Ep 619: Influential Origins with Alan Mindel and guest Ramon Maislen P2 on hmTv

Ep. 619 — Influential Origins with Alan Mindel
Guest: Ramon Maislen — Part 2
hmTv at HMTC

In Part 2 of Influential Origins, host Alan Mindel continues his conversation with Brooklyn real estate investor and community advocate Ramon Maislen about the growing tensions inside local community spaces after October 7th.

Alan and Ramon examine the BDS movement, the difference between personal boycotts and joining an organized campaign against Israel, and how political activism entered the Park Slope Food Coop, a once-welcoming community institution built around cooperation, diversity, and shared responsibility.

Ramon reflects on his own Zionism, his belief in self-determination for both Jews and Palestinians, and his growing concern over activists who deny Jewish self-determination altogether. The conversation also explores troubling claims made inside the co-op, including the accusation of “Jewish supremacy,” and how such language echoes historic patterns of dehumanization.

Together, Alan and Ramon discuss how apathy allows extreme voices to dominate local institutions, why local elections and civic participation matter, and how misinformation, social media, and ideological certainty can fracture communities that once prided themselves on inclusion.

This episode is a direct and timely look at antisemitism, identity, community breakdown, and the urgent need for people of conscience to speak up before silence becomes surrender.

Transcript

Influential Origins with Alan Mindel
Episode 619: Ramon Maislen — Part 2
hmTv at HMTC

Intro:
Humanity matters.

Alan Mindel:
This is Alan Mindel with Influential Origins, and this is Part 2 of my interview with Ramon Maislen.

Ramon, we left at a really interesting point, where a co-op from 50 years ago, a hippie co-op where people from Brooklyn get to meet, hang out, operate a grocery store, and buy food together, has now been taken over by members of the BDS movement.

Let’s take a moment and rewind for a second to explain to people what the goals of the BDS movement are versus what they might think those goals are.

I grew up during a time when there was real apartheid in South Africa. If you were Black in South Africa, you could not vote. You did not have property rights. What you were allowed to do or say was incredibly limited.

You lived in Israel for seven years. If you are an Arab Muslim Israeli, do you get to vote?

Ramon Maislen:
Most definitely. I was in the IDF with Druze people. There are Muslims and Christian Arabs who serve in the army. They are doctors. They are in government offices. People are fully integrated.

Alan Mindel:
It is a society where Muslim Arab Israelis can be chief justices, elected officials, and at one point not that long ago were part of the governing majority in Israel, and no one seemed to notice or care.

They are fully allowed in schools. They are doctors. They are full economic participants. They can own land and any property they could possibly want.

So that is what Israel has as far as the apartheid claim. But if you ask the BDS movement, they say Israel is an apartheid state. The apartheid accusation comes from the idea that if you do not live in Israel, but you are someone of Arab Muslim descent living in the West Bank, the question is: why do you not get to run Israel?

Which is pretty funny, because it is not part of the country. It is a different place.

Ramon Maislen:
At the end of the day, when I talk to these people, there was a goal at one point by the PLO of having a one-state solution, to become a majority Arab Muslim country through a one-state policy.

Over the course of time and negotiations, whether they meant it in reality or not is another question, they accepted the idea of two states. We were moving in that direction for some time. Obviously, that process broke down and has not been restarted for the time being.

But I believe both peoples can and should have self-determination. There is nothing in my Zionism that says these people cannot also have self-determination.

Alan Mindel:
One hundred percent. But that is the amazing part.

Ramon Maislen:
The Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza do not live in Israel. I was living in Israel at a time when we were debating whether to remove the settlements from Gaza. I protested on behalf of removing the settlements from Gaza, and I thought that was the right thing to do at the time.

Alan Mindel:
Because you believed that the people of Gaza deserved their own country, their own territory, their own state.

Ramon Maislen:
Yes. I was hopeful it would restart the peace process. I was hopeful the people in Gaza would look at it as a first step toward normalization. Very quickly, it became clear that I was being naive, because Hamas got elected. It was pretty depressing, and I was in Israel at that time too.

Alan Mindel:
Hamas did get elected. But it is one thing when Republicans beat Democrats in America or Democrats beat Republicans. If you were a member of the Fatah Party, which was against Hamas at the time, you know what happened to those people.

Ramon Maislen:
They were killed or had to flee, basically.

Alan Mindel:
They were taken to the tallest building in Gaza and thrown off the roof together. It is tough to get votes when you are being thrown off the roof.

Ramon Maislen:
Certainly. The challenge is that there is a revisionist history that most of these BDS activists ascribe to. They look at everything in a very black-and-white fashion.

