This month, the New York Times published a lengthy investigation into New York state’s funding of ḥasidic yeshivas and the secular education, or lack thereof, those schools provide. The front-page report, “In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money,” claimed that the state has given one billion dollars over the last four years to ḥasidic yeshivas, which in turn have failed to provide the education in secular subjects like math and reading that the state demands. The story has attracted major attention and elicited outrage: outrage from taxpayers who feel taken advantage of, from ḥasidic families who feel misunderstood, from readers who pity the students that the Times portrays, and from Jewish communal leaders who see in this front-page exposé an attempt to target their schools, teachers, and families.
What’s really going on? To sort things out, Mosaic’s convened a discussion on Tuesday, September 13 with our columnist Eli Spitzer, himself a ḥasidic educator. Last year, Spitzer published a story on this very subject, arguing that those who defend ḥasidic yeshivas against increasing state regulation have conjured up an unrecognizable fairy-tale world—but the arguments of the state’s defenders are even worse. Watch, read, or listen to him and Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver below.
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Jonathan Silver:
Eli, when you read the New York Times piece published on Sunday, were you surprised by anything that you read there? What did you make of it?
Eli Spitzer:
I should first point out that when I saw the copy of the cover of that issue of the New York Times, I had to check my calendar to make sure it was actually 9/11. I thought, “I must have missed something here.” Nevertheless, there we are in the most prominent newspaper in the world, on the most prominent section of that newspaper, on the front page, above the fold, there’s an article about the ḥasidic community in New York and about a topic that I am very familiar with. And I should also say that any close observers of the ḥasidic community are also quite familiar with, but it’s something that probably did come as news to most of the readers.
As a piece of investigative journalism, I can’t really fault it. I must be honest, I kept reading. But I felt there was a particular angle that was being pushed. Primarily by what it chose not to discuss, the Times revealed what it was pushing for. But as far as the investigation goes—the facts that were established, the evidence that was gathered—it was there. And I should say, in a value-neutral way, that it portrays something very similar to the education that I had. I went to a ḥasidic school, I went to ḥasidic yeshivas. It pretty much looked like what the Times described in terms of the quality of secular education.
Corporal punishment—it is true that when I was growing up, twenty years ago, it was more common. I think most people you would ask in the ḥasidic community, would say it still exists just about enough so that you can still say that it does exist, but I think it is certainly more of a legacy of a previous generation. I think that this is actually the first generation of ḥasidic children that are not routinely subjected to corporal punishment. That’s not to say that it never exists, it probably still does. I’m personally aware of isolated incidents, but that’s actually the element that is sort of being phased out.
If you came here expecting me to say that this New York Times piece is a complete fabrication, it isn’t. I am the head teacher of a ḥasidic school, one that looks very different from the one described in the article, I should say, but I went to ḥasidic schools, I attended them, all of my siblings did. And it looks very much like that, and I know that there’s very little difference between the scene in New York and the scene in London.
So in terms of accuracy, in terms of what the investigation found, it is true. I hope that over the course of this discussion it will become clear how those facts can be true, and yet there is still a very different picture to be revealed if someone is actually interested in scratching beyond what this investigation has found.
Jonathan Silver:
But Eli, to begin with, I think it would be valuable if we could just establish some of the basic notes, some of the basic experience of attending a ḥasidic school, a school that I’ve never been to, that I don’t send my children to, that I’m guessing that most of our viewers and listeners don’t have firsthand experience with. What’s it like? How’s it different than what’s found in the New York Times report? Just go beyond that report to allow us inside that kind of institution.
Eli Spitzer:
I think the best that the New York Times can come up with in terms of a description of what ḥasidic schools do is to use the phrase, “They are failing by design.” What the New York Times completely avoids, and didn’t think necessary at all to explain, is what that design is. Surely, it wasn’t just the design to get publicity in the New York Times. What is that design? I think the New York Times is 100-percent correct in pointing out the distinctions between failing inner-city schools in New York or in Los Angeles and deprived communities, and the failures in the ḥasidic community, but all the Times has to say in the piece is that it fails by design. So I think the most important question is to understand, what is that design?
Jonathan Silver:
Before you go into that, I want to underscore and draw out the distinction you’ve just made, because it’s very finely wrought. The distinction that Eli’s just made is this: of course it is true that there are other schools, public schools, that are also not performing well. No one would dispute that. The distinction that I think Eli has just drawn is that, whereas those schools are trying to meet and exceed, let’s say, state standards in mathematics, but despite that effort are failing to, the ḥasidic pedagogical vision is something else. It’s not trying to meet or exceed those standards.
Eli Spitzer:
One more disclaimer is just to say that I’m sure there are people in this conversation, people who feel directly misrepresented in all of this. You could be involved in a ḥasidic school, like I am personally, that looks radically different to what the New York Times is describing, and you can feel like you’re being totally ignored. Well, I’m sorry to say this, but it’s just too bad. The schools that the New York Times describe do represent the majority of ḥasidic schools. They are zooming in particularly on Satmar. For those who want to understand why that’s so important, why Satmar is a useful way of approaching this, I wrote another article about this in Mosaic, which could help people understand that, but they are the dominant ḥasidic movement in New York.
So we are talking about the average mainstream ḥasidic school. There are exceptions; of course, there are also non-ḥasidic Orthodox schools—I feel like the New York Times hasn’t done enough to make that distinction. Well, there’s lots that the New York Times hasn’t done enough of. But we are talking about the big, mainstream ḥasidic schools, and of the 50,000 boys that the New York Times speaks of, let’s say 45,000 of them actually attend the schools that the New York Times describes. Those are schools where almost, I would say, 90 percent of the day is designed—let’s use value-neutral words—so as to give the children an immersive experience in traditional Jewish texts, practices, and customs.
