Agudath Israel of America decries today’s one-sided New York Times hit piece on New York State’s Hasidic community and its educational institutions.
The article is riddled with bias, ignoring the vast majority of Hasidic parents – those who cherish their yeshivas – instead citing a minority of people who have rejected the community’s values, and passing them off as representative of the whole. The true viewpoint of the tens of thousands of parents who send their children to Hasidic schools is represented, in part, by the recent historic 350,000 letters during the state’s public comment period, the vast majority of which pleading for no interference with the yeshiva educational system for which they pay and value. Could the New York Times not speak to one of those parents?
In this article, everything beautiful is turned ugly. While challenging college classes are lauded in society, our disciplined, rigorous, and intellectually challenging Torah studies are denigrated. Disgusting innuendo abounds. The supposed poverty data, which form the foundation of much of the piece, have been debunked so many times as to become tiresome. And then there are the outright falsehoods, too many to list, being cataloged now by writers, fact-checkers, and defamation lawyers.
There are certainly some who have had poor experiences in a yeshiva. But the New York Times has written a piece that could find almost nothing positive in a community that has raised generations of successful entrepreneurs, professionals, and blue-collar workers. Generations of successful human beings – even if success is defined in purely material terms.
Hasidic communities are models of safety and commerce, with low crime, suicide, and drug abuse rates. Our communities are focused on pursuits of knowledge, family values, kindness, and service to G-d and to others.
We await, in vain, for a New York Times article on that.
Vote for Lee Zeldin. That is the only aitza, al pee derech hateva, for now.
Excellent letter! Sadly it will not get nearly as much recognition as the hit piece because a) it’s not sensational and b) it defends Jews and the New York Trash is unabashedly it to denigrate Jews as it has for many decades. Seemingly it’s the only way for them to catch some bump in it’s declining readership. Fact-finding and truth is so “yesterday” at the NYT. Today, on 9/11, this is all this rag can come up with.
Commenting on Agudath Israel’s response to the NY Times typically vile reporting on the Hasidic community, the idiotic commenter asked himself, “Why are we even bothering responding to these repugnant, repulsive, hate-filled low-lifes, and why do we even give these terrorist-loving, holocaust-hiding fiends the time of day?”
The idiotic commenter than retracted part of his comments.
“Okay, I understand why Agudah felt the need to respond to them and to expose these dregs of society for what they are: Agudah is an official organization representing a large swath of the Orthodox Jewish community. But why in the world am I responding to these skunks!?”
We must vote lee zeldin
The sad part is that the NY times is 100% correct our chasidesh mosdos secular studies is a joke ajd
for our representatives to conflate a real chasidesh education to a Torah vodahs education is disingenuous and not emes. I learned in chasidesh mosdos my whole life and still part of the community nobody including the agufay will tell me that the education they provide is sufficient.
Dear Mark Stein,
Why not simply defer to parents, allowing them to decide whether they want to send their children to Chassidish, Torah Vodaath, or even public school. Would you like Chassidim to force you where you send your child?
Because the families didn’t care and the students were too bilingual to really succeed at it. Taking these two factors into account, it is exactly similar to the state of affairs in the minority communities around the city. Only that no one wants to talk about their failing education. So the lack of context is blaring. Also, the timing of the article makes it seem that it was a political plant.
you must be the kid that was in the hallway every day. The fact is, if you want to learn the chasidishe mosdos give their students the opportunity to learn math, spelling, and language arts, but if you want to be a troublemaker you won’t learn anything, but you’ll blame the system for your problems. Another fact is, one of the biggest complaints I read in the comments is the chasidishe kids can’t speak or write English. This has ZERO to do with the schools. Its a cultural issue. A child who speaks Yiddish 24/7 except for 6 or 7 hours a week of secular studies, and when he becomes bar mitzva he speaks zero English. This child won’t know English.
Which chasidish sects backed Hochul?? Which ones had pictures with her saying to vote for her?? Are they still backing her now. Where does the corruption end.
you must be the kid that was in the hallway every day. The fact is, if you want to learn the chasidishe mosdos give their students the opportunity to learn math, spelling, and language arts, but if you want to be a troublemaker you won’t learn anything, but you’ll blame the system for your problems. Another fact is, one of the biggest complaints I read in the comments is the chasidishe kids can’t speak or write English. This has ZERO to do with the schools. Its a cultural issue. A child who speaks Yiddish 24/7 except for 6 or 7 hours a week of secular studies, and when he becomes bar mitzva he speaks zero English. This child won’t know English.
To my view, the NYTimes editor has a psychological problem. It is a result of jealousy of the Jewish education system and particularly of the Chasidic community.
They can NOT grasp, how the Jewish communities are so successful in raising and educate their children in a healthy way, where most of their students grow up to be fine people and so many devote their lives to help and support their community to thrive and flourish. They can never figure out how a Torah observant Jewish school is usually able to instill so much knowledge and skills and good character traits, in their students, so they can lead a life of great success.
They can NOT accept the fact that the Jewish students are NOT being influenced by the outside secular world. This is a great embarrassment to the American education system in general and to the New York education system in particular, where their education has NOT been able deter the many young criminals from committing vicious crimes, that is happening in all of the New York society and neither were they able to alleviate the pain of the thousands of poor and young homeless. Also, many of the upper class and most of the journalists of the leading news agencies, are viewed as the core of corruption and hypocrisy. So, This is a painful fact for the NYT editor and therefore they will try everything to minimize the accomplishments of the Chasidic community schools.