What Happened Today: April 25, 2023
President Biden announces his run; The rain in Spain falls heavily, on olive oil prices; Sudanese bio-lab is "high risk"
The Big Story
President Joe Biden announced his candidacy for re-election on Tuesday, setting up the possibility of a rematch against leading Republican candidate Donald Trump. The announcement came in the form of a subdued three-minute video, of which the most notable facet is perhaps how often it features Vice President Kamala Harris, who’s maintained a remarkably low profile while notching one of the lowest approval ratings for a VP in modern history. The campaign, built around the slogan “Let’s finish the job,” seems unlikely to inspire enough emotion from the 44% of Democrats who recently told Reuters pollsters that Biden, at 80, is too old to run. Trump faces a similar headwind, with 35% of Republicans asserting that the 76-year-old is likewise too senior to get back into office.
Indeed, the majority of American voters want to see another set of candidates face off in 2024, but that doesn’t matter. Biden has already neutralized potential challengers by bringing Govs. J.B. Pritzker (IL) and Josh Shapiro (PA), two rising Democratic Party stars, onto his advisory board, and the Democratic National Committee has said it will not sponsor any primary debates, despite calls from candidates Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to do so.
Biden’s strength could quickly become a liability should a governor from Florida (DeSantis), a recently fired Fox News broadcaster (Tucker), or another younger candidate emerge during the primaries to topple Trump, who remains vulnerable to three legal proceedings now moving through the courts. Or, those three cases could leave Trump not just unscathed but empowered if they act as catalysts for a base that views them as politically motivated.
Read More: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-80-makes-2024-presidential-run-official-lets-finish-this-job-2023-04-25/
In The Back Pages: The Fight Over Religious Education
The Rest
→ Farmers all across Europe are sitting on massive stockpiles of unsold grain because the exports coming out of Ukraine are undercutting their margins—so much so that farmers will lose money if they sell at current prices. Last summer, the European Union led a campaign to lift tariffs and other measures slowing the export of farm products from Ukraine as part of its effort to combat Russia’s seizure of major Ukrainian ports. The campaign essentially worked, staving off a food shortage in Africa and other regions that depend on the Ukrainian breadbasket, but the millions of tons of Ukrainian grain also flooded into nearby nations across Eastern and Central Europe, rapidly undermining farmers inside those nations. “We can’t compete at these prices. Nobody can compete,” Bogdan Dediu, who owns a family farm in Galati County, Romania on the Danube, told the Financial Times. “Of course we want to help Ukraine. But we also have families and children to support.” The daylight between solidarity with Ukraine and the survival of their industry has some farmers leaning on their elected officials to push back on the flood of cheap grain, an opening that some far-right groups are now trying to exploit in upcoming elections.
→ Inching closer to its lowest-ever closing stock price, San Francisco-based First Republic has plummeted roughly 90% since trading up to $115 in March due in part to depositors pulling out nearly $100 billion since the banking crisis began after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. A rescue package courtesy of JPMorgan Chase and other big financial institutions has proven to be only a stopgap measure, with the expense of the emergency funding beginning to weigh on First Republic’s balance sheet. First Republic “needs to pull off the mother of all pivots to survive,” Timothy Coffey, a Janney analyst, wrote this week. Part of that pivot will be a campaign to bring in money from clients and businesses with smaller holdings than those of the wealthy clientele it usually services. “I wonder if it’s in their DNA for them to be able to do that,” Coffey told The Wall Street Journal.
→ The Maine Lobster Festival has gender-neutralized its coronation event by marking this summer as the debut of the “Maine Lobster Festival Delegate”—the new, sleek title for a role that had for decades been known as the Sea Goddess. Young women and now young men and anyone else besides can compete for the honor, as long as they’re “passionate about being an advocate for Maine’s lobster industry.” The neutralization is only piecemeal, however; the opening night will also see the crowning of both a Miss and Mr. Congeniality.
→ A jury will be selected from a pool of roughly 150 people on Tuesday as E. Jean Carroll’s trial over her allegations of rape against former president Donald Trump begins in the Southern District of New York. The civil suit kicked off last year when Carroll filed the case under a new New York statute, which allowed plaintiffs to pursue redress over alleged sex crimes after the expiration of the statute of limitations. Rather than needing to clear the higher standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt” in a criminal proceeding, Carroll will need only to convince the jury that there’s a “preponderance of evidence” showing the attack took place, which she claims occurred in a Manhattan dressing room in the early 1990s, where Trump pinned her against the wall and forcibly assaulted her. Trump, for his part, says he never knew Carroll.