Alan Mindel:
What is their version of that event?

Ramon Maislen:
Their version, if you are ready to hear it, is pretty crazy. Their version is that Israel is the whole reason Hamas even exists. Some of them, and I am not kidding, I have had conversations with some of them where they say, number one, no rapes happened, and most of the casualties on October 7th were actually due to Israel killing them.

These are people who live in Brooklyn and are members of the Food Coop, and they have said this to my face.

Alan Mindel:
Even though this is on video. The Holocaust happened 80 years ago, but October 7th is in high-definition video with audio.

Ramon Maislen:
Hundreds of hours. One person told me they did not mean to go to the Nova Festival. They were only looking for army bases. I said, “Okay, so why did they kill people and rape them when they got there?”

Alan Mindel:
And not just rape them, but break their pelvises. But they deny that this even happened, even though you have videos from the scenes.

Ramon Maislen:
They are part of a cult. Some of these people are part of a cult that does not allow them to take in new information. Truly, I am not even kidding.

They told me 700,000 Palestinians have been killed. Even Hamas’s own records do not say that. Again, 70,000 is a horrible number, and we should hope for zero.

Alan Mindel:
We should hope for zero from all sides.

Ramon Maislen:
Right.

Alan Mindel:
But to tell you 700,000, when even the numbers being reported do not support that, creates a different reality.

Ramon Maislen:
That is why they have to inflate the numbers and say things like 700,000. Otherwise, it just would not work, because it is insane.

Alan Mindel:
The reality is one thing, so they have created their own reality. Their belief is not that Jews are entitled to self-determination, just like any other nation, while Palestinians are also entitled to self-determination.

When you talk to these people who are supposedly freedom fighters, working to get BDS employed in a grocery store, do they believe Jews are entitled to their own self-determination?

Ramon Maislen:
No. Let’s put it this way. There are many different views. You have the activists, who are the most extreme. Many of them, or at least some of the ones I have spoken to, do not believe Jews deserve self-determination.

They think there should be one state with democratic equal rights, quote-unquote. I say, “Okay, what if America just decided Canada should be part of America and Canadians can have equal rights?” Countries have borders, whether they were artificially drawn by colonial states or created in a different fashion. States exist at this point.

Alan Mindel:
And so do borders.

Ramon Maislen:
And so do borders, and so do ethnicities. These are things that are real. They can change. People’s allegiances to states can change. History is fluid, and the future is fluid.

The vast majority of people, I hope, are reasonable. Unfortunately, many of the people I have spoken to, who are probably the most extreme, are very unreasonable. Their position is that Jews do not deserve self-determination. They think Jews can live in a state where they may or may not be a majority.

Alan Mindel:
Bethlehem was the birthplace of Jesus. It used to be 85 percent Christian. How about today?

Ramon Maislen:
The thing is, they do not care. They have an alternative narrative, an alternative history. They pick and choose the facts that work for them.

What I have found is that there is a level of self-righteousness and certainty in themselves, including among the Jewish members, where they are so sure of their positions and, for the most part, unwilling to have a rational conversation.

Again, I imagine many of the people who voted for the boycott at the co-op were just upset with what was happening in Israel. They viewed that vote as a way to punish Israel in some way. I can understand that. I am not saying I agree with that method, but it is a reasonable position and not necessarily antisemitic.

For those people, I said, “Look, at the end of the day, there are two things. One, boycott the products. Just do not buy them. If they are not financially viable at the co-op, the co-op will not carry them.”

I have much less of a problem with the idea of boycotting something than I do with joining the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, because this is a hateful movement in general.

If you want to have a boycott, that is one thing. If you want to join BDS, that is something totally different to me. But I am well read and understand the difference. Most people do not understand the difference.

Alan Mindel:
What is important from here is that before the boycott really took place, there were conversations within the co-op at these meetings.

Ramon Maislen:
A lack of conversations, I would say.

Alan Mindel:
Well, they had a meeting about it at least.

Ramon Maislen:
Yes. Let me go backwards a little bit.

I requested from the group that calls itself Park Slope Food Coop Members for Palestine, in writing and through our newsletter, a mediation, a meeting, something. I was not even met with a reply.

Alan Mindel:
Why?

Ramon Maislen:
Because part of the BDS movement’s stated method of attacking Zionists, quote-unquote Zionists, is not having any engagement whatsoever. Do not talk to them.

They did not even reply to me.

Then they created a number of proposals to change the voting mechanisms, change the meetings to be hybrid, and join this boycott. The only way to have even some semblance of dialogue was to create counterproposals that we could also present at these meetings.