It is very distinct from being an academic exercise. From a very young age, starting with just biblical and talmudic stories, obviously they develop the skills to read Hebrew fluently—that’s very important because that allows you to access the text. All of the instruction takes place in Yiddish, which of course all of the children there speak as a first language. The degree to which they’re able to understand or speak English depends on their own family backgrounds, because there are plenty of ḥasidic homes where enough English is spoken. [Sometimes] the mother would speak English to the children and the father would speak Yiddish so that the children have got enough familiarity. But then there are also families where no English is spoken at all, so the children actually don’t understand any English.
They’re taught in Yiddish for the majority of the day. As they get older, around about the age of seven or eight, secular studies is introduced in the graveyard slot at the end of the day, the last hour or 90 minutes. There is a very implicit understanding, which children pick up on very early, that we do this—and actually the language is not so much, “we do this because that’s what the law forces us to do”— because “yeah, we need a little bit of being able to read and write and add.” But it is very clear [to the children] that this is by no means terribly important. It should never come at the expense of any of the other work that we do during the rest of the day.
I’m sure there are some very hard-working, dedicated people who actually teach those subjects at the end of the day, but they’re not the most qualified teachers. Let’s face it, anyone who wants a successful career as a teacher is not going to choose to work in a ḥasidic school for the last hour of the day. There used to be a trend of actually qualified mainstream teachers who would come because of the hours—it worked for them. After they would finish in public schools, they would come and teach at ḥasidic schools. For some reason, that has fizzled out over the years, so now you’ve got some unqualified teachers. Again, I’m sure they work very hard, but they’re not actually qualified to do that. They deliver the hour or hour-and-a-half with varying degrees of quality and varying degrees of oversight. But the measure of the success of a school would never be the quality of its secular studies department. Any sort of measure of success, whether it’s from the parents, the wider community, or the children, is always about the quality of the religious studies—which is most of the day—the quality of the facilities, the communication with parents, and all sorts of other things, but the school knows that a substandard secular-studies department doesn’t come at too high a cost.
Then when the boys come to the age of thirteen, they turn bar mitzvah. That’s usually when secular studies come to an end and they go off to a new institution, the equivalent of high school. They go off to yeshiva, where the entirety of the day—the day actually gets extended by a few hours into the evening—is all Jewish studies. And Jewish studies, as I said before, is mainly Talmud, but again, in the ḥasidic world, studying Torah is extremely important, but these institutions aren’t really into testing or selecting children academically. It is all about preparing them for successful lives as members of the ḥasidic community. And I want to come back to that point, but I think if I have to give a brief description of what it looks like, I think more or less, this is what it would look like.
Jonathan Silver:
Specify with a little more precision, if you can, your assertion, or rather the Times’s assertion, which you agree with, that because of the way that the boys spend the day, these schools are designed to fail at those other things.
Eli Spitzer:
So I should point out that there is quite a bit of a spectrum, not just a small minority. There is a spectrum in the ḥasidic world of attitudes to secular studies. There is a small minority that is ideologically opposed to any secular studies. One or two of those schools—there’s one such school, a very small one, in London, and I’m sure that in New York there are probably two or three schools like that or bigger numbers—that have zero secular studies at all for strong ideological reasons. The rest of them sit on a spectrum. [For many the approach is], “Yeah, it’s important to be able to hold a basic conversation in English. It’s important to be able to fill out a form,” but not much more than that. Obviously nowhere near preparing for further education, for higher education. None of that. No one believes that that’s a duty that they have, but you’ve got this spectrum of how important secular studies are.
What everyone accepts across the ḥasidic world, with the exception of some pioneers and some boutique projects, is that we [Ḥasidim] do not set out to meet a national standard in secular education—in literacy, numeracy, English, math, science, history, and so on. No one actually sets out to with that objective simply because—I think given I’m someone who actually does this on the frontline—I don’t think communal leaders have actually spent enough time looking at how many hours it would take to deliver a national standard for those subjects, and I think if they had looked into it, it would not be as many as they think it would be. I think the overall feeling is, look, however important secular studies is, it’s nowhere near important enough for me to tamper with whatever else we’re doing the rest of the day.
Delivering a national standard—the New York Times piece talks about standardized tests, which means a national standard of English, math, and science—is just not important to them. It’s not an objective. So as you said before, the distinction between the ḥasidic school that fails and the inner-city, majority-black or -Hispanic school that fails, is that at least on paper, the administrator of the school in the minority areas would say, “We aim to meet national standards.” Now, how sincere that is and how much they’ll blame structural racism instead of doing their job, and how much the unions are keeping teachers at home and actually not delivering education, that’s another thing. But at least they pay lip service to that. Ḥasidic schools do not, public relations excepted. This is simply not part of the mission of these institutions.
Jonathan Silver:
If, ladies and gentlemen, you are noticing that we’re speaking in the negative here, that is on purpose, because the New York Times piece spends an enormous amount of time, first of all, speaking to women and men who for a variety of reasons did not have a good experience [in ḥasidic schools] and have chosen to leave that community. I want to come back to that point because I think even if it doesn’t entirely skew the article, it does influence the way that the story is told and the portrait is painted. But in addition to that, it spends a lot of time explaining the ways in which these schools are failing to meet standards that are not their own. What the piece does not do is sit down with a father or mother of a ḥasidic student and say, “Why are you choosing to affirm this kind of education? Why are you choosing to send your children to this kind of school? What do you want from it?” Maybe we should turn to that positive vision to see if we can understand some part of that.