→ Since June 2022, olive oil prices in Europe have surged nearly 60%, and they might keep going up after the lack of rain in Spain, which produces half of the world’s oil supply, has pummeled crop yields and sent prices soaring. Last year was also the driest growing season in Italy, according to records dating back to 1800. The clock is ticking on the crops, which in the Mediterranean region are typically harvested between October and February, though some growers say the volatility could knock out some of the producers who’ve been in a race to the bottom in terms of quality and price, thus potentially rewarding makers that have stuck to high-quality production.
→ Fighting in Sudan is intensifying, with U.K. officials beginning an evacuation operation for British citizens, telling them to make their way to an airfield secured by French and German soldiers 18 miles north of Khartoum. So far, roughly 2,800 British nationals have reached out to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office for help in evacuating the country. The fresh urgency to get civilians away from the conflict zones has sparked concern about a new wave of hundreds of thousands of migrants destined for both neighboring countries and European shores. The U.N. Security Council is scheduled to gather on Tuesday night to address the crisis.
→ Another wrinkle in the Sudanese conflict emerged late on Tuesday when the World Health Organization reported one of the militant groups seized a bio laboratory in the capital city of Khartoum that held measles and cholera pathogens, triggering a “high risk of biological hazard.” Lab technicians have since been unable to access the National Public Health Laboratory to ensure the integrity of the biomaterials, leaving open the possibility that the group had seized some of the materials stored there.
→ Save for content made in America, the Netflix global audience spends the most amount of time watching television from South Korea. Seeking to capitalize on that favoritism, Netflix is now supersizing its investment in original Korean programming, plowing $2.5 billion into the South Korean entertainment industry, with 34 new original programs set to come out of the country this year. Netflix already has stiff competition from Disney Plus and Apple TV, which have also gone big on South Korean investments. In 2021, the country’s content industry produced a record $12.4 billion worth of new programming.
Staying on the Netflix tip: Instagram account @SephardicCommunity has the line, it seems, on Adam Sandler maybe possibly buying a new pad in Deal, New Jersey. Netflix, which inked a $250 million four-film deal with Sandler last year, also won a bid for a roughly 300-acre plot of land near the Jersey shore on the former home of the Fort Monmouth Army base, which is expected to become the second-largest production compound Netflix operates, outside of a New Mexico site it bought in 2018. For the residents of Deal, that could mean semi-regular sightings of the Sandman, who’s lifetime haul so far at the box office recently topped $10 billion.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The RFK Jr. Tapes by David Samuels
The Democratic presidential candidate and America’s most prominent ‘conspiracy theorist’ talks about his family, the military-pharmaceutical complex, and our new system of social control
A Guilty Pleasure for Israeli Independence Day by Dana Kessler
Deep-fried Tunisian tuna sandwiches known as fricassé are popular across Israel—especially, for some, on Yom Ha’atzmaut
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The Fight Over Religious Education
Debates between New York State and its Hasidic Community about school choice offer a harbinger of what’s to come nationwide
By Ray Domanico
The debate in New York State surrounding a state law that requires private and religious schools to provide a curriculum that is "substantially equivalent" to that provided in the local public schools first began in 2015. A group called Young Advocates for Fair Education (YAFFED) petitioned education officials to look into what they claimed was the lack of substantial equivalence at 39 Brooklyn Yeshivas for boys located in Hasidic or Haredi neighborhoods. Their complaint resonated with many in New York, including the editorial boards of the city’s three major dailies, who wrote in favor of investigating these schools to assure that their students were getting a full secular education alongside their religious studies. It quickly became an issue of national concern.
On March 23, 2023, a trial court in New York invalidated the enforcement mechanism embedded in these regulations, pointing out that the State’s compulsory education law is meant to be enforced by parents, not schools. It found that a family could be deemed in compliance with compulsory education by sending their children to a religious school while also filing a home-schooling plan with their local district indicating how their children would be meeting the requirements of the substantial equivalence law. It remains to be seen if this ruling will be appealed.
Whatever the outcome in New York, the “substantial equivalency” conflict between those advocating for the rights of parents and those opposing public investment in private education is sure to repeat itself in states like Arizona, West Virginia, Florida, and Arkansas, where recently enacted school choice programs will allow religiously inclined parents to place their children in schools that reflect their practices and beliefs—with public money to follow. The stakes of the debate are considerable, with billions of dollars and the deeply held beliefs of millions of Americans hanging in the balance.
The most recent estimate, from 2019, indicates that over 93,000 students in New York City attended schools considered hasidic and another 47,000 did so in five counties outside of New York City. Parents freely choose and pay tuition to these schools. It is true that some graduates of these schools have been unhappy with the choices made by their parents, as are some current students and parents. While it is hard to know the exact percentages, it seems to be a relative fraction of the hasidic community that oppose these education systems.
