The reporters, Brian M. Rosenthal and Eliza Shapiro, interviewed more than 275 people, translated documents from Yiddish and the gibberish used by American officialdom, and analysed “millions of rows of data.” The result is a damning picture of a community whose schools, one of the largest in New York’s private school sector, are “failing by design,” and soaking the taxpayer with a wink from elected officials.
In 2019, more than 1,000 students at the Central United Talmudical Academy in Brooklyn took New York State’s standardised tests in maths and English. Every single one of them failed.
In 2018, former officials of the academy pleaded guilty to defrauding the federal government’s Child & Adults Care Program of over $3m in reimbursements for school meals that the school had never served. The Chasidic yeshivas, Rosenthal and Shapiro say, “systemically” deny a basic secular education to their boys, “trapping many in a cycle of joblessness and dependency”, while “tapping into enormous sums of government money”, much of it earmarked for the poorest and neediest Americans.
The First Amendment protects religious freedom and the right to run religious schools. But no schools are exempt from federal and state laws, whether they concern physical safety or the syllabus. The law is not applied equally. The NYT’s reporters were affronted that corporal punishment is common in the Chasidic boys’ schools. But this is not illegal, merely obnoxious. New York State bans corporal punishment in state-funded schools but it permits corporal punishment in private schools.
The NYT didn’t say whether it was the Jews, the Catholics or the old-time WASPs who lobbied for that one. Nor did it give the necessary context. New York State’s public schools, especially in the greater New York City area, underperform by national standards, often disastrously. In 2014, Families for Excellent Schools, which campaigns for charter schools, reported that at 90 NYC public schools not a single black or Hispanic student had passed the Common Core testing standards. That, though, was by accident, not design.
This is classic American graft. The system won’t change from within or without. The teachers’ union opposes charter schools and any other meaningful reform, and elected officials go easy on the Chasidic schools because they are “bowing to the influence of Chasidic leaders who push their followers to vote as a bloc”. This, and issues such as tax evasion and welfare fraud, are an open secret.
We can question the NYT’s motives. This is the paper that joined then-mayor Bill de Blasio in blaming frum Jews for spreading Covid at services but applauded the mask-free vandals of the Black Lives Matter protests. But that is “whataboutery”.
The Chasidic schools are exploiting a chaotic and corrupt system in an immoral and apparently illegal fashion. The leaders of their community are using their followers’ electoral power to intimidate elected officials. The books that the Chasidic students do read in school include the concept Din malchuta malchuta: “The law of the land is the law.” When Jews break it so blatantly, it reflects badly on all of us.
