Three Haredi Responses to Educational Mandates from the State of New York

Haredi Judaism is the most rapidly growing Jewish denomination in North America. According to Pew Research Center data American haredi Jews have more children and are younger on average than Jews of any other denomination. In 2018, the OU Center for Communal Research estimated that 40% of all Jews under 20 in New York City speak Yiddish as their first language. As far back as 2005, Samuel Heilman suggested that ultra-Orthodoxy is becoming “the dominant mode of Orthodoxy.”

This rapid growth has produced an unprecedented flourishing of haredi education, in particular amongst Hasidim. In 2020, there were over 170,000 Orthodox school children in New York, and 110,000 of them were Hasidic. Hasidic schools have historically operated mainly independently of the state, except for minimal funding for special services, security, and textbooks. Recently, however, a small cadre of ex-hasidim have mounted a public relations and legal campaign to compel the state to impose (or enforce) regulations that would force Hasidic schools to radically alter the school day to provide a more comprehensive secular education.

This paper examines the response of the Hasidic community to this campaign. Using data from interviews and conversations with heads of school, community leaders, community activists, and lawyers for the yeshivas, I identify three different strategies of resistance to the threat of state mandates. The first is a legal campaign, with the aim of overturning the mandates in the courts, on religious freedom grounds. The second is an accommodationist strategy that aims to work with the state to find some middle ground that will work for the majority of schools, if not all of them. The final strategy is one of avoidance: some in the hasidic community hope to avoid the mandates by simply ignoring them and putting the onus on the state to shut them down.