The Orthodox Jew-obsessed New York Times hasn’t had its fill of attacks against religious Jewish schools, with the writers of its infamous anti-Jewish hit pieces asking for more people to talk to them about their experience in yeshivas.
“The New York Times is continuing to report on education in NY’s Hasidic community, as well as in other Orthodox Jewish community. We want to collect as many personal stories as we can, from all perspectives,” NYT journalist Brian Rosenthal wrote on Twitter.
Based on emails Rosenthal has been sending to people in the Orthodox Jewish communities, it appears he specifically wants to target special education programs in Jewish schools.
“We’ve heard that in recent years, some boys schools and girls schools in the Hasidic community (and in the larger Orthodox community, too) have been increasingly pushing to classify their students as special education in order to obtain more government funding, but have not been providing students with high-quality services,” Rosenthal wrote in his email. “We’ve also heard that many schools have high rates of students in special education. We are trying to assess whether this is all true or not, and we’re looking for any evidence we can find.”
Rep. Lee Zeldin, who proudly supported yeshivas in his recent bid for New York governor, responded to a tweet from another NYT reporter, Jay Root, asking for information about yeshivas.
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21 Responses
It amazes me how frum Jews still regard the NYT as their authentic source of news. Although it’s been vitriolically antisemitic for many years.
It’s not hate. They shouldn’t use public funds, period.
You should block out the number and contact of The New York Times reporter. Plenty of people who read The Yeshiva World would love to make up stories about Yeshivas. And of course a virulently anti-Semitic tabloid like the The New York Times is going to take their information as true. No questions asked. Then they will embellish it with some lies of their own.
Frum yidden who use the internet should respond to that request, so the antisemitic reporter will get an overwhelming number of positive reports on yeshivos, which is the correct proportion.
Huju’s has The Times on speed dial and he/she is diligently preparing his/her report! Stay tuned!
After the US declared war on Germany , American journalists in Berlin were rounded up, placed under SS guard, and interned for five months in an unheated, under-provisioned hotel outside Frankfurt — except for one. The NYT reporter, Guido Enderis ,was kept in a posh hotel because of his “proved friendliness to Germany,” The Nazis YM’S were correct in their assessment of him and the paper he worked for. So glowing was its picture of it’s regime that the Nazis regularly included New York Times reports in their own radio programs.
Today eighty years later, the reporters have changed, the enemies we face have changed. But The New York Times has not changed. It still aspires to be like Der Strumer.
The New York Times buried stories about reporting that Nazi Holocaust during WWII.
Rabosai:
It’s time to react. Anyone that has connections to major advertisers in NYT, take your business elsewhere. Their biggest revenue is from selling advertising, and we need to hit them in the pocketbook. All the messages about truth and morality will never produce a change. Hit them where it hurts.
Of course “schools have been increasingly pushing to classify their students as special education in order to obtain more government funding”, and thus “have high rates of students in special education”. ALL schools are doing that. The government, by providing the funding, deliberately created an incentive for schools to do exactly that; who can pretend to be surprised that schools, not being stupid, are doing it? As for the quality of the services provided, they’re of at least the quality provided by public schools, and who has the right to demand anything more than that? How are you measuring quality anyway? It’s inherently subjective; your measurement criteria are not the same as ours. We’re satisfied with the quality, and that’s all that matters.
Everyone should fill out this survey and express disapproval of their upcoming antiemetic propaganda.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/reader-center/new-york-hasidic-schools-experience.html
Better yet, call Brian directly on the number listed, or Jay Root at 5127505477
Worst case scenario, we flood their inbox/phones instead of others.
I felt that a lot of the rhetoric around the time of the election smacked of “Kochi ViOtzem Yadi”.
“We will all go out and stop them !!” Etc.
We are in Golus.
For thousands of years we have suffered the worst forms of discrimination and oppression. BH, in our recent lifetimes we haven’t really experienced that here in this Medina Shel Chessed.
Perhaps we can be outraged by unfair discrimination. But it’s really nothing new. We are a sheep amongs 70 wolves. Until the RBSHO has rachmanus on us.
