The Nothing Song first captures, in Yiddish, the Nothing Modern/Nothing Permitted character of ultraorthodox life:

Montik, gornisht
Dinstik, gornisht
Midvokh un Donershtik gornisht
Fraytik, far a noveneh
Gornisht pikveleh
Shabes nach a mool gornisht

It then, in English, moves on to the yeshiva curriculum:

Reading, nothing
Writing, nothing
Even arithmetic, nothing
Geography, philosophy, history, nothing
Social anthropology, a lot of nothing

On one level it’s more hysterical overreach in the face of people who merely argue that American children should learn basic literacy; but the sentence has a value-added something. “The pleasure of illiberal dependency” sounds not quite right as the opposite principle to “the pleasure of liberal autonomy.” What more easily rolls off the tongue is something like the rigors of illiberal dependency; for an ignorant, isolated, impoverished life of lockstep obedience to rabbis cannot – the writer would I guess say should not – be easy. (Hatam Sofer declared, “Every­thing new is forbidden by the Torah.”)  You’re after a life which – with its strict rituals and rules and repressions – represents a daily rebuke of modernity’s shapeless hedonism.

Of course, the writer also intends sardonic irony, for we all know that the seeming pleasure of free — read deracinated — societies quickly turns to ashes as secular modernity’s inescapable meaninglessness and loneliness drives all of us outside of yeshivas to suicide. Indeed we are incessantly assured of the rich communal meaningful happy lives within fortress u-o; and yet Shaul Magid notes that these assurances, like a recent one by Liel Leibowitz in Tablet, are “purely speculative. [Leibowitz] has never lived in [an ultraorthodox community] (I have) and his judgment is a purely romantic, or more likely opportunistic, view of one gazing in from the outside.” Sounds as though Magid didn’t think his community was very happy.

Would you be happy if you were kept from learning anything about the world you share with all of us outside fortress u-o? To read the writer’s account of modern university education, for instance, is to try to wrap your head around a world where schools like Yeshiva, Touro, Brandeis, Baylor, Liberty, Ave Maria, Hillsdale College, and many other religiously serious institutions do not exist. ALL colleges corrupt, which is why your high schools need to aim for total illiteracy – the inability to sign your name on your SAT test:

[P]reventing college is the point. Ḥasidic parents are absolutely opposed to their eighteen-year-old sons or daughters attending college for the entirely rational reason that college consists of a complete immersion in a culture antithetical to Ḥasidism…

Come, come. The other reason – you fail to note it – is that the community makes sure eighteen year old girls are already arranged-married and knocked up, with no future to look forward to but more kids. How entirely rational.

Aint dat nice. A spiritual protection racket. We fallen-away Jews have so much to learn from the real Jews.

 Liberal NYC is supposed to be a melting pot, it’s supposed to have a generous safety net and it’s supposed to be tolerant. But underpinning that are unspoken premises that, although there’s criminals in every social group, no social group makes flouting laws a virtue and that, although there are disadvantaged members of every group, no social group will actively work to make poverty inevitable. How are the rest of us supposed to feel when a group breaks those social contracts? 

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I did my graduate work in Utah and the same thing happened with the FLDS there. Warren Jeffs’ whole goal was to keep families in thrall to him, thus children were illiterate, girls married extremely young, and boys who showed the slightest hint of “mouthiness” were cast out to try and make it in a world they didn’t understand–not realizing that the entire point of the system was to raise them up in a world they couldn’t understand so they either had to comply, or end up homeless, suicidal, and completely unskilled.

In 2018, former officials of the [Central United Talmudical Academy, famous for its one hundred percent failure rate on a very simple standardized exam,] pleaded guilty to defrauding the federal government’s Child  & Adults Care Program of over $3m in reimbursements for school meals that the school had never served... This is classic American graft… [T]ax evasion and welfare fraud are an open secret... When Jews break [the law] so blatantly, it reflects badly on all of us.

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The classic example is Lakewood, NJ; but it’s pretty much everywhere, cuz when you deny the legitimacy – nay, the very existence! – of any entity outside yourself, whatever IS out there exists only to be exploited. Laws? The ‘laws’ are their bogus godless laws. We’re the only godly location in the universe; we answer only to God, who speaks to us and us alone through our rabbis; and if our ‘crimes’ are hurting the heathens, so much the better.

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What almost none of the critics of the [NYT] article I have read mention is that this story is really about corruption: the corruption of city and state political figures and yeshiva deans who have duplicitously taken money from state coffers without abiding by state regulations. And the politicians who have looked the other way and ignored non-compliance, assumingly to cultivate Haredi favor in the voting booth. As much as this a Hasidic story, this is also a New York story of political corruption.

