On Friday, April 4th, General Irving served its last cappuccino, while a familiar scene unfolded on the sidewalk outside: a final protest, led by local activists who had spent the past year organizing against the café. What looked like a trendy neighborhood spot, part café, part specialty grocery, was, to many, a symbol of both displacement and international complicity. General Irving was owned by Venn, an AI-forward real estate tech developer company formerly headquartered in Tel Aviv with prominent and direct ties to the Israeli Defense Forces.
The café opened in 2020 after Venn approached Nate Adler, owner of Gertie’s in Williamsburg, to open up a new café across the street from Irving Square Park. While Adler shaped the concept, it was Venn that ultimately owned the business. The company was co-founded by Or Bokobza and Chen Avni, who market Venn as a new tech-forward solution for urban living, promising to build an “AI-powered ecosystem that transforms the resident experience and streamlines resident management by consolidating every touchpoint.”
During the late 2010s, Venn would appear to quietly open these ecosystems in cities like Berlin, Tel Aviv and, pointedly, Bushwick. Funding the expansion into Brooklyn was Lennar, the multibillion dollar Miami construction giant, the second largest home construction company in the country. “Lennar and Venn are defining the future of ‘Neighboring,’” reads Lennar’s website.
But beneath the sleek branding lies a more controversial history. Bokobza, now Venn’s CEO, is a reserves officer in the IDF and was in Tel Aviv on October 7th and stayed to fight as a soldier. He and Avni first met in the military when they were 18, during training. Though Venn is now based in New York, where it relocated in 2019 and where both founders currently live, its founders’ military ties and real estate ventures have drawn sharp criticism from Bushwick activists, who see the company as an agent of gentrification and international oppression alike.
“We have been outside General Irving every month since to spread the word about the boycott campaign, our campaign targeting the Ridgewood Tower development, mutual aid events, and other organizing against landlords, gentrification and displacement,” said James Sweeney, who lives in Bushwick and has been involved in the efforts to boycott the cafe, among other developments. “I went to an organizing event at Irving Square Park where I first learned about Venn and General Irving early in 2024. I then started my own boycott picket campaign where I would go outside and hand out flyers to let the community know about the cafe’s ties to the IDF.”
“The boycott organizing was very decentralized,” said Sweeney, though he pointed to the Ridgewood Tenants Union for drawing attention to the boycott effort by organizing marches outside the cafe and maintaining a “consistent presence outside the cafe.”
In the cafe’s final days, the coming closure appeared to be arriving without fanfare or public comment at all. (The cafe last posted on its Instagram page in mid-2023 and neither the cafe nor Venn returned a request for comment.) The consortium of local activists following the cafe had only realized it was closing when the address was spotted on a real estate website. Employees appeared to have little idea why Venn had decided to close up shop now, with one describing the sudden move as “cryptic.”
On the cafe’s last day, a protestor named Bella (last name redacted per request) led a closing ceremony of sorts after its metal gates shuttered one last time. Bella had gotten involved in the boycott, she said, as a “socially engaged public art” project she had developed as a fellow at More Art, a nonprofit that funds “collaborations between artists and communities to create thought-provoking public art and educational programs that inspire broad discourse regarding social and cultural issues,” per their website.
“Basically, what we did was that I led a group of twenty people who were dressed in the colors of the Palestinian flag and keffiyehs through what I called a ‘walking tour,’ tracing and retracing steps of local and international displacement from Bushwick to Palestine through a series of movement prompts and gestures that have people think about where they were physically, where they lived physically and think about how disembodiment is used as a tool of the state,” said Bella.
They reenacted another routine that was part of the General Irving protests, according to Bella, involving walking “one by one, to the door of General Irving, put[ting] their hands near the handle, and then walk[ing] away, one by one.”
“They called the cops on us,” she recalled, which had surprised her. “My background is in dance, mainly street styles, but also contemporary and more of ‘creative movement’ teaching.”
After the graffitied iron grate went down for the last time, Bella says the group held a “round of applause.”
“We set up a free cafe in the public little area outside of General Irving, we had zines in Spanish and English that explained why General Irving closed and drawings for people to imagine what they would want to see instead of General Irving,” she said. “We handed out cookies and we handed out lemonade and we talked to neighbors. And we planted peas and tomatoes in the garden beds that General Irving hadn’t really been taking care of. It was really an incredible moment. They were trying to close quietly.”
“These organizers used their bodies in a really intentional way and were able to kick this gentrifying business out of the neighborhood.”
For now, the future of the storefront remains uncertain; though the locals who protested its presence appear satisfied to see the specialty grocery store and café go.
“I’m proud of the campaign and was happy to see the broad support it received,” said Adam LoBelia, who lives in Ridgewood and got involved in the boycott through the tenant union. “And I’m looking forward to the cafe reopening with new, non-genocidal, non-gentrifier management.”
General Irving was formerly at 1210 Halsey St. in Bushwick
Top photo provided by James Sweeney.
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