By Rabbi Yair Hoffman for 5TJT.com
The New York Times has written a one-sided attack against the Yeshiva and Torah community that is so filled with inaccuracies and half-stories that it is reminiscent of Tsarist-era attack on the great institutions of Volozhin and other Yeshivos, started by Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin – student of the Vilna Gaon.
With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the article would have been more aptly titled, “How do I hate thee? Let Me Count the Ways..”
- The NYT writes: “The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York’s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring.” –
This is grossly inaccurate, as the Hasidic Jewish community is not one monolithic entity, but a number of independent Hasidic groups. NYT lumping them all together is not only inaccurate but it seems designed to pander to hate groups – creating a THEM versus us mindset.
- The NYT writes: But in 2019, the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students. Every one of them failed.
What the NYT failed to point out is that The National Center for Fair & Open Testing issued a report that tallies cases of cheating on standardized tests in 37 states across the country. How do the public schools in the report cheat?
- – Encourage teachers to view upcoming test forms before they are administered.
- – Exclude likely low-scorers from enrolling in school.
- – Drill students on actual upcoming test items.
- – Use thumbs-up/thumbs-down signals to indicate right and wrong responses.
- – Erase erroneous responses and insert correct ones.
- – Report low-scorers as having been absent on testing day.
This particular school did none of that. What is egregious about the article is that there is no mention of this at all anywhere in the article. Why is that? Perhaps it is about the timing. New York State Board of Regents plans to vote on Monday as to whether to adopt equivalency guidelines for Yeshivos.
- The NYT writes: Students at nearly a dozen other schools run by the Hasidic community recorded similarly dismal outcomes that year, a pattern that under ordinary circumstances would signal an education system in crisis. But where other schools might be struggling because of underfunding or mismanagement, these schools are different. They are failing by design.
It must be pointed out that the pass rate of a nearby public school was in the high forty percentile – and that is with the cheating that everyone seems to be ignoring. Is there something rotten in the State of the New York Times here? Why is there no indictment or investigation of the public schools system that is a direct product of the New York Board of Regents? Could it possibly be for the same reason that the New York Times has attacked the religious Jewish community for decades?
- The NYT writes: 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.
Really, brutally? Was there an internal board meeting of the NYT brass to create a boogeyman here? There are states in this country such as Louisiana, Georgia, and North Carolina that do allow corporal punishment in the public school system and since 1985, New York state has not. But there is no law against it regarding private schools. Does it happen in some Hasidic yeshivos? Yes, but it is rare. The NYT article however included this to create a caricature of “those evil Hasidics..”
- The NYT writes: The result, a New York Times investigation has found, is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.
Really? Trapped in a cycle of joblessness? Let’s break down New York City’s joblessness rates, shall we? According to US Census Bureau data conducted this decade, 19% in the Fordham/Morris Heights area of the Bronx (District 14). The top five City Council districts for highest unemployment were Districts 14, 15, 16, and 17 in the south and central West Bronx, and District 10 in north Manhattan. Hasidic Jews are by and large employed or studying. Many of their wages are low, true, but the focus of this ethnic community is to enter into business and they do that from the ground up.
- The NYT writes: The Segregated by gender, the Hasidic system fails most starkly in its more than 100 schools for boys. Spread across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, the schools turn out thousands of students each year who are unprepared to navigate the outside world..The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education.
Of course, the New York Times states categorically that the rigors of Talmudic reasoning and deduction is “inadequate.” But even the neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic, professor Kevin Macdonald, a psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach, has written that Talmudic education has created a system that sharpens the minds of its students and by virtue of the fact that the best minds are sought after economically by would be fathers-in-law, it has created through evolutionary processes a people that test some twenty points higher on Alfred Binet’s standard tests
- The NYT writes: The Times found that “the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.”
There is the boogeyman again. It is nice to mention the word “Billion.” It is scary and causes people to cry, “Thieves! You are stealing our money!!” But let’s just do the math here. Assuming that these schools have 100,000 students that comes out to $2500 per child. How much does the New York City public school system pay for each child? It is $28,004.00. And again, no mention of this at all in the article.
- Warned about the problems over the years, city and state officials have avoided taking action, bowing to the influence of Hasidic leaders who push their followers to vote as a bloc and have made safeguarding the schools their top political priority.
Well, yeah. Jewish education is as important to observant Jews as water is to fish. And yes, Hasidic leaders push their constituents to vote. My dear Grey Lady, is this statement an ad hominem attack on democracy itself? Do you negate the very foundation of this country – in dismissing the voice of the democratic votes of people who hold their religion and observance dear to their hearts? Are all votes created equal, but some votes are more equal than others?
