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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38196 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money: New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.

The New York Times has an expose on how ultra-orthodox Jews in NYC are funneling billions in public money for use in their yeshivas. Students are barely taught how to read and write in English (as an example, one couldn't spell "America") and the state requirements are effectively optional or used as a study hall.

The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.

Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.

The boys’ schools cram in secular studies only after a full day of religious lessons. Most offer reading and math just four days a week, often for 90 minutes a day, and only for children between the ages of 8 and 12. Some discourage further secular study at home. “No English books whatsoever,” one school’s rule book warns.

Their leaders, the grand rabbis, wield significant power, and breaking the rules they set can carry serious consequences. That point was underscored by the more than 50 current Hasidic community members who spoke to The Times only on condition of anonymity, for fear of being exiled and barred from seeing family and friends.

Another former teacher provided hundreds of pages of work sheets from the past five years that showed that 12-year-olds — in their last year of English instruction — could not spell words like “cold” and “America.”

Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education. But public agencies pay private schools to comply with government mandates and manage social services. Hasidic boys’ yeshivas, like other private schools, access dozens of such programs, collecting money that subsidizes their theological curriculum. The Times identified dozens of federal, state and local programs and analyzed how much they have given to yeshivas, looking most closely at the last year before the pandemic. The analysis showed that New York’s Hasidic boys’ schools received more than $375 million from the government in that period [...] they appear to get more government funding on average than other private schools in the state, including other religious schools, the analysis found. The city voucher program that helps low-income families pay for child care now sends nearly a third of its total assistance to Hasidic neighborhoods

This might come as a shock to those who have no experience with Williamsburg, Monroe, Kiryas Joel, or Monsey in the NY tristate area. There is what can be described as a Hasidic Jewish mafia, that violates norms and laws to obtain hegemony, while siphoning resources from the surrounding communities. Towns are genuinely afraid of encroachment by the Hasids, because they move in en masse and quickly obtain town leadership positions and school board positions. They usually vote to reduce all extra funding, like extra-curricular funding for public schools, because their children only attend yeshivas. They label their homes as temples and don't legally marry their wives to reduce their taxes. Towns in subjected areas will purposely reduce sidewalks or veto funding for sidewalks in order to deter Hasids from moving in. Usually they will have a non-Hasidic lawyers go door to door asking to buy property with cash. They are involved in coordinated welfare schemes yet somehow get sweetheart plea deals of no jail time. Kiryas Joel was once the poorest place in all of America, and yet they have their own private security force that follows non-Hasids in SUVs if you drive through their estates, they have an enormous temple and their own state-funded maternity clinic on site and are able to obtain a unique 30 million dollar water aqueduct project.

I'm happy that the NYT is doing solid journalism on this. I kind of gripe with portraying the young as victims and bringing up the Holocaust, but it is what it is. In my mind, the Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of, because if there is all this corruption at just 200k members, well, in 60 years it will be 1,600,000. They will comprise a majority of America's Jewish community in a few decades.

In my mind, the Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of, because if there is all this corruption at just 200k members, well, in 60 years it will be 1,600,000. They will comprise a majority of America's Jewish community in a few decades.

Corruption? My mother once told me she could never make sense of antisemitism. Every time she asked someone, who expressed an anti-Jewish sentiment, what their beef was, they'd come back with a variation on "they're too in-groupy". To which she'd say "instead of dissing them, why don't you learn from them?"

You're telling me, that not only is there a community successfully resisting the influence of the modern techno-dystopia, but that they're well-disciplined, vibrant, and growing... and you're telling me I'm supposed to be upset???

Why don't you tell me if they have a Paypal, I want to send them money.

I think if non-Hasids tried to copy their playbook, the government would crush them, using every trick in the book, including mass media propaganda campaigns. The Hasids are special because they are run like a fascist micro-nation, yet they have the appearance of the caricature victim of fascism, and play off of religious protections. It's a confluence of factors that allow the Hasids to occupy their uniquely powerful position. I cannot imagine Christians getting away with anything like this, for instance, and it's remarkable that for all the discussion on fascism and religious extremist, no one is overly concerned with a religiously extremist fascist micro-nation in the Big Apple. The Amish, which is the closest Christian equivalent I can think of, do not utilize as much social resources as the Hasids, and are also in the middle of nowhere.

There are fundamentalist LDS groups that seem to be pretty similar to the Hasidim, including not officially marrying to avoid taxes and collect additional benefits and using lots of welfare. They are generally located in the middle of nowhere, and there have been efforts to stop them, but as far as I can tell these are mostly limited to prosecution on the basis of serious crimes (like child rape) which I think the Hasidim avoid. Mainline mormons and the mainline LDS church seem to be at best ambivalent about these efforts, and sometimes oppose them. There are some other legal issues that might also apply to the Hasidic communities (like misuse of public funds and effectively having a privatized religious police force) but they might also be better at staying on the "maybe legal" side.

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints#Short_Creek_raid and the sections immediately below.

The FLDS practices statutory rape as a religious doctrine. They largely get away with this(although Texas has prosecuted a few of their leaders for not marrying their underaged baby mamas), and from a blue tribe perspective they’re fascist Christian microstate. From a red tribe perspective they’re an untrustworthy, heretical, and occasionally murderous cult.

The other major Mormon fundamentalist group, the apostolic United brethren, colours significantly more inside the lines and avoids underaged marriage.

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