Tomorrow, Sunday, November 8, 2026, marks the eve of the 88th anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms. An anonymous group calling itself Philly Bike On Your Left is organizing a boycott ride through Rittenhouse Square to mark the weekend. Their targets are local Jewish-owned restaurants. They plan to disrupt operations at Mac Mart, K'Far Cafe, Huda, Goldie, Dizengoff, and Schlesinger's Deli. Co-organized with Philly Writers Against the War on Gaza, Boycott CookNSolo, and the Philly Solidarity Calendar, the campaign leaves zero ambiguity about its intentions. Their flyers demand that these establishments must go and declare they will give no business to Zionists. Social media posts from the organizers urge riders to show these business owners that the public sees them as disgusting human beings.
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday, and the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia immediately condemned the planned ride. State police under Governor Josh Shapiro are currently coordinating with local precincts to maintain order. Faced with bipartisan civic backlash, the organizers claimed the timing right before the anniversary of the November pogroms is a pure coincidence.
If you view a city as a cooperative physical space, the reality of this boycott becomes deeply troubling. A city relies on fragile, working-class networks to survive. The line cooks, delivery riders, dishwashers, and local suppliers who keep these restaurants open are part of a shared urban fabric. When an anonymous group decides to carve Philadelphia into pure and impure zones, they bypass human empathy and disrupt the labor networks that sustain our daily survival. They treat the neighborhood as a territory to be purged rather than a shared home.
Bigotry rarely announces itself plainly in a modern city. It adapts and rewrites its public justifications to survive scrutiny. We have seen this specific tactic before. On April 1, 1933, the Nazi Party placed stormtroopers outside Jewish-owned shops across Germany. The regime did not frame the boycott as unprovoked hatred. They framed it as righteous self-defense against foreign press reports, which they dismissed as atrocity propaganda. The tactic flipped the script. It cast the aggressors as victims, turned local shopkeepers into agents of a hostile foreign power, and transformed commercial ruin into a moral duty.
The boycott organizers in Philadelphia are running a similar ideological script. The allied campaign Boycott CookNSolo specifically targets chef Michael Solomonov's restaurant group. When civil rights groups pointed out the obvious bigotry of targeting Jewish businesses for forced closure, the organizers did not reflect on their actions. They doubled down, accusing their critics of mounting a smear campaign and disingenuously conflating Zionism with Judaism. Just as the 1933 regime dismissed real violence as foreign propaganda, these modern organizers file all civic outrage away as a hostile conspiracy.
Look at the actual people they are targeting. Solomonov previously raised money for an Israeli volunteer emergency medical group. Other owners made pro-Israel social media posts following the October 7 massacres. None of these businesses are foreign embassies. None are arms of a military. They include a macaroni-and-cheese shop, a sandwich counter, and a traditional deli owned by former City Councilmember Allan Domb. Their alleged crime is what the proprietors felt or donated as private citizens. The organizers are not asking for a dialogue about foreign policy. They are demanding forced closure and economic ruin for their neighbors.
Attorney General Sunday pointed out that this campaign singles out Pennsylvanians for foreign policies they cannot control and have no ability to affect. Domb correctly noted that targeting any other minority group for economic destruction would trigger universal outrage across the political spectrum. You cannot realistically compile a list of Jewish restaurateurs, denounce them as disgusting human beings, and pretend you are cleanly separating a political movement from an ethnoreligious identity. The boycotts of the 1930s sorted shops by blood and ancestry. This contemporary version sorts by a political label that conveniently lands almost entirely on Jewish neighbors. It flattens the complex reality of a restaurant—where dozens of working-class people earn their rent and feed their families—into a single geopolitical target.
True libertarian socialism is rooted in mutual aid. It demands the defense of local communities against coercion, whether that pressure comes from state authorities or from anonymous mobs trying to enforce ideological purity. Philly Bike On Your Left uses bicycles and anti-fascist aesthetics to dress up a campaign of targeted harassment. Bicycles usually symbolize civic care, environmental consciousness, and shared public space. Using them to intimidate local workers and bankrupt independent businesses betrays every core principle of justice and solidarity.
When activists reduce human beings to political abstractions, they destroy the living web of labor and culture that makes city life possible. We depend on each other to keep the lights on, to cook the food, and to maintain the streets. Punishing local neighbors for a distant war does not free a single person overseas. It just poisons the water we all rely on at home.
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