Eli Spitzer:
Yes, I think it might be helpful to start with a simple question. If you sit and read this New York Times report, you’ve got to ask yourself, “What on earth are all of these parents doing?” I think anyone, even if you take a pretty strong view of Ḥasidim—they’re not your cup of tea, you don’t agree with their lifestyle, you have a problem with their attitude to Israel and various other things—most people would give any parents the credit that they actually love their children and they want what’s best for them. Then you’ve got to start by asking, “Why do they send their children there?” There are other options. And those options don’t have to even be non-Orthodox schools because there are Orthodox Jewish options, non-ḥasidic schools, that offer even an elite standard of secular education, certainly a good standard. And yet, the majority of these parents choose to send their children there [to ḥasidic schools].
I would say something even more interesting—and no one has done the work on this, and I’m not even sure how you would do the work—anecdotally, I can tell you as someone who’s been in education for twelve or thirteen years, I would say a majority of parents, and I’ve dealt with thousands of them, would want a better standard of secular education. And yet, these parents wouldn’t consider sending their children to any other school. That raises the question, why? What are they getting from those schools that isn’t available anywhere else? That is the most important question. The lazy and wrong answer is that they’re all trapped there; they don’t have a choice. And the few members who have left and were interviewed by the New York Times are the few brave ones who managed to escape. That is not true. I don’t think I have to justify why that’s not true. I think it’s common sense; there isn’t this sort of mechanism of control that’s forcing people to stay there.
Anyone can leave and people can stay and send their children to non-ḥasidic schools. Why don’t they? That is because the very purpose of ḥasidic schools is, as I put it in my piece in Mosaic, to cultivate Ḥasidim. Parents have an understanding, conscious or subconscious, where they know that they have set themselves a very difficult task: surviving against the forces of modernity. We live in New York City, we live in one of the most populous and one of the largest financial centers in the world, one of the epicenters of modernity, and we have to survive. We have to preserve our culture, our way of life against those odds. And there is an instinctive understanding that one of the most important ways of doing that is in the institutions that educate their children.
And here we mean educate in the real sense of the word: not instruct their children in the specific content of the curriculum, but actually take those children at the most formative stages in their lives and mold them into the sort of people that will remain loyal to the ḥasidic way of life, to their parents’ way of life, and will also be comfortable and skilled enough to maneuver and to navigate the ḥasidic world. Because as you can see, any YouTuber or journalist who tries to navigate and understand the ḥasidic world when he comes to visit will find it quite difficult. The number of social norms and different cues and customs to understand is quite big. And obviously, if you train children and you bring them up and you socialize them into that way of life, you have the best possible guarantee that they are likely to follow in your footsteps and grow up and remain members of the community.
Why would parents want that? I think that’s obvious. I think it might be harder in a world where community has been destroyed, where the traditional family structure has been destroyed, but I think most people, certainly people listening to this, probably can appreciate that the instinct of any parent is whatever way of life that they have chosen and they feel to be correct, they want their children to follow in their footsteps. Even if you pay lip service to “No, of course you make your own choices and do whatever you like,” if you have it your way, your preferred option is for your children to follow in your footsteps and have your traditions. The best guarantee that parents have for that is the ḥasidic school system, because what it does—and as I said before, it doesn’t focus on academic standards—it does extremely successfully cultivate children as the ones who are going to be future successful members of the ḥasidic community.
Jonathan Silver:
And by successful, we should pointedly specify, we don’t mean that they exit that community and earn financial rewards in the professional sphere outside of it. It may mean that in some cases, but that is not the primary meaning of what successful means. What successful in this case means is that they are fully integrated into the thick network of community, and crucially, the intergenerational families that make that community itself.
Eli Spitzer:
Correct. Now, the last thing that you can expect from a school like that is to undermine its own mission by doing what some advocates are asking for, saying that you have to prepare them for the outside world. I mean, you might be able to demand that, but you can’t at the same time pretend that you also understand what the parents’ real wishes here are. We have this difficult question of what if a child, a member of the community, a young adult decides to leave. And we shouldn’t whitewash the pain or the suffering of those people who spoke to the New York Times and spoke of how difficult it was for them to function in the world beyond the ḥasidic community, because their entire educational upbringing was focused on their being successful within the world of the ḥasidic community.
To what extent do ḥasidic parents have an obligation to ensure that, should their children decide to reject their way of life, that they should still be successful? It’s a difficult question, but I think it helps when we understand the context of that question. And I think the New York Times could speak about the failure by design, but at no point was it able to describe, or even attempt to describe, “What are these schools doing? Why do they exist?”
Jonathan Silver:
It is a form of cultural, and theological, and social perpetuation. The school’s very clear purpose is to transmit a way of life from generation to generation and not to impart a set of skills whose very purpose is to take people away from that way of life. Let me just put this proposition to sort of reverse it and turn it around and see if the proposition makes as much sense to you, Eli. There are a number of Jewish women and men who are ba’al t’shuvah [Jews who became religiously observant without being raised thus] and “returned” to a way of life that is very different than the kind they grew up in. If they were to harbor a form of resentment at their non-Orthodox parents, and their non-Orthodox schooling, and non-Orthodox community, and non-Orthodox synagogue that did not equip them with the manners and mores and language aptitudes and text-study ability, with the world of resources necessary to enter into the community where they truly belong, it would be the same sort of resentment, which we are now reading about in the Times coming from those who left this community and left everything that it prepared them to become. And they now find themselves wanting to become nurses or school teachers, or to find some kind of other honorable career in life outside of that community. It’s the same sort of hypocrisy, it seems to me.
Eli Spitzer:
Except that it’s not. Look, we should add that there is a major difference, which is that the subculture that is Ḥasidism, is hosted by a host culture and a state. And there is a question of what interest does the state legitimately have about educational outcomes? That is a very important question, but I think that question hasn’t actually been touched on at all in the New York Times article and in most of the discussions that I see on social media, because just to pick the standard of the public-school curriculum in New York and say, “Well, you know what, you’re a private school. You can do whatever you like, but you should be more or less roughly equivalent to what we do” means you haven’t restrained yourself to the bare minimum of what the state is obligated to.