We can do whatever we need to do as Hishtasdlua. But please- primarily we need to DAVEN for rachamei shamayim….
NYT isn’t the Judge just a horrid evil voice ___ Nazi’s…..Zeldin can’t help, nut job is married to a MORMON….sorry Zeldin RIS……all you can do is PRAY
The NYT has been anti-Semitic since the days it refused to report on the Holocaust. Why would it change now?
Hahahaha!
You fools VOTED for this! You wanted Dems, YOU GOT THEM!
PS,
@Sara Rifka, methinks thou dost protest too much! Could it be that YOU have some goy skeletons in YOUR closet?
I think we should be a little more objective here. And we should be a bit more honest with ourselves. The NYT like any other (non Jewish) newspaper does not abide by the laws of lashon horah! It is very common for journalists to do an expose on organizations or individuals even though that by definition paints those organizations in a very bad light. So when the NYT does an expose on Hasidic Yeshivas and it so happens that everything they write is true, that does not qualify as a “hit piece” nor is it in any way anti-Semitic. They did not at all smear the entire Hasidic community the article was specifically about the Hasidic Yeshivas. It is extremely unfortunate s that this comes out into the spotlight but when someone does something we don’t like that does not make them an anti- semite.
For all those who call it a hit-piece how about coming out with some solid facts. please tell us what exactly in the NYT article is false?
Give these NYT couple of Special AD programs (specially for
mental retarted ) the’ll be quiet…………………FULL OF S
YMSV
To sickofidiots: Please read this carefully, you self-hating idiot: I do not have The New York Times on speed-dial, and I do not report to it. I don’t like people (or whatever you are) lying about me, you lying liar. Try to learn the difference between your suppositions and actual facts.
They’re not wrong. Our quality of actual education is lower. Jewish schools specifically chassidish chadarims’ education systems are of terrible quality. It’s embarrassing. It’s crippling. It’s wrong.
Yabadabadoo Omer is a moron
Kach: My family were close with Rabbi Kahane HY”D and he would NOT have approved of the tone you take with Sara Rifka. She and I have had our share of differences in the past, but I would never hurl invective upon her in such a way. She is a בת ישראל with very strong faith in the Almighty and should thus be accorded our respect.
Now, as for the article:
As an educator for over two decades in both public schools as well as yeshivot who holds three M.A.’s and is in candidacy for his doctorate, I think myself qualified to opine on this subject. One of the areas in which many Jewish schools get it right is special education. Having taught, administered, and consulted across the spectrum from Modern Orthodox schools in New Jersey to Charedi and Chassidic schools in NYC as well as in public schools in both NY and NJ, I can tell you that the Jewish community AS A GROUP are careful to meet the minimum guidelines for SE.
This does not mean there are not to be found in our midst schools that fudge the numbers and where the teachers do the proverbial once-over with their students. In my own career, I have taken professional measures on several occasions to ensure that an unqualified, unmotivated, or indifferent principal be terminated.
One area in which there is room for improvement is the degree to which students who receive an IEP (Individualized Education Program) are tended to. Another pressing issue in our schools is the need for more differentiated instruction as well as DI (Direct Instruction), which are crucial as yeshivot host students who occupy all segments of the fast-slow and continuum.
Conditions such as Asperger’s, Tourette’s and TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) are generally dealt with better in Modern Orthodox schools. The more right-wing yeshivot often meet only the minimum standards expected in such situations.
The classical methods of instruction used in most Charedi schools, that is, schools with a Luddite view regarding the use of technology, are not adequate to many learners. Indeed, reading and lecturing yield low rates of retention as compared with group discussion, practice and implementation, which yield retention rates of fifty, seventy-five and ninety percent.
There are techniques for the instruction of abstract ideas that if practiced with regularity could yield surprisingly high comprehension and retention rates even among auditory/visual/tactile learners whose natural learning styles are often neglected, misperceived, or undiscovered. When these techniques are not put into practice, such students often occupy the lower end of the competency spectrum among their peers. I should note that these techniques work wonders for hesitant learners, not to mention for mathematics and Talmud instruction.
