In her brave 2012 memoir “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots” (Simon & Schuster), Deborah Feldman asks the rabbis how a caring God could allow the monstrous slaughter and suffering of the Holocaust.
She has it backward, she’s told. The Holocaust was God’s willful punishment of the Jews for attempting to assimilate with Gentiles.
The explanation is appalling, grotesque and insulting to the living and the dead, whatever their belief —or lack of belief — in a humane and rational God.
But what would such a God make of the modern, self-inflicted suffering of New York’s Chasidim whose pious elders orchestrate wholesale intellectual deprivation of their own schoolchildren?
Risen from the ashes of World War II, their schools focus strictly on Jewish law, prayer and tradition to the near exclusion of traditional academics. And as a stunning, exhaustive New York Times investigative report revealed recently, this has inadvertently created a community disaster of intellect and economics in which graduates are left essentially illiterate and unequipped to survive in the outside world.
Reporters Eliza Shapiro and Brian M. Rosenthal open their report this way: “The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York’s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring. But in 2019 the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students.
“Every one of them failed.
“Students at nearly a dozen other schools run by the Hasidic community recorded similarly dismal outcomes. … But where other schools might be struggling because of under-funding or mismanagement, these schools are different. They are failing by design.”
The Times says its reporters interviewed about 275 people, including current and former students, teachers and administrators. They reviewed thousands of pages of public records. They translated dozens of Yiddish-language documents.
In the entire state of New York, the newspaper reported, only nine schools had less than one percent of its students test at grade level. All of them were boys schools. The girls schools were only marginally better.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
New York’s Chasidic schools educate children in Jewish law and tradition, but “wall them off from the secular world,” The Times reported. “Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history … the result is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency … unprepared to navigate the outside world, helping to push poverty rates in Hasidic neighborhoods to some of the highest in New York.”
The Times reported, “Most of these schools 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.”
Often, The Times reports, these schools’ English teachers “cannot speak the language fluently themselves. Some have been hired off Craigslist or ads on lamp posts.”
The Times’ reporting set off considerable defensiveness in New York’s Chasidic community, much like the reaction to Deborah Feldman’s “Unorthodox” memoir a decade ago.
Feldman left the Satmar community in Brooklyn, and then she left the country. Her book was turned into an award-winning television series.
In a TV news interview, she later explained how rabbis described the Holocaust as “punishment for assimilation.”
“They designed a new ghetto,” she said. “They believed that the only way to prevent another Holocaust from happening was to develop a lifestyle that was stricter than any Jewish lifestyle that had been lived before. And every single rule that they designed was like an extreme interpretation of a Jewish law … because they believed they were appeasing God … and that God would have mercy on them, that he would quell his anger against them.”
But how would a righteous God feel about a different kind of disaster — of the intellect — in which a tribal impulse toward appeasement and protection instead leads to a new and tragic kind of vulnerability?
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