Americans have been mourning Elizabeth II like she was one of their own. President Biden, usually no friend of Britain, has ordered that the flags on federal buildings remain at half-mast until after the Queen’s funeral. In TV studios, the producers and runners say “I’m sorry for your loss,” before I opine on the TV and radio shows that are running wall-to-wall royal coverage. The Queen’s ethic of civility and decency reflects well on all of us, even far from home.
The exceptions, of course, come from minor academics and the New York Times. It even found a minor Harvard academic willing to claim that the Queen who presided over the age of decolonisation had really been a front for “colonial violence,” including being “a white face on all the coins, notes and stamps circulated in a rapidly diversifying nation.”
The last time I checked, the face on the coins was the colour of brass or silver. The NYT has committed itself to being the Facebook of the left. This is lucrative for its proprietors, the Sulzbergers, and no doubt thrilling for the kind of readers who enjoy that sort of thing. But it is a shame that a paper once known for its seriousness should have become so trivial.
Still, it’s not all bad news. Or rather, it is bad, and it’s not really news, but it’s still pretty good journalism. This week, the NYT also reported that more than 100 boys schools run for and by Chasidic Jews in the New York City area have received more than $1 billion in public funding in the last four years, while also failing to teach their pupils the basics of secular education.
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.
