A spokesman for the Israeli-owned Breads Bakery told JNS that the New York City chain “is built on love and genuine care for our team” and that it celebrates “peace and embrace people of all cultures and beliefs,” after a newly-formed union of workers at the chain accused it of supporting “genocide” in Gaza.
“We make babka. We don’t engage in politics,” the chain spokesman told JNS. “We’ve always been a workplace where people of all backgrounds and viewpoints can come together around a common purpose, sharing in the joy and love of a bakery, and we find it troubling that divisive political issues are being introduced into our workplace.”
Workers at the chain said that they had formed a United Auto Workers Local 2179-affiliated union, which they are calling Breaking Breads Union. They said the new union represents about 275 bakers, kitchen staff, cashiers, baristas, porters, caterers and drivers at the chain.
The union said that it is seeking “a living wage, safe workplace and basic respect” and it allages that workers have faced unsafe conditions, wage concerns and discriminatory behavior by management.
The group stated that management “recommended that workers refrain from speaking Arabic on the shop floor” and “prohibited workers from playing Spanish-language music.” It also claimed the bakery engaged in inconsistent scheduling, paid less than a living wage and used “faulty mixers, broken racks and other defective machinery.”
The workers also decried what they said is the company’s “support for the genocide in Gaza.”
The union alleged that a Leah A., whom it described as a former bakery employee, was fired “illegally” for organizing. “We see our struggles for fair pay, respect and safety as connected to struggles against genocide and forces of exploitation around the world,” it said. It expects to petition the National Labor Relations Board for an election if the company does not voluntarily recognize the union, it said.
Some observers told JNS that the effort appears to blend labor organizing with anti-Israel politics.
Yair Klyman, a Jewish financial adviser who lives on the Upper East Side, told JNS that many companies unionize, but “what feels different in this case is that the conversation appears to move beyond labor issues and into political territory.”
“Breads Bakery is a culturally Jewish, Tel Aviv-rooted brand, and it seems that it is being singled out in a way that aligns more closely with the broader BDS movement than with traditional workplace concerns,” he said. “When a union campaign shifts focus from employee conditions to demands tied to international politics, it raises questions about motive and precedent.”
Klyman sees the effort as part of a “broader moment we’re living in—one where politics increasingly intrude into everyday life and institutions that were once seen as apolitical.”
The movement to boycott Israel “has gained significant momentum, and we are now seeing Jewish-cultural institutions targeted in ways that many people never expected,” he told JNS. “Historically, religious or cultural discrimination within workplaces was not something that sat at the forefront of labor organizing, but today it is becoming harder to ignore.”
Allison Josephs, founder and executive director of the Jewish Institute for Television and Cinema and an Orthodox Jewish educator, also said the campaign is connected to broader anti-Jewish sentiment.
“It’s open season on the Jews,” she told JNS. “Bringing back boycotts to Jewish businesses—that’s essentially what the workers are doing—is how the Holocaust began.”
“None of this is normal. When the employees were hired, likely many of them knew about the identity of the owners, but enemies of the Jews have been working over time since Oct. 7 to isolate, vilify and delegitimize Israel,” she said. “It’s likely that people who did not have issues with Israel before, that they now do.”
Josephs doesn’t patronize the bakery, because it isn’t kosher. She asked the owners to “respond to this provocation by getting kosher certified.”
“Let more Jews support you,” she said. “Lean in, as our enemies try to isolate us.”
Breaking Breads Union described itself as the largest New York City craft bakery union effort in nearly a century.
The National Labor Relations Board has not yet ruled on the unionization effort, and no election date has been set.
“This is going to spread. This is not spontaneous,” stated Deborah Lipstadt, former U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism and Dorot professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, about the union’s anti-Israel demands.
“This is part of an effort to marginalize Jews and Israel,” she wrote.
