By Andrew L. Jaffee

A Russian-owned shop in Brooklyn, calling itself the “Costco of the ethnic Eastern European market,” has stopped selling packages of sunflower seeds sporting a very anti-Semitic label after pressure from local Jewish groups. This is not an isolated incident, as anti-Semitism is on the rise in the U.S. It is disgusting to think that the shop owners would even consider stocking their shelves with such blatantly bigoted branding. Here are the details from Ynet:

A Russian food chain in Brooklyn stocked and sold dozens of packages of roasted sunflower seeds featuring a caricature of a greedy and sinister-looking Jew wearing a skullcap on the label, Ynet learned on Wednesday.

The Cyrillic letters on the left of the label read, “Shalom, from Israel,” while the right side employs a slang phrase meaning “spit them out everywhere,” alluding to “dirty Jews.”

The packages drew the ire of Brooklyn’s Jewish community, prompting the food chain’s owners, the Shnayder family, to pull the packages from the shelves in all four of Net Cost Market’s Brooklyn locations.

Net Cost Market describes itself as the “Costco of the ethnic Eastern European market,” and offers a wide variety of imports from all over Eastern Europe. The roasted sunflower seeds are produced in the Former Soviet Union by Kremlin Kitchen. …

According to [Amos Hermon, head of the Jewish Agency's Anti-Semitism Task Force], the US has seen a sharp increase in anti-Semitism due to the global economic crisis, adding that some of the images and slogans posted against Jews on the Internet have not been seen there in years. In most cases, he said, the websites claim that a “Jewish conspiracy” was behind the fiscal meltdown.

Will it ever change? Will Jews always be the minority to take the blame for all the world’s ills?