I think that there is some sort of interest for any civilization just to maintain a basic level of cohesion, a basic level of respect for the fundamental institutions of that country, that there is a basic level of literacy, a basic level of understanding of the nation’s history of various things, although the New York Times is the last institution I would trust with the nation’s history because the “1619 Project” is actually the biggest threat. I think ḥasidic kids are better off not learning any American history than studying the New York Times’s version of American history, which is all about how America was born in sin and rooted in slavery, and every institution needs to be destroyed because of it. But let’s leave that aside. I think in a world where we can trust in a politics-free, neutral consensus on what those basics are, I think there is a legitimate discussion to be had: what can the state demand that all its citizens deliver as a basic standard?
Where I think parental autonomy is important is the discussion of at which stage of their education [is this introduced]? Say that I would rather, up until the age of seven, or eight, or nine, or ten, that [ḥasidic children] are totally immersed in their own culture, and I introduce [secular studies] at the latest stage. Say that as a community, we can demonstrate that at the age of seventeen or eighteen we have a program [for teaching English and other subjects]. And I actually believe that this should be explored because as someone who’s taught myself English and taught myself to read and write—I couldn’t speak English up until the age of fifteen—I think more thought should be given to this. We shouldn’t pretend that it takes fifteen years to make up for a fifteen-year deficit of education. I think that point is being overplayed quite significantly, both by the New York Times and by a lot of the opponents of the ḥasidic community, who pretend that if you’ve left school at the age of sixteen without secular education then you’re screwed for life. It’s simply not true, but I think the discussion has to proceed from a basic understanding that the parents have got cultural autonomy that they’re entitled to, and let’s first establish what is the bare minimum that the state is entitled to [demand] as a legitimate interest in terms of outcomes. Then we can start having an argument about it.
I don’t think that the work has been done to understand that discussion, and I don’t think that there is, at the moment, a dialogue between the ḥasidic community and the authorities. At the moment, the ḥasidic community feels compelled to defend and lie and misrepresent what they actually do because they do feel that their way of life is being threatened. They do feel that this is an attempt to undermine the fundamental institutions, such as the education system, of the ḥasidic world.
Jonathan Silver:
Okay. So let me just ask you a couple of very frank, practical questions, not speaking for anyone other than yourself, but just so that we come to understand how you think about a question like this. What should ḥasidic students in New York City know about American history?
Eli Spitzer:
Well, especially in America, [they should have] an understanding of the founding fathers, the key significant events in the nation’s history, but with a particular view of understanding how the soul of the nation was developed. [They should] have an understanding of how the Constitution was developed as a way to understand what those guaranteed rights within the Bill of Rights are. Those are the things which I think are crucial to understand the host culture, which as I said before, I believe has a right to demand that from all its citizens at a very basic level, but I think everything you demand, you have to justify and explain why that’s what you’re asking for.
Jonathan Silver:
It’s not only justifying and explaining the reasoning behind it. It also, it seems to me, has to do with the place of reform. If I were truly interested in pedagogical reform within the ḥasidic yeshiva community, going to the New York Times would not be the way that I would undertake the initiation of that reform. You’ll react in a minute, but my guess is that educational leaders in this world will retreat and harden their views, whatever they are, before they bend to the pressures of the New York Times and even the New York State assembly.
Eli Spitzer:
Yes, although I do think that the ḥasidic community—and I think I can say this as a member of that community—we all need to grow up and we need to accept that we are now big enough. The age of information is upon us, the Internet has happened, and we can no longer rely on preserving ourselves by flying under the radar and no one noticing. I think we have to become mature enough to recognize that we will have to defend our way of life. We will have to argue about it and explain it, and not just throw out the whataboutism of, “Oh, some schools in the black community are just as bad.” That’s not helpful; that doesn’t help you, that just makes you defensive. And actually, it’s a shame that this New York Times article hasn’t triggered a real discussion about where the ḥasidic community is, what their argument is, and what the state’s argument is.
Often because I think, as the New York Times correctly points out, there are various loyalties among politicians. Look, The New York Times hasn’t got a lot of friends just generally in lots of pockets of the traditional ḥasidic community. And therefore, the New York Times is automatically an institution which is easy to target and easy to point out how hypocritical they are.
I think the New York Times could have been much more effective if they would actually be completely objective, sharing the facts without this weird obsession with the money, because—maybe I’m missing something, I’m not in America—but I just don’t understand the argument of why children who don’t know how to read should not be entitled to school lunches or to transportation to and from school. I don’t get it. That figure of $1 billion is completely devoid of context. I’ve got no idea whether that’s a lot or that’s a little, or how much every other school in New York is getting. From what some people say, apparently the average ḥasidic child is subsidized by the state to the tune of about $2,000 a year, and for the average mainstream child in New York it’s about $25,000 to $30,000 a year. I don’t think the New York Times provided that context. And again, unless they’re accusing them of fraud or of stealing money, why is it relevant?
Jonathan Silver:
It’s a very ugly insinuation. If I were to try to make the New York Times’s argument as charitably as I can, it goes back to the point that we were discussing before, the point of the difference between the public school whose animating purpose is to create children who are competent in the things that the state says children should know, and the point of a private religious institution whose parents voluntarily choose that in lieu of public school, which says, “We do not, as a matter of principle, care about what the state thinks our children should know.” And that therefore accepting money is dishonest in some sense, because they’re not buying into the project.
That is the insinuation. I think it’s a very ugly insinuation, one which I think fair-minded readers should have evidence to reject in part for the reason that you say, which is that that money spent on public transportation and the playground outside—if the state were to withhold that money from those children precisely because they’re Jewish, that would be deeply un-American.