All of that came to a head in April 2026, when the quote-unquote pro-Palestine group, though I would say they are more anti-Israel than pro-Palestine, presented a motion to reduce the boycott voting threshold from 75 percent to a simple majority. I presented a counterproposal to keep the 75 percent threshold.

Alan Mindel:
The reason there was a higher threshold was that you want to make sure there is a vast majority of people who agree before doing something as radical as removing products connected to one ethnicity from your grocery store.

Ramon Maislen:
Correct. The founder of the co-op, Joe Holtz, who subsequently retired, wrote a letter to everybody saying that every single boycott at the co-op had vast buy-in from the majority of members, 85 or 90 percent plus. No boycott that had ever been done had been truly contentious in any meaningful way.

That is why the 75 percent threshold helps keep the community together. That was the argument I made.

Unfortunately, during that process, or during the lead-up to it, when the Park Slope Food Coop Members for Palestine were presenting, one of the commenters said, “Jewish supremacy is a real problem in this country.”

Alan Mindel:
I really want to unpack that, because this is an incredible concept.

Jews represent two percent of the population here. That is it. People say, “Are you really a minority?” We represent two percent of the population.

Secondly, part of the dogma today is that Jews are the oppressor, the white oppressor. Coming from a Holocaust center, that is almost laughable, because the entire premise of Nazi Germany was that Jews were not white, that they were impure, that their DNA was the problem genetically, that they were an inferior race of people. Because they were considered inferior, they were put into ovens or shot in the head, just like the vast majority of my family.

Then Jews come to America. You could buy golf clubs if you were Jewish, but there were clubs all over the country that said, “Enjoy the golf course, but do not bring a Jew here to play.” There were properties with deeds that said, “By all means, sell the house to a good buyer, just make sure they are not Jews, because Jews are not entitled to buy this property or live in this town.”

But all of a sudden, here in Park Slope, Brooklyn, one race of people is now labeled as supremacists. Those same folks.

Ramon Maislen:
It is astounding, really. There is a lot to unpack there overall.

I was in conversation with an African American woman in front of the co-op, and we were discussing the boycott and why I opposed it. She said to me, “Well, you are white, and you are not being discriminated against. How can you say this boycott is discriminatory?”

I said to her, “Look, at the end of the day, yes, I am white-passing. I can move in and out of white spaces. There have been African Americans who were light enough that they could pass in and out of white spaces as well. It is true that for you, someone looks at you and immediately places you as other. For me, they do not immediately place me as other unless I physically mark myself as visibly Jewish.”

If I had payot, or if I were wearing Hasidic clothing, people would know I was visibly Jewish. It is different, and it is confusing for people. It is not so easy.

The Jewish people are such an ancient people that we defy logic to many people. Are we a religion? Yes. Are we a race? Sort of. We are certainly a tribe, and there are not that many tribes left.

I think it is confusing for many people. When things are confusing, a lot of people seek simplicity. They say, “My boss is Jewish,” or “That wealthy person is Jewish,” so Jews must all be rich and wealthy. Statistically, that is just not true.

Having honest conversations matters. In general, the American population has been incredibly welcoming to the Jewish community, certainly more than any other community in human history.

Alan Mindel:
Until now, for sure.

Ramon Maislen:
Even now, even though it has gotten worse, it is still markedly better than it ever was in Europe. It is a testament to how amazing America has been to the Jewish people. This is why Jewish people love America so much, because we have been accepted here more than we have anywhere else, other than Israel, obviously.

It is complicated for people who are not Jewish, or who do not have very close friends or family who are Jewish, to understand these dynamics. For you and me, we tread very freely in this water.

Alan Mindel:
But there is a long history in this country too, as good as it has been, where Jews were just not equal in a lot of places. Now Jewish members, whether they are pro-Israel or not, are being told that Jewish supremacy is the issue of the world.

Ramon Maislen:
That comment came up, and it was very auspicious because it was the last comment from their session. Immediately after, I got to get up and speak.

Usually, when you speak at the co-op, you get 60 seconds. That is not a lot of time to respond to something of that order of magnitude. But because I was presenting my counterproposal that we should keep the 75 percent majority, I had 12 minutes to speak.

So I got up there and chastised everybody in the room. I told people, “At the end of the day, Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. Full stop. And the Palestinians who live there are indigenous to the land of Israel too. And guess what? They will figure it out. But you people here having a boycott is not helping matters. And certainly saying that Jewish supremacy is an issue in this country harkens back to the worst Nazi crimes and the ways they spoke to dehumanize Jews.”

