Professor Aaron Twerski: The State and City’s treatment of our yeshivas is “abhorrent” and “would lead to the destruction of Torah education in our schools.” In an early morning filing, Bobov, Chabad and Satmar submitted a thorough federal civil rights complaint detailing the discriminatory practices of the New York City and State Education Departments.targeting their yeshivas. They complain that “the discriminatory conduct pervades every aspect of yeshiva education,” and explain that if the City and State got their way “they would no longer be Jewish schools.” Among the charges is that New York has targeted Jewish Studies (limudei kodesh) classes for discriminatory treatment; prohibits yeshivas but not public schools from teaching required classes in a foreign language; and seeks to force yeshivas to use texts that they and their parent body find objectionable. On this last point, the yeshivas revealed that a New York City Department of Education employee, Robin Singer, has explicitly directed yeshivas to assign texts that are unacceptable to them. She explained that the purpose was to make sure that yeshiva students were “exposed to a range of materials that their parents and schools wouldn’t otherwise permit them to read.” The complaint also highlights New York’s double standard when it comes to dual-language instruction, quoting a senior State Education Department official who told a conference of school administrators that its English-only language requirement for yeshivas “is one difference in . . . what happens in district [public] schools” and nonpublic schools. He left no doubt that this double-standard targeted yeshivas by providing the following example: “[I]f you do go to a school where they say we have great history instruction and it’s actually happening in the morning in our Talmudic class, and you go to see it and it is in Aramaic, that would not qualify” as credited instruction.” Professor Aaron Twerski, a longtime law professor at Brooklyn College and a leading legal scholar said in an interview that “the civil rights complaint is totally justified. The state and city education departments have unfairly targeted our schools. Their refusal to recognize Jewish studies as part of a satisfactory curriculum is abhorrent. Their actions would lead to the destruction of Torah education in our schools.” As the complaint alleges, New York’s actions are particularly troubling because “its discriminatory dismissal of yeshiva education is contrary to the way it deals with other cultures. In 2018, New York adopted a “Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework” that is intended “to assist in the promotion and perpetuation of cultures, languages and ways of knowing that have been devalued, suppressed, and imperiled.” But not the Jewish culture. One yeshiva administrator told YWN, “the City and State have respect for all cultures except the Jewish culture and for all forms of education except for Jewish education.” The complaint makes clear that it is not challenging the regulations adopted in 2022 by the State Education Department. As YWN readers are aware, a lawsuit challenging those regulations is now pending in the New York Court of Appeals. Rather, the subject of the “Complaint is New York’s discriminatory conduct and practices against Complainant (and other) Yeshivas. New York seems to believe that it has the leverage to push the Yeshivas to deemphasize their Jewish Studies and to standardize and secularize their curricula. That is the conduct that is […]