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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38199 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.

A yet another New York story about the ultra-Orthodox goes into my collection (previous entries: The New York Post: I was a Hasidic Jew – but I broke free, New Yorker: When One Parent Leaves a Hasidic Community, What Happens to the Kids? and bonus entry Vice: The Child-Rape Assembly Line).

What's always fascinating about traditionalist Jews is that they're not doing anything special or clever, all the secret sauce apparently lies in the execution and commitment to the cause. What is novel here? Strict patriarchy and gerontocracy, meritocracy where it matters (rabbis are smart and also fiercely loyal to the tribe), rewarding cooperation and association with cooperators, punishing defectors and non-punishers (with an eye to long-term pruning of bad branches: denying marriage prospects to non-compliant individuals), guarding against infohazards, sieged fortress doctrine to bring out maximum ingroup sentiment, willingness to sacrifice opportunity for your principles and forgo temptations for long-term (reproductive) gain, cozying up to local authorities and making use of acquired resources until your group grows enough that you can boss those authorities around, exploitation of politically expedient memes, playing the victim; and or course perfect coordination like voting in bloc, with blind trust in the judgement of your tribal hereditary elite. If it takes that much today to stop young Ashkenazim from using TikTok, the Rabbis will do that much. They take their mission as stewards of the group seriously.

(By the way: «Grand Rabbi» sounds like Archbishop or something, but that's basically a clan leader, a dynastic head priest; I wonder if Americans comprehend just how alien those people's livestyles are. They are not represented at all by your favorite blogger, or some funny nerdy STEM professor from a sitcom, running in the morning to the BART station, half-eaten bagel in hand. It's not a matter of degree, not an issue of extremist outliers, nothing like some beautiful exotic superstitions your gf's granny from Hawaii knows: they really are living like old Qahals, by strict Mafia-type laws enforced with more consistency than your state laws, omerta and all. But I digress).

They don't do anything their ancestors didn't do in Russian Empire shtetls and European ghettos. This is how they have been surviving – and attracting hate – for centuries, sans minor details like voting, and their dress code looking more quixotic now, a frozen snapshot from 18th century. If we are to trust Romans and Greeks, this is how ancient Jews have been living even in the pre-Christian era. In some ways the Hasidim have become more archaic, almost desperately LARPing as old school Orthodox; but in most ways they're being true to the general mold of the tradition.

If the society has «evolved» in any sense except purely technological, why are their tricks so effective? Why is it so easy to exploit? This reminds me of Wyclif's great series on Universal Cultural Takeover:

Bryan Caplan:

Given a choice, young people choose Western consumerism, gender norms, and entertainment. Anti-Western governments from Beijing to Tehran know this this to be true: Without draconian censorship and social regulation, “Westoxification” will win.

How’s that story working out in Tel Aviv?

Ultra-Orthodox Judaism is not a one-off. As Eric Kaufmann points out in _Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? r_eligious cultures which haven’t been “eaten by the demon” are doing fine.

In all parts of the world, fundamentalist fertility exceeds moderate religious fertility, which in turn outpaces secular fertility.

Sometimes explicitly, self-consciously so. Some of the most extreme fundamentalist groups eschew conversion in favour of reproduction. They have quit persuading people on to their ark, and are getting ready to float.

Anyway. Ethics of nakedly particularist rules-lawyering aside, are they unhappy? The NYT authors are certainly very opposed to the continuation of their lifestyle, because it's, well, not explicitly geared towards what we recognize as self-actualization (I don't believe they worry all that much about subverting local politics or the funding issue). And sure enough, there's plenty of abuse in that community. But are they neurotic? Wracked by climate fears and anti-racist remorse? Invested into the Culture War, frothing at the mouth about Beijing Biden or Trump, Pizzagate and COVID? What do they think about their brothers secular/Reform Jews, or about Gentiles for that matter? I recall they think the latter are soulless murderers (to the extent that staying with one in an isolated space is inherently dangerous), and Reformers are lost souls who are almost as bad. They probably feel immensely greater disgust towards modern innovations like trans rights than the staunchest reactionary here (those of them who are allowed and willing to expose themselves to the Chaos of external society, the courageous vanguard). So, do they want to be rescued?

One additional issue is the existence of AI. We have many pundits and thinkers discussing the dangers of automation, the loss of meaning that for now comes with hard work. That's a very Christian, even Protestant idea. This group, if no other, will make the transition just fine. They do not like to work, they try to work as little as possible, their religion promises them liberation from work at the end of history as reward for millenia of piousness and fulfilling mitzvot, they find meaning in their family, tribe and praising their God, and that'll be only easier to do with universal basic income. If the AI deity offers it to them, they'll gladly welcome the opportunity to multiply and prosper.

These days, that's worth something. I would like other groups to take notes.

But are they neurotic? Wracked by climate fears and anti-racist remorse? Invested into the Culture War, frothing at the mouth about Beijing Biden or Trump, Pizzagate and COVID?

The Orthodox life might look idyllic from the outside, but it is not spared angst and trauma, angst that might look silly to the outsiders, but is deadly serious for the insiders.

for example: "Is the water I was drinking all my life really, really kosher? What if I accidentally swallowed some tiny bug?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/nyregion/the-waters-fine-but-is-it-kosher.html

https://gothamist.com/food/nycs-tap-water-clean-but-filled-with-crustaceans

https://oukosher.org/blog/consumer-news/nyc-water/

There is plenty of things "impressive" with what Hasidim manage to uphold in both Israel and the West. The main problem is that they are simply one group out of many, and if everyone (or even some significant number of groups) behaved like this we would very soon have societal collapse and descend into tribal warfare. They are a truly insignificant minority in America and rest of the West, but Israel is already waking up to this problem.

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