These are just the tip of the iceberg of the hatchet job. For shame, New York Times, for shame.
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20 Responses
The article addresses many of the items R’ Hoffman says are not addressed, including the fact yeshivos are not part of a network and public schools collect much more in public funding.
The response about zero Satmar kids passing the test is a bit silly. All of the public school kids who passed were cheating?? Only the Chasidish schools don’t cheat?
It may be time for the non-chasidish schools to part ways with the chasidish schools because our General Studies departments, although not perfect, are very different than many of the chasidish yeshivos. My childrens’ yeshiva does state testing and the students pass by large margins.
People who are deeply concerned with Chinuch know that there are areas where improvement is needed. The nonsensical opinions of the Times are not important. But it is important to ask ourselves how well our system succeeds in producing erliche Yidden who can function well – both spiritually and in the practical world. That’s a more worthwhile discussion than concocting absolutely ludicrous “rebuttals” to the Times critique – such as claiming that all the goyim cheat and we don’t.
(Ignore my previous post sorry accidentally hit the post button prematurely)
Puleeeeze! Rabbi Hoffman you used to be good, lately even your halachic articles are often one sided.
I’ll give you a good example. A family member of mine used to work in a pediatric medical office in Williamsburg. Sometimes forms needed to be filled out. Usually the mothers brought the kids in but when the father’s came in instead she’d have a problem. The cooler dads filled out the forms. But when the more farfrumt dads showed up, well they’d look at the form, stare at it, krechtz a little like they weren’t sure what they were reading. Then say to the staff, uhhh when my wife comes in next time, she’ll fill it out. They didn’t want to admit that they had trouble reading the forms!
The NYT article clearly had an agenda but some of R’ Hoffman’s efforts at rebuttal are equally offensive, especially the repeated theme that all of the public school test results are the results of pervasive “cheating”.
i have 9 children who all graduated UTA and 3 of them have their own business employing over 70 people and the other five have very good jobs and do not live off any government funding. I must admit i always had my kids tutored when they came home from school to achieve a bit more but 90% of their studies was given by the Teachers at UTA.
Of course as the world knows that the New York Times and all other news outlets are FAKE news , so is this article against Chsidishe institutions.
I applaud R Hoffman on this excellent NYT article for Der Stormer. Let’s not delude ourselves to think NYT is going to stop with math and science. They want to teach their agenda in our yeshivas. Just like the misyavnim they won’t stop until “Kisvu Al keren she’ll shor ain lanu chelek b Elokay Yisrael”. We have to show an unified front to stop this racist paper.
Gadolhadrah thinks he is the smatest from everyone
Let’s see… at this time in NYC (and in many parts of the US and the world) violent crime is rampant; most of these violent criminals who are repeat offenders, are products of the public school’s system, none are from Chassidic schools. At this time, public AND private schools are busy brainwashing the students with non-sensical and dangerous material, for example pro-Marxism, (Project Veritas has videos of taped principles of PRIVATE secular schools explaining their agendas). The currents students from public school, dropouts as well as graduates, do not know basic math, do not have basic English skills and are entitled, depressed and depraved and barely functioning as a society. Public AND private secular schools are teaching the kids as young as preschool “gender studies”, they are brainwashing them that “they are really the other gender they were assigned at birth”, which encourages these kids to take hormone blockers and do have surgeries done to mutilate themselves in their early teenage years.
Meanwhile Chassidishe and Yeshivishe kids are comparatively mentally and emotionally healthy; I say comparatively because the so-called “mental health therapists, psychologists and all the “experts” in this growing cult are chipping away at the health of our communities and we are assigning “mental diseases” to what is a lack in chinuch in middos and lacking to make aware our children of bechira instead they are becoming helpless victims. But compared to the secular world, our children are gold. It’s a pity we are letting the garbage called “mental health” continue to makes inroads to decay the health of our children because of lazy parenting and stressful school schedules. Instead of learning from the destruction the “mental health experts” are causing in the secular world with soaring suicide rates, acceptance of perversion and no responsibility for one’s actions due to the influence of the “mental health experts” we are giving these cultists more and more power to be “mechanech” our kids with pills and “therapy” while the issues in children are growing bigger; just check out the growing divorce rate in our communities which is one manifestation of their growing influence due to the neglect of parents to instill good middos in their children (thus turning to these “mental health experts” for therapy and pills to “save” their child…)
As for mentioing the amount of money going to frum moisdos it is disgusting to mention the money being spent on our students while neglecting to compare how much public school students are costing the state and neglecting to mention as well that a huge chunk of the taxes WE PAY are funding public schools (who are failing to pass the minimum grades ). The state pays an exorbitant amount of money per public school students, with a large percentage of them being children of illegals or illegals themselves. WE ARE PAYING WAY MORE FOR THEM. The public officials of NYS are criminals in this (and in other regards), constantly raising taxes and overburdening us. We are getting back a little of what we pay towards the system and nothing more.
