Liel Leibowitz
Tablet, Sept. 7, 2022
Sometime soon, The New York Times is slated to publish its expose on the state of Hasidic education in New York. Several members of the community who were contacted by the Times expressed their grave concerns to Tablet about the paper’s biases and the likelihood, or lack thereof, that the Times will give Hasidic Jews a fair hearing. One member described the impending piece as “yet another assault.”
It’s a convenient feature of the Times these days that one hardly has to read it to divine what the Gray Lady might utter. And so, unless the muse of objective journalism intervenes in some way none of us should reasonably expect, we can assume the report will read something like this: We’ve talked to dozens of (self-selecting) people in the Hasidic community, reviewed documents handed to us (by interested parties), and were troubled to find that Hasidic schools have fallen far behind. Despite receiving enormous amounts of government assistance, these (money-grubbing) private schools don’t bother teaching children basic tenets like history or science, the result being graduates who are illiterate and an embarrassment. This Dickensian grimness is made possible because those crafty Hasidim vote en masse and hold local politicians under their sway—power these black-hatted Rasputins inexplicably choose not to exert when it comes to charging and convicting assailants who beat up members of their own community.
How to address such allegations?
You could play defense, and say that labeling what goes on in Hasidic yeshivot as strictly religious instruction that bears no relevance to the so-called secular world is woefully unfair. Study page 14 of Tractate Eruvin, for example, and you’ll come across the pronouncement that, “Whatever circle has a circumference of three tefachim must have a diameter of one tefach.” Aha! the average Times reader may growl. But this is wrong! Pi isn’t 3, it’s 3.1415 etc.!. … source