Eli Spitzer:
The irony is that the New York Times will then write an article about how these children are not even given adequate facilities and playgrounds to play in. I think that has really revealed something else going on here. The fact that this obsession with the money and the fact that this is the title of the piece, when actually in the investigative element of this article the money plays a very small role; this graph about childcare being concentrated in three ZIP codes in the area with sort of a third of the childcare vouchers, which is not adjusted for the number of children that ḥasidic families have—again, with no context, but enough. If you scroll through quickly the comment sections in the New York Times, I think they know what buttons they’re pressing, because plenty of Americans have developed this understanding of let people be, live and let live, but as soon as you come to taxpayer dollars they feel like, “Right, I’ve got a stake in this. Why are we allowing this to happen?”
Jonathan Silver:
Okay. There’s one other just fascinating part of this New York Times story, which I want to ask you about. I don’t know if it’s the first time that this has happened in the history of the paper, it may not be, but it’s certainly the first time that I can recall. The Times translated its own long essay into Yiddish with the specific hope that the piece would be read by the very community that is the subject of the piece.
Eli Spitzer:
It’s interesting. First of all, you are correct. This is the first time that the New York Times has actually published a full article in Yiddish. They have had some Yiddish quotes, most notably when Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize, there were quite extensive quotes in Yiddish of things that he wrote and things that he said, but it is the first time that the New York Times has published something in Yiddish. It’s important to say that we then learned from the Forward actually, which put something out on Twitter, that they were approached by the New York Times asking to find someone who could actually translate this into the ḥasidic dialect of Yiddish, which is very different from the Yiddishist and the YIVO Yiddish. There’s another column on that by the way, for Mosaic.
When I read it in Yiddish—I actually read the piece in Yiddish first—I couldn’t help just enjoying the fact that a paper like the New York Times is writing something in a real good-quality Yiddish. There’s no question that this was good-quality Yiddish. And in fact, because it was written in Yiddish, it was able to capture some nuances about the ḥasidic schools that the English piece wasn’t able to do. Small things, but we enjoyed it. When I say we, I’m talking about friends and people that we’ve shared it with, but it’s only then that I started thinking, “Well, why? Why did the New York Times publish this in Yiddish?” This would’ve been a significant amount of effort, even for the New York Times with all of its resources, simply because this is uncharted territory for them.
This would’ve been a lot of headache to identify, and properly check, and proofread something that they’re not used to. What was that interest? I don’t know, other than what the New York Times is saying, is that it was in a way part of actually marketing the article itself. “We are writing about a community of people who can’t access this article because they can’t speak English,” which is an exaggeration. At the same time, there are people in the ḥasidic community who exist who can’t read English, but they are less likely to be the sort of people who have got access to the Internet and who will read the Yiddish version of the New York Times. And that’s a side point.
I also think I could be wrong, but there also may have been strong feeling of a righteous propaganda about this, in a way that we read about South Korea dropping leaflets to North Korea. It’s as if they feel like there are gatekeepers there who wouldn’t allow these poor trapped, street people, who crave knowledge, actually know how bad things are. And here we go, [they think], we’ll find a way to get through the gatekeepers and reach them directly. That’s the impression that I got. I think that’s just a bit underhanded, a bit nefarious if you like, but that was my take on it.
Jonathan Silver:
We have spent our time, I hope, trying to inhabit multiple points of view in this conversation without being triumphalist about ḥasidic communities. The first part of our conversation dwelt on very real educational shortcomings in the very schools that we’re discussing. Nevertheless, we’ve tried to offer our listeners and viewers the chance to understand and inhabit for themselves the very reasons why somebody would want to affirm, despite those shortcomings, some of the blessings of this community.
I want to end this part of our conversation with a theological note, because we’ve asked up until now some questions about what the state believes that our children should know, what the state thinks that our children should know about mathematics, about the operation of the natural world and science, what the state thinks that American children should know about American history. I want to turn that over now and ask, this is a very complex question, but I think it’s the right antinomy. What does God want our children to know? Meaning is there a theological response to the civic and political injunction that an educated person knows a certain thing?
Eli Spitzer:
It’s a difficult question. I think, especially if you frame it as, “What does God want them to know?” But I think “What do parents want children to know?” might sometimes be a more useful question to ask, because I found after many years in education that when parents want children to achieve a certain grade, it’s often because the school has established that as the ultimate measure of success for that child. And parents themselves, when you really sit down, and this is across the full spectrum—I’ve worked in non-ḥasidic schools and I have experience with non-Jewish parents as well—ultimately they’ve got a completely different set of priorities than what the education system has generated over the years. And I think you will find that [parents will want help in] developing an individual who has got responsibilities, is disciplined, who has those virtues of restraint.
You’ve got parents who would come and complain sometimes that they are struggling with some behaviors of their children at home and wondering why the school doesn’t do more to do this or that, because of course it’s all the school’s responsibility. To some extent it is true what Winston Churchill said, that his education was interrupted by extended periods of schooling, but it’s very important for people to remember, and it’s so easy to forget, that there’s so much more of a person besides how he will go on and be successful in life or whatever that success means, which has nothing to do with the content of what the instruction of the curriculum is, and so much more to do with the hidden curriculum, with what they’re being socialized in, what institutions they value, what character traits they look up to, what is being modeled to them.