… R. Aaron Teitelbaum, one of the two Satmar rebbes today, is quoted in the article as saying “The truth is, we either had very little secular studies or none at all. We will not comply, and we will not follow the state education commissioner under any circumstances.” And yet his schools readily accept state funding. It is this corruption that merits a featured essay in the Times.

It is also not necessarily to Israel’s advantage that an American Jewish community that is able to exercise considerable political influence is in the process of disappearing and being replaced by an isolated, impoverished population that will not be in a position to influence anything outside of the states and localities in which they are concentrated.

Well, yes. Israel has its own socially/economically destructive ultraorthodox community with which to reckon; it now correctly and anxiously views an earlier stage of this community taking shape in the US.

Our immigrant grandparents coped with poverty by working, not by stretching out a begging basket. Time to harden our hearts.

I’ve always been amazed by the way the truly hardened hearts – those of the hostile and exploitative haredim – are reliably sentimentalized as warm and shtetl-hamish by the non-ultraorthodox. This commenter is right – we’re the nostalgic pushovers, the easy marks (given what the ultraorthodox have accomplished in schools that we subsidize, ‘easy marks’ is putting it politely) who regard the perverse, self-punishing practices of this totally rejectionist community as somehow true Judaism. ‘What Haredi communities are really after is autonomy from the state, not advancing a principled religious liberty.’

… proceeds, and will proceed, no matter how many front page New York Times articles try to shut them down. Yeshivas dedicated to debraining generations of ultraorthodox Jewish children- entire high schools score ZERO on basic literacy exams – are straight out of Alfred Jarry’s absurdist Ubu the King, the 1896 play where debraining machines first appeared.

UD Says: Enjoy the ruckus about Jews who debrain their children. It’s going to get very noisy as it begins to dawn on taxpayers what they’ve been paying for at the ultraorthodox yeshivas. Some good writing will come out of it. Some high-level thinking about the limits of toleration in a liberal state will appear. You’ll learn something. Nothing will change.

Heartbreaking.

Well, they’re on the warpath. No Pasarán!! they cry; the enemy shall not pass through our sacred gates! So-called Jews who make a PEEP about our way of life (we’re looking at you, Jonathan Tobin) are traitors and will be dealt with as such (remember Jacob Kornbluh!)

A haredi prof at a Brooklyn law school really gets it said:

When asked whether he was concerned about the lack of secular education in many Hasidic schools, [Aaron] Twerski replied, “We make the trade-offs, not the state.”

Haredim to New York:

DROP DEAD

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Nu, so what next?

Nothing. Some violent all-male demonstrations in NYC and upstate. They’ll never be pushed to the wall, so if they were smart they’d shut their traps and do nothing. But who ever said they were smart? They’ve been yeshiva-retarded. They will scream and smash and let out their sexual frustration all over town, and then, on the absurdly slim chance they are, in ten years or so, called to account, they will settle down to cheating on the standardized exam.

You thought Varsity Blues was something. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

OTOH we know nothing will happen as a result of the regents finally saying officially that zillions of schools in NYC and upstate NY – with zillions of students, their numbers growing insanely quickly, and most of them run by schoolboards rife with retarders – must be subject to serious investigation/review, and schools who keep retarding will be shut down/lose accreditation/lose subsidies… We shall do such things!

Look at Israel, babe. Look at England. England’s been failing forever to do something about schools that treat female students like slaves and teach islamofascism. Israel’s situation is hilarious. A corrupt ex-prime minister, desperate to stay out of jail, has just offered the following deal to the retarders in his country: Be part of my coalition and I promise never to interfere in any way with your child-retardation process. Full, fulsome government funding will be maintained for all of your efforts. Puts Andrew Yang to shame.

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Because everyone knows nothing will happen, and because almost no one – from their parents to NY State officials – cares about what goes on in Jewish retardation locations, talk is cheap. Suddenly you’ve got the ex-editor of Commentary, of all people, sweating rhetorical bullets over the dire social implications if America’s big, visible, Jewish community — which is soon to be demographically dominated by the retarders — starts looking like a bunch of skid row bums. Not a good look. Nothing to do to avert it, but lemme get myself on the record saying it’s not a good look.

Jonathan Tobin begins with paragraph after paragraph of boilerplate:

Evil secular rags like the NYT hate Jews and we are right to regard anything they write with extreme skepticism.

NY public schools are shitty too.

‘[P]oliticians and news outlets unfairly scapegoated the ultra-Orthodox for spreading COVID-19.’ Hey Tobin short memory: Google Orthodox Spreader Events, lad. (‘[M]ost [haredim] continue to live in constant poverty and go to the doctor without being able to understand their own diagnosis. The price they pay, as we have seen during COVID-19, as well as the recent polio upsurge and anti-vax sentiments … is high and will remain so unless major changes come.’)

