What started as an interaction between one customer and three employees of an Oakland cafe has turned into a viral video, accusations of antisemitism, firings, national coverage, doxxing, and a call for a boycott. All this transpired in roughly one week, in the latest case of tensions around the war in Gaza playing out in a local setting.
A video that garnered millions of views on social media shows three employees of Farley’s East blocking a customer from entering a restroom at the cafe. The argument centers around graffiti written on the restroom walls, saying “Zionism=fascism” and “Your neutrality is enabling genocide.” The customer wanted to document the graffiti, and the staff didn’t want to let her enter.
In the video, the employees tell the customer repeatedly to leave the premises, saying it’s private property and that they have a right to refuse her service.
“You need to let me go into the restroom … I’m a patron here,” the customer responds from behind the camera. “I should not be excluded and other people allowed.”
One of the employees offers to let her use another restroom in the cafe and someone else offers her use of a facility in a neighboring business. They accuse her of only wanting to enter the restroom in question to get a video of the graffiti.
“I know Israel loves taking private property and saying it’s their own, but we gotta have—,” an employee says at one point.
“Why are you afraid I’ll take a picture of it?” the customer asks. Ultimately they allow her inside, and she captures the messages on camera.
“History didn’t start in 1948, lady,” an employee says to the customer, referring to the year the state of Israel was founded. “Free Palestine.”
The video ends there, but the back-and-forth has continued—now between the cafe’s owners and its employees, who have issued competing statements after the incident came to light.
Farley’s owners apologize, say customers should feel safe in cafe
On Tuesday or Wednesday of the week following the Sunday, Dec. 3, incident, the video was posted by the X (formerly Twitter) account @StopAntisemites. The account soon took down the video, apparently at the request of the customer who filmed it, but not before it had spread far and wide, earning coverage by the likes of the NY Post, Newsweek, and more. In response to the video, other social media accounts posted personal information and photos of the staff involved in the incident and of their family members, with some labeling the workers “Jew haters.”
The owners of Farley’s East, Amy and Chris Hillyard, posted an apology note about the incident on social media mid-week, saying the graffiti was “hate speech” and that staff “handled the situation poorly.” Then, on Friday, the business announced on Instagram it would “pause” operations for the weekend.
The cafe remained closed Monday, and the owner statements have been deleted, replaced with a new, longer statement. The latest message said the employees involved in the restroom incident are no longer employed at Farley’s East.
Adan Ortega, a former Farley’s manager, said that three people were fired at the end of last week, and three or four more quit in support of their coworkers.
“Events like these strike fear in the Jewish community and perpetuate the rise of anti-Semitism in our community and around the world,” wrote the Hillyards, who own a second cafe in San Francisco along with outposts at the Oakland and San Francisco airports. “We do not tolerate any behavior at Farley’s that makes anyone feel unsafe.”
The owners continued: “As human beings, our hearts hurt for every single person who’s been affected by the pain and suffering that’s occurred in the Middle East since the harrowing events of October 7th,” referring to Hamas’ attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 people and took about 240 hostages, and Israel’s bombardment and ground forces in Gaza, which have killed about 18,000 people.
“Nothing we can say can adequately capture the pain and terror that Hamas inflicted on innocent civilians, nor the horrific suffering and loss of innocent Palestinian lives in Gaza since then,” they said.
Employees say owner knew about the graffiti for weeks
Over the weekend, a group of former and current Farley’s East employees spoke out too, alleging that their bosses misrepresented what happened at the cafe and criticizing them for letting go of long-term staff. They said the now-infamous video shows only part of their interaction with the customer.
The employees, calling themselves “Former Farley’s East United,” said the customer, upon seeing the restroom graffiti, yelled at staff and blocked them from doing their work before she started to film them.
They also claimed that Chris Hillyard was aware of the graffiti for weeks and did not take steps to remove it until the video went viral. The messages were scrawled in October, said Ortega, the former manager.
“I assume they were doing damage-control and trying to appease and comply with the people posting the video,” said Ortega, who wasn’t at the cafe during the incident but said he resigned on Friday in solidarity with the terminated employees. “They wanted to assert that they themselves were not antisemitic—but were willing to imply that staff were.”
A spokesperson for the Hillyards, Jason Overman, said the owners are not doing interviews, as their statement “speaks for itself.” He declined to answer follow-up questions about when the owners knew about the graffiti.
Employees said the claims that they’re antisemitic and mistreated the customer because she’s Jewish are false.
“We condemn the genocide being committed against the people of Gaza, and we stand against the continuous displacement and oppression of the West Bank by the Israeli government,” their statement said. “We stand against racism and antisemitism in all its forms.”
Ortega, the former manager, told The Oaklandside that he could not speak to whether the employees in the video feel they should have handled anything differently.
“Despite what is shown in the video, I think the impetus for everything that happened is on the owners,” he said, adding that the Hillyards did not react to the graffiti or penalize employees until “they felt their business was going to be impacted.”
“We all worked with them through the pandemic and helped the cafe get through the pandemic,” Ortega said. “We’re all just shocked that, despite what we thought was a good relationship, as soon as a customer that was a stranger to them [criticizes them], those relationships ended immediately.”
The group of staff is calling for a boycott of Farley’s East. Ortega said they want safety measures put in place for remaining staff and an assurance that employees won’t be “thrown under the bus” in future cases.
Incidents increasing nationally but not new for Oakland
The legality of the employee’s behavior and the subsequent firing by the owners is “complicated,” said Catherine Fisk, a professor at Berkeley Law who specializes in employment and labor law.
“They have statutory protections against being terminated in retaliation for political activity,” she told The Oaklandside. “But the statutes dont give employees the right to harass customers or coworkers on the job in the name of political activity. What most employers expect, and this is not controversial, is staff will behave better than irate customers.”
The Farley’s East incident, while among the most viral, is hardly the only time that political tensions have erupted in an Oakland business. The refusal by Hasta Muerte to serve a uniformed police officer at the collectively run Fruitvale coffee shop made national news in 2018. The year prior, controversy swirled around Reem’s California in the same neighborhood, over a colorful mural of Palestinian activist Rasmea Odeh, who was convicted of involvement in a bombing in Jerusalem in 1969.
These flashpoints have increased dramatically over the past two months, locally and nationally.
“If the University of Pennsylvania president can be forced out of office,” said Fisk, “it does not surprise me, in this day and age, that employees on all sides of this are going to lose their job when an incident of somebody expressing strong views on one side or another of this Middle East dispute goes viral.”
Correction: This story previously misstated that 15,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since Oct. 7. The accurate number is over 18,000, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