You could hear a pin drop in the room. There were maybe 150 people in the room, and there was not a single person making noise.

Alan Mindel:
As opposed to when the Jewish supremacy comment was made, when there was a round of applause.

Ramon Maislen:
Correct. At the end of the day, they are so subsumed within this cult-like hermetic seal they have put themselves in that this kind of language and these kinds of things do not resonate as anti-Jewish, because they are so accustomed to hearing them.

That is why they were so shocked when I got up and chastised them and basically told them they were acting like racists. They are not used to having anybody push back against them.

Alan Mindel:
How do you say it is not racist to call a Jew a supremacist?

Ramon Maislen:
They doubled down on it. They have a newsletter, and they created a whole fantasy historical background as to why it is totally acceptable and not racist to say that.

Again, there is a twisting of the narrative and a twisting of history to meet their needs. I realized people were further gone than I had previously thought.

I have interacted a lot with Brooklynites over the last couple of years because I founded a PAC to defeat Shahana Hanif during the same time I was fighting against the co-op.

Alan Mindel:
Brooklyn Bridge Builders.

Ramon Maislen:
Brooklyn Bridge Builders. We were canvassing, door-knocking, and handing out flyers. I have interacted with a lot of people. I have been called racist, Islamophobic, a genocide supporter, and a lot of other names.

Alan Mindel:
When you have a long history of being a progressive, liberal human in Brooklyn.

Ramon Maislen:
Exactly. What I have come to realize is that it does not matter what I say. It only matters what their narrow version of history is, and they just run with it.

When you try to shake them a little bit, sometimes you can. Again, I am not saying that the government of Israel is great. By the way, I do not like most governments in most countries.

Alan Mindel:
That is the funny part. People say, “Is Israel perfect? Are you saying everything that country does is the way you would do it?” The answer is, of course not, just like it is not true in America.

We love America. We are about to have our 250th anniversary. We are very proud to be here. But we are not proud of every part of American history, nor the present. There are things going on today that we say are terrible.

But we still love our country. We believe in striving to make a more perfect union. We understand that as Americans. When it comes to Israel, it is not judged like that.

Ramon Maislen:
That is the double standard. People say Israel is the only country in the world that is expected to be the most Christian country, where it always needs to turn the other cheek.

There are a lot of problems in Israel. I have a lot of issues with the current government and current policies.

Alan Mindel:
None of those are even a factor here.

Ramon Maislen:
No, of course not, because at the end of the day, we are talking about whether this place deserves the right to exist.

Alan Mindel:
And whether a Brooklyn museum director has the right to run a museum — not a Jewish museum or a Zionist museum, just a museum — or whether, because she is a Jewish woman, she should be marked for death because people are saying they want to globalize the Intifada here.

And whether Jews belong in this co-op to buy their ethnic food, or whether they should be made uncomfortable there.

Ramon Maislen:
And they are called supremacists. More than that, activists have explicitly stated that they are happy to purge quote-unquote Zionists, and that they do not want us here.

That is the difference between the boycott for apartheid and the boycott happening at the Food Coop. The goal is to purge Jews from the co-op.

Alan Mindel:
Bad Jews, let’s say. Bad Jews meaning Jews who believe in their own self-determination, who remember history a little bit, who believe in the rights of everyone equally. Those bad Jews need to get out of this co-op.

Ramon Maislen:
For those activists, yes. I think some people are along for the ride without realizing that. More than half of the co-op is just apathetic, which mirrors our political reality. Many moderate people who are totally reasonable just do not vote.

You saw the same thing taking place on a smaller scale. That is why it is so easy to take over.

Alan Mindel:
That is how the Holocaust happened. That is why it ties into here. It was not that the vast majority of people in Europe or Germany hated Jews. It was that the overwhelming majority just did nothing about it while a small minority made it all happen.

That is what we are dealing with here too.

Ramon Maislen:
Yes. I do not see Jews ending up in cattle cars, thank God. I do not see that.

Alan Mindel:
I hope you are right.

Ramon Maislen:
I hope I am right too. I think we are witnessing something very different.

When the printing press was invented, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people were killed in religious warfare between Catholicism and Protestantism. When radio was invented, you had the rise of fascism and millions of people killed in the Second World War.

What you see is that when a vast technology that allows mass communication happens with no control, there is incredible societal upheaval. Now we are living in the midst of the third age, which is the social media age.

Alan Mindel:
I want to talk about that, but I also want to talk about one of the oldest newspapers, one of the best-regarded newspapers in America, and its part in all of this.

We will be back soon.