One point (besides for the “mental health professionals” encroaching on our children’s chinuch which is disastrous) is that is absolutely debilitating for those Chassidishe men who do not to know the basics of English; they should be able to fill out forms and and perform basic functions in the English language. Every cheder must teach the basics of the English language, it is neglect and bordering on abusive control to withhold the basics of what is NEEDED TO FUNCTION AS FRUM INDIVIDUALS.
Seems a simple solution would be for these schools to commission a longitudinal data study of their students, their grades, tests scores and eventual outcomes (i.e. drs, colleges attended, schleppers, millionaires etc).
Please be honest? The article has nothing to do with yeshivas. It’s about the Hassidic school system. Why is Rabbi Hoffman being disingenuous in his title pretending that the NYT wrote about Yeshivos?
Unfortunately the article was 100% accurate
Long Island yid,
How is it when the Hispanic parents walked in and did the same thing and needed an interpreter to talk to?
Where I work there are a lot of Hispanics that work with me and a lot of them don’t know English, oh you would say we have forms in Spanish
SO THEN HAVE FORMS IN YIDDISH!
Long island Yid, “The cooler dads filled out the forms.”
Huh, the cooler dads went to the same yeshivah. Don’t you realize that you are proving that it has nothing to do with education.
Lots of silly things in this rebuttal, but let’s start with the claim that it’s “one-sided”. As the NYT article says multiple times, they have reached out to Hasidic schools but the schools did not respond to a request for comment. When the schools are intentionally fostering an atmosphere of opacity, it is the schools’ fault that their side is not properly represented. And anyway, there is no “other side” to consider, since the agenda of Hasidic schools has been explicit and public for a long time.
woodman516 You shouldn’t have commented here. Saying someone thinks they’re “ the smartest from everyone” is basically proving the nyt’s point. Do you know how ignorant you sound? To have been born an educated here and talk like that? BIZYOINES! I cringe when guys like you jump into conversations with educated people brandishing your crippled ( farkriplteh) heimisheh English. It’s so embarrassing for all the rest of us. You do more damage than help. Just be quiet till you learn the language. As far as gedolahadorah; she’s just a democrat hack probably a not a shomer shabbos
Regardless of whether you agree with Rabbi Hoffman or not the blatant “love” demonstrated by the likes of “Gadolhadorah” (what a misnomer) and its ilk is disgusting.
Fech.
You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Shnayzin123 coming in with impressive pronoun sensitivity re gadolahadorah : the diyuk being “it’s ilk” . 😀
I hope it thanks you !
There is plenty wrong with Rabbi Hoffman’s criticism of the New York Times article. Here are a few that I want to highlight.
Rabbi Hoffman’s comment 1: If you read more than the first paragraph, you will see that the Times article clearly indicates that there are many independent Hasidic yeshivas, each of which makes its own policy and curriculum. And my guess is that antisemites do not read the Times or other newspaper with their morning coffee, or morning 40, or morning meal.
Rabbi Hoffman’s comment 2: This comment is just “whataboutism,” i.e., a criticism that the article overlooked an issue or bundle of facts. The article was focused on Hasidic education. There is no need for to mention the failures of the public or other school systems.
Rabbi Hoffman’s comment 3: More whataboutism. Yes, the public schools have lots of failures, some worse that the Hasidic system. They don’t have to be mentioned in an article about Hasidic education failures.
Rabbi Hoffman’s comment 4: The last sentence, alleging malice against the New York Times, is unsupported by facts. Show me the facts, and I will respect your opinion.
Rabbi Hoffman’s comment 5: More Whataboutism. Being better than other low-performing school systems does not make you good.
Rabbi Hoffman’s comment 6: Yes, the rigors of Talmudic reasoning are highly valuable, but the Hasidic schools fail to connect that skill to the skills that would enable Hasidic boys to apply Talmudic reasoning to the rest of Creation. Hashem delivered Torah to Moses and the Jewish people, but Hashem also created the world, and Hashem wants us to understand all of Creation, not only the Torah.