Respect for authority, for example, is one of these issues people would argue with and say that it sort of supports tyranny, but I think it is something that children should develop at a very young age, an understanding of a hierarchy, understanding of authority, and understanding of where their place is. I think you can do that. And at the same time, helping children understand what their rights are and still protecting them from abuses of that authority. I think mutual responsibility, supporting each other, understanding, being part of the bigger picture. And I’m foreshadowing another piece from Mosaic, but institutions such as family, and marriage, and all of those different things where children spend most of their social life, is where those values are being modeled, discussed, praised, valorized. That’s where it happens. You can do an academic piece of work to try to pinpoint exactly where it happened, but I think people understand that if you have a community that’s committed to those values, and they tend to employ staff that will sign up to that ethos, then chances are that children will be socialized into that as well.
Jonathan Silver:
Another way to formulate that is simply to say that there is an entire worldview, including crucially a way to organize time in a particular calendar, a set of social institutions and daily, hourly habits of prayer and devotion, as well as a concept of leisure and the way that a man of a certain bearing spends his time. There is a way of comportment and responsibility, all of which make up a life. And that life is the thing that these schools are designed to teach. And the fact that children do not learn geometry—we should acknowledge that the New York Times is correct when it says that so many ḥasidic boys don’t know geometry. That is true. And it is nevertheless true that this is a trade-off that those parents are equipped to make and in doing so are affirming something else, and we should try to understand what that something else is in order to cast judgment upon it.
Eli Spitzer:
Even as we say that, Jon, for me, it’s important to say that I’m actually not even arguing that all of these ḥasidic schools are morally superior to all of the other non-ḥasidic schools. Not every ḥasidic school is even successful in achieving its own aims, but that’s what they set out to do. That’s their mission. Within that, you still have the same spectrum of good and bad schools in the way that you’ve got everywhere else.
Jonathan Silver:
You’re absolutely right. Just as we would say regarding the formation of civic virtue: while that may be the purpose of a publicly supported, taxpayer-funded public school, some of those schools do better and some do not do so well at that. Same thing here. The point is that both of them are trying to undertake the moral and civic formation and communal formation of their students, acculturate them into a certain community, and we have to try to understand the community that these children are being acculturated into.
The Talmud states in tractate Kiddushin that fathers have to teach their children a trade, with which they’ll be able to support themselves. Is there any kind of recognizable vocational training that you think these schools are being effective at? Or is that something that they’re not being effective at?
Eli Spitzer:
No, the short answer is they’re not very effective at doing that. And it is true that they have that obligation and there’s no way to argue that that is a particular strength of this community and a lot more can be done to make it better.
Jonathan Silver:
Since we have already acknowledged that the school’s purpose is not to teach geometry, are they endowing their students with the life skills they need to live well?
Eli Spitzer:
Again, I think it could be more developed, it could be more structured, it could be done a lot better. I could point to all sorts of—we haven’t got the time for this—interesting developments and projects that are ongoing, but I think it’s important to point out that it is relatively recently that ḥasidic schools started feeling a responsibility to provide anything beyond socializing children into the ḥasidic world. A lot of it was expected from parents, and I think more recently there’s a realization the parents are too busy and have too many children and are relying on the school to do it. So I think it’s one to watch. I think there are good developments there, but I think probably more could be done.
Jonathan Silver:
You can defend parents in schools as trying to maintain community, but if so, why aren’t the family and community strong enough so that the schools can teach secular education without fear of their children leaving it?
Eli Spitzer:
That’s an excellent question. And actually, I was hoping this would come up because what everyone could ask is actually, since I did say earlier, that I do believe that the majority of parents at least wouldn’t object to having, or would probably want, better standards of secular education, then why can’t they make the school leaders deliver it? There are a number of answers to this question. I think some of the answer is that the dynamics, the way the schools, all of them, tend to be oversubscribed, that makes the school leaders quite powerful. Actually, it’s not that easy to boss them around, but I also think part of the problem is that there has yet to be a model to emerge that has done it successfully.
There are too many examples of schools that have set out to preserve everything that ḥasidic schools do, but only achieve a better standard of secular education, and very quickly have not been able to accomplish what they’ve set out to do in terms of preserving the ḥasidic ethos of the school. They still remain Orthodox, but very quickly, it has emerged that some of the compromises they’ve made have gone one step too far, and therefore parents feel like, “Look, it’s a slippery slope. We don’t know exactly how to tamper with [our educational model].” And therefore they shy away from demanding a specific change. I think there’s a bit of both there.
Jonathan Silver:
What about the need of some people to become engineers or other professionals? These schools assign them to poverty and living on the dole. What would a normal path look like for a ḥasidic child who does have some, let’s say, aptitudes that could lead toward engineering? What does that look like? Meaning, how could that be accommodated without leaving the community, and in fact, even strengthening the community?
Eli Spitzer:
Good question. I should start with a personal example. I have two brothers, both of them are successful lawyers, one working as a lawyer in London and one in Tel Aviv for a British firm, and both of them went to the same ḥasidic school that I attended and went through exactly the same journey. Both of them started speaking English, self-taught at a relatively late stage, and at one point they made the decision that this is what they wanted to do. They had to put in some serious effort into it. I think it was a process of probably about two years in their early twenties. They qualified as lawyers and now they are both successful English- and Yiddish-speaking lawyers.
The reason I use this example is that of course the response to that will be, “Well, hang on a minute, they must be very bright that they’ve been able to do it.” Well, frankly, engineers and lawyers and so on, they have careers that are reserved for the brighter ones in society. But why would anyone want to raise an entire community full of lawyers and doctors? I think the Modern Orthodox world has sort of gone down that route. It has worked because they are very bright and there’s a high proportion of bright students in the Jewish world, but I think it is true that ḥasidic children are less likely to want to do that because they didn’t grow up with this sort of expectation, driven by parents and driven by the community, but the possibilities are there. And in fact, those possibilities are becoming easier. Not too long ago, it would’ve involved living on campus in a university, which would’ve been completely inappropriate for anyone who wants to maintain a ḥasidic way of life, the mixed genders and the problems of kashrut and Shabbos observance and so on. That has been completely eliminated now by the ability to do distance learning, and online learning and so on.
