What Happened Today: April 3, 2023
Twitter troll guilty of conspiracy; Russia confiscates passports; Italy says abbastanza! to AI
The Big Story
On Friday, a federal jury handed down a guilty verdict to a far-right provocateur over his Twitter posts that prosecutors alleged were part of a conspiracy to deprive voters of their rights to cast a ballot in the 2016 presidential election. Now facing a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, Douglass Mackey, 33, used a Twitter account under the alias “Ricky Vaughn” to distribute memes targeting Black supporters of Hillary Clinton with various messages that mimicked political advertisements. Mackey and his lawyers saw the memes as satire, but prosecutors allege they tricked people into believing they could cast their vote with text messages to a particular phone number. According to prosecutors, nearly 5,000 unique telephone numbers sent texts to the number in the lead-up to the election.
Arrested in 2021, Mackey was charged under a federal law that criminalizes conspirators who intrude on a person’s constitutionally protected rights: in this case, the right to vote. Mackey’s attorneys argued that the messages, while misleading, are speech protected under the First Amendment. Eugene Volokh, a professor in the UCLA School of Law who wrote about Mackey’s case for Tablet in 2021, told The Scroll that the case will likely not reach the Supreme Court but rather find its ultimate conclusion in the appellate court, where the decision could have far-reaching implications.
“Picketing outside a party’s headquarters, urging party activists not to show up for the get-out-the-vote effort (perhaps arguing that the party’s candidate has recently been shown to be a crook or a racist), would be a crime” as implicated in the use of the federal law against Mackey, Volokh wrote in 2021. “What’s more, [the particular law] isn’t limited to protecting the right to vote. … Say that people try to prevent a public speech at a local university by urging university employees to cancel it. That too would be a conspiracy ‘with the specific intent to impede or prevent qualified persons from exercising’ the First Amendment right to speak, or the right to listen.”
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/douglass-mackey-ricky-vaughn-memes-first-amendment
In The Back Pages: The Case for Free Jewish Day School
The Rest
→ Russia’s security agency, the FSB, has begun confiscating the passports of senior Russian officials, civilians, and state business executives with security clearances over increased fears of defections and leaks of security information. Though Russia has maintained a set of laws dating back to the Soviet era that require officials who are privy to state secrets to keep passports in safes guarded by the state, the rules have been essentially unenforced. But ongoing discontent among Russia’s elite over the effects of the invasion of Ukraine on their lifestyle has engendered a new level of paranoia within the Kremlin and the FSB, according to a new Financial Times report, and passports and other travel documents are now routinely being confiscated by state security agents. “Basically any information can be deemed secret, so the embedded FSB officers start telling you that you have sensitive information. What is it? Why is it secret and who decides that? Nobody knows,” Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central bank official, told the FT.
→ Song of the Day:
Co-founder of Sire Records and music business titan Seymour Stein died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 80. For more than five decades, Stein’s work with Lou Reed, Brian Wilson, the Talking Heads, the Pretenders, and The Smiths made him one of the most successful executives in the business. Frank and sardonic, Stein told journalists in jest that stories that made him look bad could result in their demise. British and European musicians and record labels were persuaded to license their hits to his American label with the cheesecakes he would pack in dry ice and carry with him on a plane from New York. “The more we delivered, the easier it was to walk out with bargains,” said Stein. The song featured above comes from Belle & Sebastian—who, before they broke through, had met with Stein at a swank hotel as he showed them the kind of opulent music-business life they could lead if they signed to his label. “The message was quite clear,” B&S bassist, Stuart David, writes in his memoir. “If we signed to Sire Records for America, this was the kind of plenty we would have access to.”
→ An 11-year-old girl who’d written several emails to her school administrators about ongoing bullying against her and several of her classmates took her own life in a bathroom stall at her New Jersey school in February.
Speaking to NJ.com, the girl’s mother, Elaina LoAlbo, said administrators “have swept under the rug the bullying that she and so many other kids in that school have encountered, and now they’re doing the same with this investigation.”
