist establishments." That gap matters. A boycott tied to a specific, changeable policy position is political speech of the kind Claiborne Hardware protects. A list that widens from one company's donation to six restaurants selected because their owners are Jewish, published on the eve of the anniversary of a pogrom that did exactly that to Jewish shopkeepers, fails that test regardless of the vocabulary used to describe it. Pennsylvania officials from both parties reached that conclusion within hours of the flyer's release, which is itself notable in an era when little in American politics draws instant bipartisan agreement. The appropriate response is not new legislation restricting boycotts, which would endanger the broader, legitimate tradition Claiborne Hardware protects, but what Philadelphia saw on Sunday: open businesses, a crowded counter-demonstration, and officials willing to name discrimination plainly while still affirming the right to protest Israeli policy loudly and often. That combination — protecting the speech while rejecting the premise — is the model worth repeating the next time a list like this one circulates, because it almost certainly will.