I think there are some amazing examples of organizations that are dedicated to developing unconventional or alternative routes to qualifications that don’t rely on SATs, or GCSEs as it would be in Britain, at the same time, I think that the Yiddish-speaking community needs a little bit more help. I think a lot of those projects assume a basic level of English-language proficiency, which is lacking in the ḥasidic community. Again, as someone who has done it myself, I think it is doable. It just needs the infrastructure to actually do it.
Jonathan Silver:
An anonymous attendee asks your view, Eli, of whether you would feel comfortable making similar arguments on behalf of other sub-communities, even other sub-communities of faith, say that evangelical Christians in America should have the same kind of wherewithal to structure their schools just as you’re advocating for Ḥasidim.
Eli Spitzer:
Well, the short answer is of course yes. I see parents as the real sovereign body in making decisions about raising children. The fact that the state is involved in raising children is just something that modernity has brought on because of the way we organize our lives. Our children are not raised at home, we have to send them to something which isn’t natural. The natural thing would be that they’re in a tree until we pull them down and we tell them what to do, and raise them, and then we model behavior for them. That’s something that we developed in recent centuries, but I still think that any intervention from the state needs to be justified, especially if it undermines the wishes of parents. I would afford exactly the same right to every single minority or majority. It doesn’t matter. I think parents should be the first and last port of call when it comes to decisions about raising children.
Jonathan Silver:
Eli, there are a great many questions here, as I’m scrolling through, that have to do with the fact that the New York Times chose to make this into a major frontpage report in the first place. One person asks, you mentioned having quickly scrolled through some of the comments, if you were surprised at the anti-Jewish attitudes that were manifest there and why you think that the New York Times would’ve wanted to forefront this issue?
Eli Spitzer:
I think when it comes to those questions, the easiest explanation that requires the least assumptions is probably the correct one. I think that, simply put, the New York Times has understood, just like Netflix understood, that anything about Ḥasidim is clickbait, and that’s the real business that they’re in. I think that’s the first explanation. I think that the comments, they are quite hostile, but I think I’ve always understood that for people who comment on online news articles there’s a selection bias there because they tend to be a certain kind of keyboard warrior. The sample I don’t think is representative, so I’m less worried about it. It’s painful to see, but I’m not surprised.
But I also think that previously journalism, especially when it wanted to sensationalize something, had free rein to go after any sort of minority, foreigners, anything different, to make the majority feel good about themselves. That was standard practice until recently, but nowadays you can no longer do it. And unfortunately, I think that in that new world where you can’t offend anyone, Ḥaredim and Ḥasidim remain the last acceptable form of bigotry. For a number of reasons, they’re considered white enough, they’re enough of an apex oppressor class to be allowed to be fair game, and I think that’s why you see, whether it’s Netflix or the New York Times in this instance, going for it.
Jonathan Silver:
There’s good reason for friends of the ḥasidic community and ḥasidic leaders to have their suspicions. In fact, very soon after accusations of that racist nature were made. To the extent that like, of course these white Jews are receiving state funds that otherwise could have been diverted to girls and boys of color. That kind of statement, yes, was at the ready when the piece hit newsstands.
Now in your essay for Mosaic, Eli, you make an important distinction, a terminological distinction between education and instruction. On the instruction side of that divide, which is designed to impart skills rather than form a worldview, this person asks about the accepted and normal careers, which women and men who stay within the ḥasidic community take up.
Eli Spitzer:
There aren’t too many members of the ḥasidic community who pursue the high professions for a number of reasons. What is quite common of course, are positions in education, which itself are actually extremely attractive to working mothers in the ḥasidic community for the simple reason that when you raise a large family it’s good to have your work calendar perfectly aligned with your child’s holiday calendar. That tends to work very well. When you have complete autonomy and where 99.9 percent of the children in your community attend your own schools, the educational workforce is massive, absolutely huge—probably by far the largest employers within the ḥasidic community are its own schools for boys and for girls. Then there’s a lot of entrepreneurship and a lot of real estate—Amazon sales has become very big in recent years, a lot of that. There’s also some sort of finance and mortgage brokerage, and so on.
I think because of the barriers in terms of entry requirements, when it comes to engineering, medicine, law, and so on, most Ḥasidim, even if they’re bright enough, sharp enough for something like that, often are under too much pressure to start providing for their families in order to be able to afford to take a few years and go through the full process of becoming qualified. When you get married quite young and you immediately start having children, that responsibility to provide for your family kicks in. And frankly, a five-year process of becoming a qualified engineer and then an apprenticeship of another two years before you can earn a full salary is something which puts people off. So I think that’s part of it.
Jonathan Silver:
The Times piece does mention this, and several of our questioners do too. Just speak a little bit, if you can, about, how girls’ education is different. We’ve been focusing mostly on the experience of boys.
Eli Spitzer:
I think actually one of the quibbles that I had in terms of the accuracy of the piece in the Times is I felt that they sort of underplayed the significance of how much better secular education is in girls’ schools. I think the Times has sort of a throwaway comment, if I remember correctly, of saying, “Yeah, it’s better, but still 80 percent of girls failed some standardized tests,” or something to that effect. That’s by the way, a bit of a mystery of what those standardized tests refer to, what the context is, but I can tell you that my experience, and in London, certainly—there’s very little divergence among different ḥasidic communities internationally—the girls’ secular education is pretty much equivalent to any secular education in mainstream schools, which is quite remarkable given that they have about 50 percent, sometime even more, of their timetable dedicated to Jewish studies. They still manage to achieve very high standards across a full range of subjects.