After many we’re the victims! paragraphs, Tobin finally, gingerly, timorously, delicately, reticently, dips a toe in.

You don’t have to share the contempt for religious Jews that may be widespread in the Times newsroom to be alarmed by the fact that test scores in these subjects at ultra-Orthodox schools for boys (girls, who are expected to get jobs rather than merely study sacred texts, get slightly more instruction and do marginally better) appear to be the lowest in the state.

I like that “may.” It may be widespread. Ya think? I don’t think. I think a long-term reading of the NYT reveals just the opposite – an effort to write about religious Jews

(And hey Tobin doesn’t really mean religious Jews, does he? Reform Judaism, in which I was raised, is religious, but of course ultraorthodox Jews think Reform Judaism is an utterly profane obscene joke. In Israel, ultras spit at/shout GOYISH WHORE at eight year old Orthodox girls whose skirts are shorter than they should, ultra-istically, be. I think Tobin needs to specify what he has in mind by the phrase religious Jews. Me, I think a baseline definition of a religious Jew is a person who takes the ethical as well as spiritual tradition of Judaism seriously, which would, religiously, put the endemically corrupt ultraorthodox movement somewhere quite far below the Reform and Conservative movements.)

with the same neutrality/objectivity the paper’s journalists write about everything else. But what the hell is objectivity if you’re a yeshiva-educated ultra? The schools have surgically removed, as a cancer, anything that comes out of the empirical, enlightenment, traditions. This is what makes ultras such perfect Trumpians – it’s all conspiracies, rage, our side’s righteous lies, our side’s unique possession of the transcendent truth. (Bonus point here: One of the many reasons nothing’s going to happen to the ultra-orthodox retardation locations is that politicians are literally frightened of this group, whose … parlous… emotional/intellectual state combined with unquestioning mass obedience/action means … riots. Politicians don’t like riots, and believe me there will be riots if anything seriously disruptive is done to ultra life. Remember the mass attack on Jacob Kornbluh. That’s just the beginning. America’s ultras are way behind Israel’s, who riot pretty much continually; but mess with them and they’ll be torching cars.)

And then a little more delicacy cuz we don’t want to hurt any feelings here: APPEAR TO BE the lowest in the state. Another conspiracy? Have the Jew-haters in the NY State testing bureaucracy fucked with the results? Good to be skeptical about things like this.

Tobin sympathetically explains the ultra POV:

They believe that the issue here isn’t so much poor education as the refusal of the secular state … to accept the desire of the ultra-Orthodox community to opt out of society. 

Two points here:

1. If you want to opt out of society, you don’t get to take society’s hard-earned tax dollars. You’ve opted out of that.
2. You might want to opt out of society, but society can’t opt out of you. You live among us, you vote in our elections (why?), and – wait for it – we have laws. We have laws against beating kids up and defrauding the welfare system and assaulting children sexually. I know you do everything you can to hush up your bad behavior, but society features people – police, journalists, social workers – who act as society’s conscience and try to make sure that children aren’t being abused, our taxpayers aren’t being ripped off, etc. etc. The big glossy NYT article last Sunday draws many more eyes to your – anti-society? – than were ever on it before. Time to duck. “This is something dark. This is the willful perpetuation of social pathology at the hands of Jewish leaders.” “As Hilly Rubin, a resident of the heavily Chassidic neighborhood of Borough Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., told The New York Times: ‘They could have education and still have the religion. But they don’t, and the people are suffering so much.'”

Here, Tobin. Feast your eyes.

Tobin eventually says the right, obvious, sane things about ultraorthodox yeshivas, but it’s so hedged about with paranoia and knee-jerk anti-leftism (As many commenters on the NYT article note, it’s nuts to make this a left/right thing. Ultras don’t know shit about politics OUT THERE, in That Distant Evil Society. They go where the ultra-friendliest winds blow.) that it’s worthless.

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UD in front of the Israeli Embassy,

Washington DC, 2013. Photo: Jewish

Daily Forward.

Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro of Queens led the group of rabbis protesting [in Albany] Monday. 

“There is a viable, working community,” he said. “The fact that they’re failing math is not indicative of a problem.”

… whose failed mayoral candidacy did everything but suck the dicks of each of the major ultra rebbes. As a NYT commenter writes:

One day after the story broke and I don’t see any of the major recipients of ultra-Orthodox campaign donation rushing to their defense. Contrary to what some of the commenters have written here, the ultra-Orthodox (or haredim as they are known in Israel) are neither Democrats or Republicans. They vote as they are told by the community big shots who decide based on promises made to them by the politicians. If they were in the pocket of one party, their unholy efforts would be far less effective. The fact is that the community votes as a bloc and those votes are always up for grabs.