The girl had recently lost her father to cancer and suggested to school officials that they create a “trauma club” where students could talk to each other about stressful events in their lives. “I was watching TV and thinking about the things in my life that happened to me, and I got a great idea. Instead of drama club, it would be a trauma club. … I would help and provide as much as I can,” the girl wrote.
The same week the girl took her own life, a 14-year-old freshman girl committed suicide after a video of her being assaulted by her classmates went viral in another school in New Jersey.
→ Several of Montana Rail Link’s freight cars derailed and fell into Montana’s Clark Fork River on Sunday. No injuries were reported, but a hazmat team is keeping an eye on a derailed car full of propane as the cleanup of the debris, including beer cans and food products, continues. After five crashes last year and nine in 2021, this derailment was only the first of 2023 for Montana Rail Link. Congress is currently evaluating a new railway-safety bill following the spectacular environmental disaster of the Feb. 3 train crash in East Palestine, Ohio. Part of that legislation would require railroads to develop more robust disaster plans for crashes involving hazardous materials.
→ Number of the Day: 30 billion
That’s how many Facebook images Clearview AI has scraped from the social platform to populate its controversial facial-recognition database it licenses to law-enforcement agencies around the country. With increasing frequency, the people arrested based on matches made to the faces in the database turn out to be innocent, including two recent cases in New Orleans and Detroit. CEO Hoan Ton-That told the BBC in March that Facebook users weren’t aware that his company had taken their images for his database, which has been accessed by law enforcement at least a million times since 2017.
→ Microsoft’s ChapGPT AI software has been shut down by Italy officials, at least for now, until Italy’s Data Protection Authority completes an investigation into a security breach that briefly exposed conversation transcripts and some financial details of the AI’s users to the public. It’s the first regulatory move against an AI chatbot, though likely not the last as regulators grow wary of how much information the language models powering AI chatbots can acquire. Last week, Elon Musk and early AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio signed a letter with more than 1,000 tech leaders calling for a government-enforced six-month moratorium on further language-system developments to “ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt,” the letter said. “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity.”
→ Months of ongoing protests against pension reforms in France that would raise the retirement age might be down one demonstrator after local police arrested a 50-something Saint Omer woman for “insulting the president of the republic” in a March Facebook post. The comment—“This piece of filth is going to address you at 1:00 pm … it’s always on television that we see this filth”—was enough to land her a criminal trial, whom La Voix du Nord newspaper referred to only by her first name, Valerie. Clashes between police and protests are expected to intensify on Thursday during a series of planned strikes across the nation.
→ A menagerie of some 70 hippos that were kept on the ranch of infamous drug trafficker Pablo Escobar will be shipped off to various nature refuges in Colombia and India to the tune of $3.5 million. Nicknamed Escobar’s “cocaine hippos,” the animals were just one species among the many exotic animals that he kept on his ranch, most of which were relocated to various nature preserves after his death in 1993. Initially just one male and three females, the hippos were too expensive and complicated to transport at the time and have since proliferated into a group of at least 130 animals that, because they lack a natural local predator, have spread far beyond the confines of the original Escobar estate, posing a threat to the wildlife and residents.
→ Stat of the Day: 56%
That’s how many Americans now believe “earning a four-year degree is a bad bet” compared to the 42% who still think it’s worth it, according to a new Wall Street Journal survey. The skepticism about the value of a college diploma is highest among the 18-34 demographic. Notably, those who already have a college degree are those whose opinion has changed the most compared to opinions recorded in previous surveys: Just a decade ago, only 40% of Americans believed getting a college diploma wasn’t worth the expense.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Four Children by Sean Cooper
A new survey captures the changing landscape of American Judaism
On European Intellectuals, Anti-Americanism, and Judith Butler by Éric Marty and Blake Smith
An exchange of letters
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 Case for Free Jewish Day School
Day schools are getting cheaper. That’s not good enough.
My wife and I were reluctant day-school parents. She was a public-schooler all the way up to college (and the daughter of public-school teachers, to boot); I was educated in a mix of public schools and secular private schools. But, as it happened, two of our five children are now in Jewish schools. One went because we thought it would be a better fit than the public school she was in; the other, because the Jewish school was opening in person and, due to COVID, the public school was not.
Now that I’ve had an intensive immersion experience in the day-school world for six years, I have come to this conclusion: Sending your child to a Jewish day school is one of those human endeavors, like parenthood itself, or Ted Lasso, that you might not think is for you, but almost surely is, if only you’ll give it a try. Once you’re in, you’re in, and the occasional gripes—about cost, or dirty diapers, or season three—pale next to the obvious advantages. Pretty soon, you’ve forgotten why you resisted, and you wonder what took you so long.
Every parent, and child, will have her or his own reasons for embracing a Jewish education, which may include the schools’ effects on students’ long-term Jewish engagement, on their Zionism, or on what scholar Alex Pomson, author of Inside Jewish Day Schools, calls “cultural virtuosity.” As for me, I am impressed by Jewish schools’ obvious sense of purpose, which astounded me when I saw it from the inside. “[A]ll good schools have an implicit sense of mission,” I’ve previously argued, and in Jewish schools the sense of mission is front and center: to be knowledgeable about, custodians of, and practitioners of a glorious inherited tradition. Jewish schools offer a reason for school beyond the college-obsession, or self-centered careerism, now preached by many public and private schools.
Jewish parochial schools are not for everyone, of course, but they are for enough people. Especially given that, according to the latest survey of the American Jewish community, a large-scale study conducted by Keren Keshet, most American Jews hope that their children and grandchildren engage with the Jewish community. In a survey that suggests that American Jews don’t agree on much, 65% did agree on this. And there are few more impactful ways of guaranteeing that your child will be deeply connected to Judaism than sending them to a Jewish school.
Another thing many respondents (almost a sixth) agreed upon: that the cost of being Jewish is a barrier to greater engagement. I have thus begun to wonder, given the high interest in sending your children to Jewish day schools and the high cost of doing so, shouldn’t they be free? Put another way, aren’t there enough wealthy and charitable Jewish institutions that poor, middle-class, and even financially stressed upper-middle-class Jews should be able to send their children to Jewish schools without worrying about the tuition? If we are the people of the book; if we hope for Jewish continuity; if we believe Judaism is life-enhancing and promotes human flourishing; if we believe Jewish knowledge is as important as secular knowledge; if we believe our children have a right to know this stuff; if we feel called, or even commanded, to do this; and if there is extraordinary wealth in the Jewish community, then why do we only manage to fund most of these schools a little, or a good amount, but not all the way?
Before I go on to make the case that day school should be free (or almost free—I’ll explain that caveat in a moment), it’s worth noting that these schools have made great leaps toward affordability in the last decade. Without question, the about 300,000 students enrolled in about 900 non-Haredi schools (ultra-Orthodox yeshivas are a different matter; they are cheaper, and enrollment is growing) are receiving more financial aid now than ever before. And the money is getting better, faster. After the recession of 2008, when day-school enrollments began to decline, many Jewish communities embarked on herculean efforts to make the schools more accessible.
In Toronto, for example, TanenbaumCHAT, the large non-Orthodox Jewish high school, was in trouble. “The school was shrinking,” said Dan Held, chief program officer of the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto. “In 2017 it was at 900 students, with 175 in grade nine. It had been over 1,500 kids only eight or nine years before that.” Shrinking numbers meant that fixed overhead costs had to be spread among fewer students, pushing the price up. Together with the school the federation launched an initiative to lower tuition. Six years ago, with 14 million Canadian dollars ($10.4 million) in gifts from local philanthropists, the school reduced tuition by about one third, from nearly CA$28,000 to CA$18,500.
“The net result,” Held said, “is that six years ago, we had 175 students in grade nine, and today there are 350. That number will tick up even higher next year.” The school has additional funds for families that cannot meet even the reduced tuition and continues to keep tuition increases below inflation. Federation, in the meantime, has launched the Generations Trust, an endowed affordability program for Toronto Jewish elementary schools, which in its first two years has contributed to a 12% growth in the kindergarten classes.
Although nobody seems to have computed the average cost of Jewish day school, a look at some numbers are startling. On the high end, there are schools like Ramaz in New York City and Shalhevet High School in Los Angeles, where high school is over $40,000 a year (at Ramaz, preschool is over $30,000 a year). Same goes for Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, outside Washington, D.C. On the other hand, at Friedel Jewish Academy, a K-6 school in Omaha, Nebraska, tuition is $9,200 per year. Community Day School, in Pittsburgh, will charge $19,200 next year. Many Haredi schools are much cheaper still.
Toronto is not the only community to embark on ambitious tuition-reduction or financial aid programs. Seattle philanthropists have launched a similar program, and the Pava Tuition Initiative has substantially reduced tuition at the modern Orthodox school that serves the the I-91 corridor from Springfield, Massachusetts, through Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut. One of my daughters, in fact, attends a school that benefits from one of these efforts.
But for all these efforts, it’s still the rare Jewish philanthropist who makes Jewish schools—or Jewish summer camps, which are similarly transformative—a top priority. “Deep Jewish education has not, at least until the recent past, been top of the list among investments in the Jewish community,” said Paul Bernstein, CEO of Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools, a network for Jewish day schools and yeshivas in North America. “If we want committed leadership for the Jewish future, and to have a literate community deeply engaged here and with Israel, ready to fight antisemitism and strengthen society as a whole, we need to make the big bets to help day schools flourish.”
Donors prefer to focus on Israel trips, arts and culture, or well-meaning efforts to combat antisemitism. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that. But I can say that I have forgotten more about my Birthright trip than I ever remembered (and I think my wife, brother, and sister, all Birthright alumni, would say the same). And without Jewishly educated adults, there is no audience for Jewish film festivals.
Jewish parents who don’t send their children to day schools have many reasons. There are those who just aren’t interested—which is fine. Among those who might be interested, some believe strongly in public education, which I don’t quarrel with. I have sent my children to many cumulative years of public school, and I wonder about the ethics of using private schools.
Some parents eschew Jewish education because they seek “diversity,” but many of them have a fairly quirky notion of what that means. “What they often mean,” says Alex Pomson, “is they don’t want their child only to be in school with Jews. Ironically, because of where many Jews live, the public schools their children attend don’t include so much diversity, racial or economic. But they do include non-Jews.”
Such parents may also worry that Jewish schools, by their very nature, don’t have the “excellence” that secular private schools have. And these parents are often not price-sensitive; that is, no matter how cheap a Jewish school got, they wouldn’t consider it. For parents with a lot of money, and a fixation on elite college, a tiny edge in college admissions for their child is worth spending $40,000 a year, or more, even if there’s a Jewish school that costs nothing. And this population of parents, who would strangle themselves in ivy to get their kids some, includes thousands of synagogue-going, culturally engaged Jews.
But there are families for whom money matters, a lot. And financial aid. And how accessible the financial aid seems. Many Jewish schools promise that “no family is turned away because of need,” or some language like that; but if accessing that aid requires onerous forms, and submitting one’s entire tax returns, many people won’t bother (even if they should). And a high sticker price can be off-putting to casual shoppers, who may never bother to find out how much aid is actually available.
For such Jews, the most important innovation may not be more scholarship money but the unbelievably user-friendly aid calculatorcreated by the Toronto federation. It is intuitive, answers every possible question, and also connects families interested in day schools with opportunities for summer camps and other Jewish activities. “We can offer families on scholarships free entrance to community events that would normally have a nominal fee—tickets to the Jewish Film Festival, a hotdog at the Walk with Israel, etc.,” Dan Held said.
When I pushed my free-day-school idea to several philanthropic officials, none would bite. One Toronto macher told me that there was no way to raise CA$100 million a year, the amount of the whole Toronto, non-Orthodox, Jewish-school economy. Of course, Toronto is an outlier. The Shalom School, a K-6 school in Sacramento, California, has an annual budget of $2.7 million. In many cities, the full cost of Jewish education could certainly be met by a few motivated philanthropists.
Another common reply was that people need to “have skin in the game,” or “we don’t value what we don’t pay for.” According to this thinking, it’s somehow ennobling to require people to pay something. But I am not sure that’s true in reality. In fact, the opposite is often true: Californians still look back with pride on the days when tuition in the University of California system was nearly free. The University of Toronto charges CA$6,590 this year, and Canadians don’t think less of it because it’s cheap. The Roman Catholic parochial-school system, which at midcentury was dirt cheap in most parishes, was a tremendous source of quality education, not to mention social cohesion. Many of us value public education precisely because it’s a commonly funded good.
But what if I’m wrong? One federation officer shared with me another concern, a fear that if school were free, “some people would say they’re coming and then just not show up in the fall.” If these are real problems, there is an answer: Just charge a little! Drop tuition to, say, $1,800—enough to transmit value, but not so much that it breaks most families’ banks.
It seems to me that even Jews who didn’t send their children to Jewish schools would be proud to say, “Jewish children can get a free (or very cheap) good Jewish education, paid for by the Jewish community.” Think of what it would signal about our community and its values. (As one friend noted: “People would convert just to get to use our private schools,” which in my opinion would be a very good problem to cause.)
So: Is the money there? Not right now. According to the Pew survey, there are 1.2 million American children living with a Jewish parent and being raised Jewish; at about $20,000 per year per child (more than the cheapest day schools, way less than the most expensive), the price tag would come in at about $20 billion. Figure only half of families would use the Jewish education; further recognize that children aren’t in school their first few years; and we’d still need somewhere close to $10 billion—more than the total of all philanthropy through Jewish federations and donor-advised funds in the U.S. in a given year.
It’s a hefty ask. But I’m a writer and a dreamer, not an accountant or fundraiser. I don’t have to live in the realm of the possible. And besides, I’m not saying Jewish day schools will be free—only that they should be. That seems a good place to start.
Paul Bernstein, of Prizmah, was telling me about the bump in day-school enrollment because of COVID, and he noted that more than 70% of these new families have kept their children enrolled. I asked him why. “COVID demonstrated the fact that school is about much more than grades and which college you go to,” Bernstein said. “Students need to receive an excellent education, and they benefit most when it is values-driven. The students and, importantly, their families want to feel part of a loving community, to feel connected to one another. For teachers to succeed, they too needed to feel part of the community. Everything surfacing during COVID showed it is the whole child that really matters, not just the homework. Those are the things Jewish day schools are really good at, and our schools excelled during and since the darkest days of COVID. If 10 years ago the question was, ‘Are these day schools good enough?’ COVID showed that this is exactly what we are good at.”
Especially compared to other religious groups, Jews are deeply invested in community, even if they can’t say why—and can’t always figure out what to do about it. This latest Keren Keshet Foundation survey exposes a troubling gap between American Jewish engagement and interest. Not a whole lot of American Jews are currently engaging with Jewish institutions like synagogues, yet a whole lot of those same people say it is “somewhat” or “very” important to them that their children, or any children they might have, be “actively engaged in ... being Jewish.” In that yawning chasm you can see the need for a dramatic institutional intervention. Free Jewish schools would be one.
The potential base of support for Jewish schools is thus quite broad. For passionate, engaged Jews, financially supporting Jewish education should be a no-brainer. But for those with a more inchoate longing, who have not figured out how to make Jewish community in their own lives, Jewish schooling is a way forward. These schools are diverse: Some are liberal, some not; some fiercely Zionist, others not; some single-sex; most co-ed. But they all teach children, and they all teach them Judaism. And that’s something. Maybe it’s everything.
A child who attends a day school or a yeshiva from K-12 with summer camps as a way of transforming the written text to a totally Jewish environment gives such children at least a fighting chance of being passionately engaged , Jewishly literate and observant Jewish adults