NEW YORK — I don’t write this to score points or gain any followers, I write out of fear and frustration. Fear of seeing another wave of antisemitic attacks in the already dangerous to walk streets of NYC and frustration of experiencing the hypocrisy, and double standard we as Jews – unlike any other ethnic group – are exposed to.
As I imagine you already read or at least heard of the New York Times front-page article about the broken Hasidic education system.
The article is as biased and as antisemitic as it can be.
Among others, the NYT wrote: The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools.. they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.
Sounds like the Taliban no? Well, it does and that’s exactly what the NYT wants you to think. Should I read anything like this on any other community I don’t know well, I’d think so too.
Nevertheless, since being part of this community and thereby getting used to negative media coverage, I learned to look at things differently.
I won’t go as far as to say the NYT made up stories. No, they did not. It most probably has occurred in the past cases of teachers abusing children. We’re not perfect and we never will be.
However, in my 13 years in a Hasidic school, neither the above nor teachers brutally drilling students was something I ever experienced. The NYT cherry-picked rare unfortunate stories and with that besmirched not only an entire school or community but most (or at least a great percent of) Orthodox Jews.
Corporal punishment is something that is still used in ‘some’ Hasidic schools but even so, very rarely and in an extreme vigilant way.
Would it be hard to paint the public school system as broke and a place where teachers rape children, force them to take nude photos, and convince 11-year-olds to change their identities?
No, because all of this actually happened in the past few months.
Another truth-twisting line from the Times article was about the $1 Billion in aid Hasidic schools benefited from over the past 4 years. Now, if you take a closer look at those numbers you see a very different story.
This big billion accounted for no more than $5,500 per Yeshiva student compared to a whopping $100,000 per public school student.
So yes, Hasidic schools took the $5K per student to teach Talmud instead of science and ‘drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally. Yet our precious public schools spent $100,000K per child to teach gender studies and critical race theory.
As a result, the Suicide, homicide, and drug rates in our community are virtually zero while the public schools are at record highs with children occasionally taking AR-15s to wipe out entire classrooms. Never in history has there been a mass shooting at a Yeshiva by a Hasidic boy. Yet, there have been 76 school shootings in New York since 1971 and well over 121 nationally since 2018
Never (never ever) has a Hasidic Jew attacked an African American, while antisemitic attacks by the black community are at record highs. The irony is that those African Americans who by in large are public school students/graduates received a ‘so-called’ high-quality education and learned about the Holocaust while we Hasidic Jews only study the ancient Talmud and never learned anything about race and equality.
My goal here is not to smear the public school system but to defend ours. To properly defend yourself you sometimes have to use the offense tool.
The NYT knows better than me, my wife, and tens of thousands of other parents what’s good for their children. The same NYT who doesn’t bother about the 400% YoY increase in antisemitism in NY, the same NYT who didn’t bother when my grandparents were slaughtered to death, they care for my children’s education?!
Another blatant lie the NYT wrote was that “generations of [Yeshiva students] have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency”. Not only didn’t they – even once – mention in this ‘investigative article’ about the thousands of successful entrepreneurs from the Hasidic community but they intentionally ignored facts. Largely Hasidic populated towns like Monsey and Kiryas Joel beat plenty of other places in New York.
Only the Hasidic community can be accused of high unemployment rates and controlling the NY real estate market at the same time. No other ethnicity subject to hate was ever accused of doing both at the same time.
This was the first time in history the NYT published an article in Yiddish. Wondering why? Would the Times ever write an investigative article on Jihadists in the Muslim community in NY? Would it be in Arabic?
In conclusion, I will take the pen and write that word I so hate to use. Antisemitism…
Is the NYT an antisemitic newspaper? I leave that up for others to speculate. What is clear to me though, is that this time antisemitism was the motive.
Are the writers/editors of this article Jewish? So what. Can I be black and endorse the KKK?
Jews have always experienced hate from within. In fact, some of the most influential communists back in Russia were Jewish.
When a newspaper criticizes only Israel ‘and’ the Haredim but has nothing against Jews, I ask what then does it mean to be a Jew? What then defines antisemitism? What else defines a Jew if not his religion and home country?
As reported by VINnews