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| Image from Religious News Service |
The anger that seems to be beneath the pushback against the New York Times investigative report is palpable. The feeling about it from much of the religious community is near identical. Which is that it was a hit piece designed to smear religious Jews. Specifically Chasidim. Article upon article has been written by a variety of people most of them Charedi with the same message. That the Times article was deeply flawed and biased. And that its hidden subtext was intended to smear Chasidim. A community that is far more successful than other communities.
I remain unconvinced by these responses. I will attempt to show why one angry response by Rabbi Yair Hoffman’s does not do away with the problematic issues raised by the Times.
First let me say that I admire Rabbi Hoffman. A few years ago I had occasion to discuss issues relating to sex abuse in the religious world and found that we were pretty much on the same page. Despite the fact that at the time our views were not in concert with the view of much of the Charedi leadership. However on this issue we could not be further apart.
Rabbi Hoffman’s argument against the points made in Times article could best be described as ‘Whataboutism’. A response that does not address the accusation itself but instead asks why a much bigger problem is not mentioned in comparison to the one under discussion. The following excerpt from his article is an example of that:
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.
What Rabbi Hoffman points out may very well be true. But that other schools have problems of their own which maybe even worse - is irrelevant to the fact that all 1000 students tested from Satmar’s flagship school failed state tests in reading and math. Rabbi Hoffman doesn’t dispute that. He in essence just asks: What about the much bigger problems in public schools - that do not exist in those Chasidic schools?
The thing is that the Times wasn’t dealing with public schools. They might even agree with Rabbi Hoffman about them. But thier focus here was on discovering the poor education of certain Chasidic schools. They investigated an issue that has been in the news for a couple of years and which state education officials were about to do something about this is what they found.
It is almost as is some of us have a siege mentality. That it is them versus us. Which is exactly what they say the Times seemed to be creating. But I see the opposite here. It is what intelligent, well meaning defenders of Orthodoxy seem to be creating.
Like I have been saying. I get that some people think that Times is biased against Chasidic Jews. It might even be true that bias actually exists in the minds of those Times investigative reporters. But as I also said, facts are stubborn things to which will not bend to bias. When all 1000 students fail a test like that, it ought to raise concern about what actually goes on in those schools.
Why is it that so many fine and decent people see only the bias and not the failure in education of those schools? Doesn’t it bother someone like Rabbi Hoffman when an entire population of Orthodox Jews – like those of Satmar can’t spell simple words like ‘cold’ and ‘America’?
Why are they willing to perpetuate a system that so short changes their people? Just because they live happy lives doesn’t mean there are no serious problems.
In my view when an an entire community of Chasidim as large as Satmar can't spell words any better than a first grade, it ought to be of far more concern that the bias of those that reported that sad fact.
Nuff said