YAFFED, a group of hasidic students, graduates, and parents in New York State, argues that parents in these communities face reproach if they opt out of these yeshivas. More importantly, YAFFED believes that the schools fail to provide boys with a sufficient education to prepare them for either college or the world of work. As a result, according to YAFFED, poverty and reliance on public assistance is rampant in hasidic communities.
There is, to be sure, some poverty and reliance on public assistance in hasidic communities in the state, and in some cases the poverty is extensive. New Square, NY, a town of roughly 10,000 Skverer Hasidim, is the poorest town in the state, with a poverty rate of 64%. But New York’s poverty extends far beyond these communities. In 2019, almost 14% of the state’s population lived in poverty; most of those living under the poverty line received nutrition assistance. Hasidic schools enroll less than 5% of the state’s students, so other schools must be producing significant numbers of students destined for poverty. For decades, the Regents and the State Education Department have failed to break this public school to poverty pipeline, yet they are now leaning on the Yeshivas to follow a curriculum like that used in the public schools.
It is also true that some hasidic schools do not offer education in secular subjects and that others attempt to provide the bare minimum with support provided through Federal Title One programs for eligible students. They all provide a classical Jewish education which features intensive instruction in Torah studies and a strong focus on Talmud, in which the boys and young men decipher and analyze competing commentaries on the scriptures in Hebrew and Aramaic. This is not the rote memorization of prayers; it is textual analysis of complex writings. Public schools often adopt “critical thinking” as a goal for their students, but many of them do not ground their students in either enough cultural literacy or advanced thinking skills to meet that goal. Among the three Brooklyn yeshivas I visited, only one does not teach any secular subjects, but its Talmudic studies classes evidenced intense discussion of complex questions related to how people should relate to each other and one’s responsibilities to others in various circumstances. That is a good anchor for raising educated, responsible adults.
These schools also maintain extraordinarily high standards of their own. Some of them expect their students to be fluent Hebrew readers by the end of grade one and test them regularly throughout grade two to gauge their proficiency. The state of New York does not test public school students on English reading proficiency until grade 3, and the state-wide results are middling at best.
The Yeshivas that teach students from Yiddish speaking homes offer more complicated cases, and the shortcomings in their secular programs yield graduates who are not English proficient. Presumably this limits their ability to interact with the larger secular world, to find certain forms of employment, or to pursue higher secular education without remediation, but one does meet adults who came through these schools and who have gone on to law school or other professional training.
It should also be noted that many Jewish Day Schools in the Modern Orthodox and Centrist Orthodox traditions feel that they fulfill their religious obligations with their Talmudic studies while also providing their students with a full range of high-level academic instruction in secular studies. Why are the hasidic schools in question so insistent in limiting secular studies? As a father of children in such a school explained to me “the answer boils down to the idea that these fleeting early years of education, when children are impressionable and sensitive to everything they see, hear and are taught, should be grounded in a classical, purely Jewish education.” This principle, they explained, is accentuated by the disintegrating state of society at large; hasidic parents seek to create and foster a solid Jewish religious foundation during these crucial years of schooling before they enter the world. This traditional form of full immersion in Jewish studies has served their community well through many centuries of trials and tribulations in the diaspora. Contrary to the way these communities have been portrayed, multiple schools serve each hasidic community, so parents are free to choose the level of secular education they desire for their children.
The question for New York’s education officials is now how to best serve these religious communities who are their constituents. A court has ruled that the State cannot shutter schools which don’t provide a substantially equivalent education, but that they can impose fines or threaten prison to parents who are not ensuring that their children are receiving a substantially equivalent education. Are the state and city education agencies really going to impose sanctions on the many parents who are happy with the educational choices that they have freely made? Some schools might be able to document substantial equivalence with changes at the margins, but those changes will not likely satisfy those most opposed to the educational practices of these schools.
Some schools that offer no secular studies, like the one I visited, may become the locus of a case before the Supreme Court, which in 1972 gave Amish communities an exemption to Wisconsin's compulsory education law, allowing them to opt their children out of high school, citing the uniqueness and self-sufficiency of the Amish community. The hasidim of today might just rise to that same standard of uniqueness and self-sufficiency.
Ray Domanico is Senior Fellow and Director, Education Policy at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. For over forty years he has studied education in the public, private and charter sectors in pursuit of greater educational opportunity and choice for all communities.
If vegetarians would unite, they could eat our Vegetable-in-Chief ... not sure that would provide any relief.
Having attended a Yeshivah which provided "secular" education from 3:30-6:30 PM S-Th through high school, was able to test and receive NY Regents scholarship, get BA, and advanced degrees, as did many of my classmates. At same time, many family members attended Yeshivas with little or no secular/English education, no college and poor financial opportunities, some living in New Square, and yet happy in their choices and their community around the Skverer Rebbe. Life choices, some made by parents and some by individual, and varying conseuences.