The commenter goes on to wonder why Andrew Yang in particular isn’t tweeting that if New Yorkers had voted for him none of this religious persecution would be taking place, and the beautiful diversity that is beating kids and keeping them ignorant would continue to assume its secure, state-funded role in our great city. Not long ago, he went very public with his love of ultraorthodox ways:

The key for Mr. Yang was his early declaration that he intended to take a laissez-faire attitude toward Hasidic yeshivas… 

[Yang]  criticized the city for allowing investigators “to check for infractions of various kinds” in yeshivas.

 … Mr. Yang has sought to appeal to Hasidic voters on issues besides education, including support for the right of parents to choose a circumcision ritual, metzitzah b’peh, which is used by a minority of Hasidic mohels and has transmitted herpes to babies…

Yeah! And what’s even better, Andrew, is that, as you know, all the babies that get blown by infected mohels die! What a way to go, huh? Helluva cultural practice — one you were happy to support.

So here, in their hour of need, with the NYT finally telling everyone what’s going on in the schools and creating a firestorm, where are you? Where’s the great champion not only of shameful schools, but clerical herpetic cocksuckers?

If you don’t educate your children this time, I SHALL DO SUCH THINGS.

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World’s best job: Sit around your entire career futzing with proposals for reform of ultraorthodox education knowing nothing will ever happen. The ultimate sinecure.

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Yeah I know you think a big glossy Sun NYT exposé will make ALL the difference. You doodoo.

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A reminder from the comment thread:

These [groups have also been allowed to be exempt] from the obligation to vaccination — [which] they are skirting based on their religious beliefs. Paying them to undermine public health [along with paying them to undermine education] is another wrong we can no longer tolerate for the health of the rest of us. Measles and now polio. No no no.

Another one:

As a public health physician since the 1980’s, I can also note that the disregard of the schools for vaccination requirements are a (large) part of the peril highlighted by yesterday’s polio disaster declaration in New York state, and the detection of polio in the waste water of multiple NY counties, the latest Nassau. The US school age vaccination rates for polio in the US approach 94 %; rates are much lower among yeshiva students, contributing to silent spread of an almost eliminated infection in the US.

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Systemic welfare fraud is something else we allow them.

The article also talks about teachers violently abusing their students. It appears to be endemic. We know that rates of sexual abuse are high in these communities as well.

No one cares. Nothing will change.

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Tell you what. I’ve been studying and following the ultraorthodox scandal, in the US and Israel, for years. I fully admit that I just do not get it. Israel’s ultras are routinely violent against the state as well – street riots galore. No one cares. Nothing will change.

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I will say this: The NYT piece is a brilliant, even exciting example of fearless investigative journalism. The one hundred percent outraged, very lengthy comment thread, full of readers describing themselves as absolutely shocked by the educational gutter the article depicts, tells you what? It tells you that all that’s ever been needed for ordinary taxpayers to be sick with disgust over a scofflaw, rapidly growing, hopelessly welfare dependent subculture in this country is for our paper of record to find the guts to write about it.

Once again, nothing will change. But talk about making the situation graphic. A final comment from the thread:

I never thought I would see a major news publication actually have the audacity to describe the situation accurately, bluntly, and plainly.

Why does this take guts?

Damned if I know.

WWWWuh oh. WWWWWWWWuh ooooooohhhhh. You is runnin headlong into theology, lady, as in God TOLD you He’s not a sadist but what you gonna do about the fact that God told your male Republican colleagues damn straight He IS a sadist?

This is South Carolina, the Jesus-Told-Me State. It’s like – you played your game of Telephone with the Lord, and He totally told you NOT to destroy mothers and children and babies with a no-exceptions state abortion law; but all them guys played their game of Telephone with the Lord and the Lord told them hell go ahead and force people to give birth even though it might kill them.

Static on the line? Who’s hearing it wrong?

Miscommunication – you said it. Might just make a body wonder ifn basing legislation on who’s hearing Jesus correctly might not be a good idea.

Timed to coincide with the president’s American Fascists speech, gun-toting cultists just showed up en masse at an Idaho public library demanding hundreds of books be removed or they’ll blow everyone’s brains out In Jesus’ Name Amen. The head of the library has already quit and run away, not wanting her brains blown out. “They start showing up at your house with guns on their hips and Bible tracts in their hands.”

A parochial school … baptized 100 students without permission from parents—some of whom were left angry by the surprise. “My daughter calls me from the school and says, ‘Mama, can you bring me some dry clothes? I got baptized today,’” the parent of an 11-year-old told the Fayetteville Observer. “I said, ‘WHAT?’” At least three parents complained to the Northwood Temple Academy principal, who said a handful of students were scheduled to receive the sacrament and the others “just began to respond to the presence of the Lord.” 

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The Honey, I Baptized the Kids! problem is more widespread than you might think.