Simcha Eisenstein: The NY Times was looking for a hit piece on Hasidic education

NY Dem. Assemblyman Simcha Eisenstein responds to years of media attacks on New York yeshivas.

NY Democratic Assemblyman Simcha Eisenstein characterizes the media attacks against yeshivas as an attempt to crate a negative narrative of Orthodox Jews and Hasidic education.

Describing how the New York Times has been focused on looking for a negative story about yeshivas for two years, he says: "The focus was clear. They were looking to come up with a hit piece, not only on our school system but on the broader Orthodox Jewish community and their way of life.”

“Most of the article to be honest with you is a bunch of rehashed inaccuracies that we’ve been reading about for years. They liberally fabricated a lie that we use in our school system corporal punishment as a common tool which is just absolutely false. It goes against our Torah values,” Eisenstein says, speaking to Israel National News from the Israel Heritage Foundation event that took place Sunday in New York city.

“They found a handful of individual cases of corporal punishment – I may add none of these are substantiated, normally you would think they would have a police report or something to back it up – and they just try to indict an entire community with one broad brush as if this is what we do. I would also just say that even the five cases that they highlight in the article, some of them we don't even know when this happened, the schools don't even have any recollection or documentation of these incidents, but some of them may have happened two decades ago and to sensationalize singular individual stories against an entire community that's below the belt.”

Responding to criticisms about the curriculum the yeshivas teach, Eisenstein comments that their students receive a “rigorous education” that is more hours per day than public schools.

“Our school day is a lot longer. We start at 7:30 in the morning, the public system starts at nine. We go to 6:30, 7, 7:30, depending on which age,” he explains. “When this started eight years ago, our so-called critics, the talking points that they were using – Hasidic kids don’t know how to spell their names in English, can’t sign their names. You remember that? Guess what? Now the goal posts shift. ‘They do learn English but they only learn English and math.’ Eight years ago. Eight years ago they were saying we learned nothing and now they're saying some schools only learn 90 minutes but they admit others do two hours, two and a half hours and so on and so forth.“

He adds: “The mere fact that they're focusing on yeshivas. There are 440 yeshivas in the state of New York. It's a spectrum. There are those that focus more on one subject and those that are focused more on another subject. Parents have a [right] to choose from a wide range of schools that put more emphasis on different subjects.”