A typical girls’ school in Stamford Hill, the schools that my own daughters attend, offers at GCSE level—which is the sort of post-high school qualification—anywhere between ten and fifteen different subjects. Of course, you’ve got the core subjects of English, math, science, history, geography, and then you’ve got the range from computing to home economics and various different things. Where they sometimes fall short is that there’s a certain censorship that goes on in the curriculum. For example, science will not include evolution and reproduction, so that sometimes undermines their ability to teach the full syllabus on biology, for example, and that has caused some tension in the past where the authorities have said, “You can’t censor test papers.” And the schools have said, “Well, therefore we’re not going to offer those exams.” But really if you look at the big picture, they offer an extremely high standard of secular education.
Why that is is a very interesting question. The lazy answer, one answer that I saw in a report from someone who was supposed to be an expert on the ḥaredi community, is that boys are expected to become rabbis, and therefore they’re expected to spend more time studying religious studies. That is complete nonsense. The whole idea of ḥaredi men studying full time is a complete conflation with what happens in Israel. That is a uniquely Israeli phenomenon, and actually far less common in the ḥasidic world than it is in the Lithuanian, non-ḥasidic, yeshivish world. It exists in Lakewood, [New Jersey] as well, where there’s a high concentration of non-ḥasidic Ḥaredim. I can think of probably fewer than ten people in the Stamford Hill community in London whom I know, and I know lots of people, who are past the age of thirty-five and are full-time students. Everyone is expected eventually to go and earn a living.
Now, admittedly, some people’s aims are to become rabbis or to become teachers, religious instructors, and so a lot of the professions, if you like, are within the Jewish world, but the expectation for men to go out and be the breadwinners in the ḥasidic world is overwhelmingly something that is a given across the ḥasidic world, regardless of attitudes to secular studies. And therefore, that idea that girls have to be given a higher quality secular education because they are the only ones who go and work is nonsense. Where that has developed, it’s worth maybe thinking about the history of how ḥasidic girls’ schools came into existence and how ḥasidic boys’ schools came into existence.
To some extent, ḥasidic boys’ schools can draw a straight line to the ancient Talmud Torahs back home [in Eastern Europe] before any formal schooling, certainly in some parts of Hungary and the rural parts in Poland before children attended any sort of school at all. Girls’ schools, however, came into existence as a response to the phenomenon of education for girls, which is in itself a much more modern phenomenon than education for boys, that there was a problem in the traditional Orthodox communities before World War II, and straight after the war, that there were no options for girls’ education in the ḥasidic world, so they would end up sending their children either to non-Jewish or non-Orthodox or modern girls schools. So ḥasidic girls’ schools came into existence as a response to the crisis of ḥasidic girls not attending ḥasidic schools. The starting point was, how can we compete with the Bais Yaakov school [a network of ḥaredi girls’ schools] around the corner, which is offering a decent standard of secular education?
I think the final point to make, and this is not something I’m going to pretend that I’ve developed fully, but I think there’s an element, an instinctive understanding that boys are more of a flight risk than girls are. Therefore, it is less risky exposing girls to a full range of secular studies at a formative stage in their life than it is to exposing boys to that full range and opening that completely different world to them. That is more of a hypothesis. I can’t pretend that I’ve tested it all the way.
Jonathan Silver:
Why do you make that hypothesis? Why are girls less of a flight risk?
Eli Spitzer:
The bit that I haven’t tested is whether it’s true that girls are less of a flight risk, but the hypothesis is that the reason why we feel less threatened by allowing girls to have a full secular education is because we are less worried about them leaving the fold than we are about boys.
Jonathan Silver:
Eli, I want to ask you a final question, which is actually drawn from your magnificent Mosaic essay. There you say that in your own school that you lead you are trying to improve the elements of the children’s education that is not only rooted in a talmudic study. Can you just tell us a little bit about what you’ve tried? What’s worked, what hasn’t worked?
Eli Spitzer:
I never discuss my own personal school publicly because I don’t think that’s fair to them. It’s business and pleasure, and we keep them separate, but I can speak more broadly, because it’s not the only school where I’ve worked and experimented. I think there has to be a better attempt of defining what outcomes you want. One that isn’t just saying, “Well, we just want to be tied to the national curriculum. Whatever they want, we want.” I think that starting point is the most threatening to ḥaredi parents: when they ask, “Well, what do you want out of your secular-studies department?” and your answer is, “Well, we want a national standard, we want equivalency.” By the way, the same language that the Board of Regents is using in New York, that in itself is actually quite threatening. So I think you have to come up with a vision of what you actually want, and define that very clearly, and say you want fluency and literacy. And by the way, explain why you want that.
You say that not so that [ḥasidic kids] can leave the community if they want to, but so that actually they don’t have to question their positions in the community. They don’t have to feel like that they’re being robbed of the basic decency of being able to participate in a conversation with people outside of the community. That’s a convincing argument, but if that’s what you’re setting out to do, then you have to explain how the content that you’re offering is in line with that mission, as opposed to just again, ticking boxes to satisfy some outside curriculum, which actually doesn’t meet your own objectives.
So being very much focused on what skills this will give them later on, that’s a big part of the conversation with parents and with the community as a whole, and also demonstrating your commitment to the school’s ethos and showing how, for example, if you include Sherlock Holmes in the curriculum, you carefully select which of the stories are appropriate for a ḥaredi school. That, by the way, takes a lot of knowledge and sometimes people won’t know which ones won’t offend the sensibilities of a ḥaredi school. What is the messaging in some of those stories? If it’s too romantic or too much of the seamy underbelly of Victorian London, that won’t be appropriate. So constantly being aware of not undermining the cultural ethos of the school and constantly articulating a vision that gives parents what they actually want, not what some outside agent wants for them.