The Constitution and New York’s Efforts to Control the Yeshivas

Earlier this month, the New York State Board of Regents approved a set of amendments to the educational requirements for private schools—written primarily with ḥasidic schools in mind. Michael A. Helfand considers the constitutional limits on the state’s ability to govern what happens in religious educational institutions:

New York’s rule requiring private schools to provide “instruction in mathematics, science, English language arts, and social studies that is substantially equivalent to such instruction required to be provided in public schools” is likely to withstand constitutional challenge even if that challenge is grounded in a combination of parental- and religious-liberty rights. And that’s because it will almost certainly be viewed as necessary to ensure students become full and productive members of a democratic society. Thus, while the Supreme Court has been sympathetic to religious-liberty claims in recent years, the need to provide citizens with educational basics is sufficiently weighty that it will likely overcome constitutional challenge.

At the same time, some of New York’s rules veer beyond these core objectives. For example, New York’s education law requires students to study “patriotism, citizenship, and human-rights issues,” including “the study of the inhumanity of genocide, slavery, . . . the Holocaust, and the mass starvation in Ireland from 1845 to 1850.” This sort of very particular curricular list, while undeniably providing important educational lessons, is far more vulnerable to constitutional challenge because it is less connected to the essential skills that typically justify limitations on parents’ 14th Amendment rights.

Maybe there’s a lesson in all of that. To the extent government officials impose only core educational requirements, they stand on strong constitutional footing. . . . But if government gets carried away, and moves beyond what is essential to that goal, its authority wanes—and the strength of potential constitutional challenges grows.

Read more at JTA

More about: Hasidim, Jewish education, Religious Freedom, U.S. Constitution

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF