Rabbi Yaakov Menken is managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values.
A few years back I commented that were he still around, The Forward would be criticizing Chairman Mao for being insufficiently left-wing. This defining characteristic of the outlet was evident recently in their celebration of a film purporting to depict the 'failures' of Chassidic education.
Jewish education is undergoing a renaissance. Burgeoning antisemitism on campus has made Chabad houses the first destination for Jewish students under siege, while one of the hottest trends among teenagers in Israel is, of all things, Shabbat observance. And for the first time, this year, the majority of Jewish Israeli first-graders entered a religious school.
At The Forward, however, schooling in the Orthodox Jewish world, like anything Orthodox, remains a bugbear of choice, even when there is no real story behind a censorious headline. It recently took a serious review of a tendentious film and slapped it with a title that’s pejorative and assumes the conclusion, to misportray one of Jewish education’s shining successes as not merely mundane, but a failure.
If the title of the article, “A new documentary shows what it looks like when Hasidic education fails,” wasn’t bad enough, the page title on their website was far less subtle, declaring that “Hasidic education fails children.”
The propaganda piece to which The Forward refers, however, was devoid of evidence that Hassidic education is failing anyone, much less that it “fails children” overall. Let’s be clear: By every relevant statistic, Hassidic education is markedly superior to anything offered in New York City public schools, and The Forward, like the filmmaker, simply did its level best to obfuscate the truth.
I spoke to the reporter, Jon Kalish, at some length, and the story he told was considerably more balanced than the documentary itself, to say nothing of the title The Forward attached to his work.
He recounts the filmmaker’s discussions with a woman with a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics and psychology and another with a doctorate in English, both former members of the Hassidic community. The most ardent secularist would hardly call a high school graduate able to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, much less a Ph.D., an educational failure.
Kalish also noted that although Naftuli Moster, who founded the group Young Advocates for Fair Education (Yaffed), makes frequent appearances throughout the film as an advocate for changes to yeshiva education, Moster now concedes his approach was misguided. He even acknowledged to Kalish that the Hassidic community “is thriving despite the chaos and dysfunction surrounding us.” Needless to say, the documentary did not share Moster’s frank assessment of the community’s success.
What is most striking, though, is that neither the filmmaker, nor the reporter, nor his editors questioned the false assumption at the film’s heart. A good education is not measured by arbitrary bureaucratic assumptions, but by clear and inarguable indicators of adult success: The ability to hold a job, earn a good and stable income, avoid crime, nourish intellectual interests, demonstrate good study habits and cultivate critical thinking. yeshiva graduates outperform in each and every one of these areas.
Yeshivas also teach other skills that produce a happier outcome for students and society, yet remain sadly neglected in American public education. George Washington, Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr., all believed, for example, that education should nurture virtue and character, core elements of the yeshiva curriculum.
How to build and maintain a marriage, too, is taught in yeshivas but not the public schools, despite mountainous evidence of the personal and societal benefits of providing a loving two-parent household to the next generation. Yeshiva students not only learn far more about legal proceedings and transactions, but they also learn the importance of being law-abiding citizens.
One of the best ways to authenticate a falsehood, however, is through accurate but irrelevant statistics. Thus, the film, like anti-yeshiva advocates, paid great attention to the poverty line, a somewhat arbitrary number that swells with family size, but not to income, as the figure that actually correlates with educational success.
On this basis, it misportrayed Hassidic Jews as hapless victims, denied the education they need to support themselves, and not so subtly belittled them for having more children. Though Hassidic neighborhoods are hardly the slums that the word “poverty” implies.
A skewed agenda was obvious throughout. On screen, a supposedly learned professor bemoaned that defenders of Hassidic education had failed to address the criticisms found in The New York Times, instead simply calling the paper antisemitic. As the author of a piece that addressed the Gray Lady’s lies and distortions, I know that his assertion was robustly false; it was the professor himself who ignored inconvenient evidence.
While I certainly highlighted the antisemitic tropes behind the caricature of Hassidim as foreign, money-grubbing, incapable of independent decision-making and worthy of the hatred directed against them, I also detailed how the Times had twisted reality.
For example, it claimed that yeshivas were “flush with public money” by misrepresenting school bussing, COVID relief and school lunch funding as if they were pilfered from the public till. All of these government programs are or were offered universally, and were acclaimed by the Times and most New Yorkers, until the recipients were Hassidic Jewish schoolchildren.
Only willful blindness could explain a failure to perceive antisemitic bias in that shift. In actuality, parents sending their children to Jewish schools save the public nearly $3 billion a year in New York City alone.
Simply by putting a different title upon the writer’s work, The Forward could have offered a more dispassionate look at a biased film. By asking a few more critical questions, the reporter could have penetrated beyond the one-sided interviews and selected answers.
Ultimately, by conducting interviews with people on both sides of the question, the film could have offered a detailed and balanced assessment of reality worthy of being termed a documentary. All of these, of course, are valid critiques even before considering the abysmal state of New York’s public schools.
There were, indeed, profound failures throughout the process, but none pertained to Hassidic education. The Forward, like the filmmaker, owes an apology to the schools, to the parents and to their readers and viewers. This is especially true at a time when their defamatory portrayal offers antisemites a convenient pretense to rationalize bigotry and hatred against the Jewish community.