At the end of June, New York City educational authorities announced that an investigation had found that eighteen ḥasidic schools had failed to meet educational requirements. But if these schools are really so bad—asks Frieda Vizel, herself a former member of the Satmar ḥasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—why do parents keep enrolling their children? There are many reasons, she contends, beginning with the fact that, in a community where families are large, the schools “take on the task of easing the burden for parents” as well as “seek to address students’ emotional needs.” And that is sometimes hard for outsiders to appreciate:

It is an irony of the current debate that liberals who believe in strong social safety nets, who would balk at the assertion that a person should be judged by his wealth or career attainment, and who once celebrated the maxim made famous by Hillary Clinton, “It takes a village to raise a child,” seem incapable of appreciating those same values when they come from religious communities.

But the critical reports from the New York Times and from the Department of Education don’t focus on the ways these schools serve as vital organs to ḥasidic communities. Instead, they focus on what the ḥasidic schools don’t do: they do not prepare the boys to be efficient workers and reliable consumers inside of mainstream, secular economic arrangements. And this is true. Ḥasidic schools don’t do the kind of career prep that can help students become future brand managers, corporate tax consultants, or equity administrators. It seems that in the wider world, people are so used to conflating education with economic preparation—because this is what modern education has become—that they assume that ḥasidic schools seek to do the same.

Yet, Vizel goes on to explain, most graduates of these schools immediately enter the workforce, and New York’s Ḥasidim usually provide opportunities for young people to learn on the job in family businesses. As for the discontents:

All of this doesn’t mean that ḥasidic parents don’t have criticisms of their sons’ schools. In fact, I believe the debate over ḥasidic education stems, in part, from internal frustrations. As someone who is on the periphery, parents talk to me candidly about the things that bother them. Plenty have complaints about education, as parents will have anywhere, and I hear especially about the state of “English” for boys. . . . But at the same time, these parents value the many things they do get from the schools, and would by no means want the good to go away.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.