Putting aside the values-based issue of the use of instructional technology for a moment, we as a community should consider that online learning and even the use of a closed Intranet system have proved highly beneficial in the learning process. Many in our community still lack these resources for sociological or environmental reasons, such as working parents, lack of learning assistance, lack of technology skills, or a lack of specific expectations for online or offline technology-based learning, to name just a few possible explanations.
Effective notetaking, the use of manipulatives, and organizational skills are critical to the success of our students. Also, forms of motivational salience should be put into practice whereby a reward is used to reinforce desired learning outcomes or approach behavior. Incentivized learning works. I repeat: Incentivized learning works.
In all schools, it is highly probable that a program of evaluation, teacher-parent communication, incentivized learning, and task analysis can and will ameliorate the impact felt both by mainstream and SE students who have undergone a flagging period in their schoolwork. This routine supports the well-being of children during this unprecedented time when older methods of instruction prove themselves to be insufficient and obsolete. Yet in the more right-wing yeshivot, these techniques are often not employed or even known to the teacher.
וְאַחֲרֵי כִּכְלוֹת הַכֹּל – There is room for improvement in our schools. That being said, except in very rare cases, the yeshivot are not the chaotic incubators of subliterate antisocial inaptitude the NYT is portraying them to be. Past that, a glaring error in understanding permeates much of the criticism, at times warranted and sincere, leveled at the yeshivot, which is as follows:
Many nonproficient English students in the Charedi and Chassidic yeshivot have very high literacy rates in rabbinic text. I have done intervention with many of these young people who would be considered gifted and classified as AT (Academically Talented) in the public schools if their scholarly achievements in secular studies were coextensive with their proficiency in limudei kodesh. Based on my own identification processes, which in the past have included the Harvard-outline format, these gemara kep, these Talmud scholars, demonstrate high ability in literacy.
To illustrate, when consulting on these students, I ask what chapter of which tractate they are currently learning. I then look up the chapter and devise an outline that traces the flow of a given sugya, leaving out key elements for them to fill in orally or in writing. I have been amazed at the keenness and retentiveness of some of these learners who would otherwise be considered subliterate by the educational establishment.
That gifted boys of 15 are able to read diverse rabbinic texts independently, texts that employ several forms of Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic and which operate according to a hermeneutical system that would impress any professor of Logic, is a marvel. Such young Torah scholars should be celebrated. Despite my own modernity and my being an insider in the field of education, I worry that the push for punitive measures vis-a-vis standardization will interfere with the success that such exceptional learners in the yeshivot have thus far achieved. For others, though, I strongly advocate the methods I’ve already mentioned.
The thirst for knowledge is ever-present across the spectrum of the Jewish community. It is also the case that for values-based reasons, the more staunchly Orthodox opt for one form of literacy over another. One of my goals is to form a streamlined system of secular studies for the Ultra-Orthodox schools in NY, which meets all state-mandated standardization requirements and is in keeping with what might be called heimish values.
There is much more to be said on these issues, but I’ll leave it at that.
@ Ari Knobler:
What you are writing about is entirely irrelevant. The NYT did not say the Yeshiva students are anti social. They only stated the fact that the students are not getting a secular education which the Yeshivos are required to give by law. The point of the article is that the Chasidish Yeshivos are getting alot of government funding but are providing almost no secular education. That they are able to learn Gemarrah does not qualify according to NYS law.
By the way I don’t know which yeshiva you had the zchus to teach in but from my experience most boys 15 years old would not be able to learn a blatt Gemarrah on their own. In fact I would venture to say that the majority of yeshiva graduates (even Yeshiva Gedolah) have difficulty understanding talmudic texts on theit own. Sure they can listen to a shiur and debate it but that is not the same as learning on their own. Just go into any Shul and see for yourself how many learn on their own versus go to a Daf Yomi shiur? How many can learn the text without aid of an Artscroll Gemarrah? I’m sure that “gifted” students have no problem learning Gemarrah but the “gifted are a tiny minority.