What Happened Today: August 9, 2023
NYT’s emails in report on Orthodox schools; Wildfires in Hawaii; WeWork on the verge
The Big Story
New York Times reporter Eliza Shapiro worked closely with New York State Education Department officials ahead of the newspaper’s investigation into New York Orthodox Jewish schools last September—which turned into a series of articles that would earn the paper a George Polk Award for Education Reporting. That’s according to a new Breitbart report based on more than 800 pages of emails between Times reporters and state officials obtained by the publication through a public records request.
In an email to Emily DeSantis, then assistant commissioner for public affairs at the Education Department, Shapiro, the lead author of the yeshiva series, writes, “I wanted to walk you through it on a high level and we can talk about what might make sense for comment.” In a subsequent email, Shapiro confirmed that her piece critical of the religious schools would run the day before the New York State Board of Regents’ scheduled vote to regulate educational curriculum in the yeshivas.
The Breitbart report, published on Tuesday, also noted that the state education agency regulating the schools was given a full week to respond to the article while the Times only gave the schools featured in the investigation a few days to reply before publication.
Another email exchange reveals that DeSantis corrected Shapiro’s claim conflating two laws about public and private schools requirements to provide basic education to students—a correction that did not make it into the report. “The final copy of the Times story maintained the premise that the Jewish private schools violate ‘basic education,’ ignoring DeSantis’ explanation of the definition, and also ignoring Shapiro’s own point that the state would ostensibly be responsible for enforcement,” writes Emma-Jo Morris, author of the Breitbart piece.
In The Back Pages: The Plot Against Jewish Education
The Rest
→ The Obama Presidential Center has taken in $1.1 billion since it began accepting funding in 2014, but last year was its best year yet, as it hauled in more than $311 million in grants and contributions, with major checks from Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky ($125 million) and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ($100 million). The big-ticket gifts from some of the United States’ wealthiest business owners are being used in part to increase compensation for Valerie Jarrett, the chief executive who previously served in Obama’s White House: She earned a $161,000 salary bump to more than $750,000 last year. The foundation oversees the operation and expansion of the presidential center celebrating Obama’s administration, as well as an educational scholarship program.
→ X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, failed to turn over data and records related to Donald Trump’s Twitter account to Special Counsel Jack Smith after he’d obtained a search warrant. Smith had also obtained a nondisclosure order that said X could not notify Trump or anyone else about the warrant, an order that X unsuccessfully challenged in court, saying it violated its First Amendment rights. In a 3-0 decision unsealed on Wednesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision that found X in contempt of court and liable for a $350,000 fine for missing by three days the deadline to turn over the records Smith sought as part of his probe into the former president’s involvement in the effort to undo his election loss to Joe Biden.
→ China’s largest property developer, Country Garden, missed interest payments on two large American bonds, signaling that the slump for China’s housing market could get a lot worse before it gets better. While Country Garden has 30 days to make the $22.5 million interest payment, its shares listed on the Hong Kong stock market already plummeted 14% on Tuesday while investors in other housing companies quickly unloaded their holdings. “The fact that the company is struggling to address an interest payment, rather than a full bond principal repayment, perhaps underscores its very tight liquidity,” Sandra Chow, co-head of Asia-Pacific Research at CreditSights, told The Wall Street Journal. The financial trouble for Country Garden comes after a campaign of supportive efforts last year by Chinese authorities to shore up the real estate industry.
→ Disney has inked a $2 billion deal with online gambling operator Penn Entertainment as the studio conglomerate makes a major push into the U.S. sports-betting arena. Previously known as Barstool Sportsbook, Penn will rebrand its betting platform to ESPN Bet while selling all of Barstool back to its founder, Dave Portnoy, after struggling to crack into the nascent sports-betting market on its own. The deal looks like a windfall for Portnoy, who will not pay anything and still get the company back less than six months after Penn paid the last of a $551 million bid for the property. Should Portnoy sell the podcast and media operation, he’ll have to turn over half the proceeds, but otherwise he gets the money, the company, and the breathing room to air his sometimes-controversial political and cultural opinions on social media, which landed Penn in hot water as it sought gambling licenses. “We underestimated just how tough it is for myself and Barstool to operate in a regulated world,” said Portnoy, adding that now “we don’t have to watch what we say, how we talk, what we do … It’s back to the pirate ship.”
→ Wildfires torching part of the Hawaiian island of Maui forced people to jump into the ocean to escape the flames on Tuesday as the Coast Guard rescued dozens of survivors in the water. The fire was particularly widespread in the historic town of Lahaina, where several businesses and properties in the popular tourist destination were destroyed. While Hurricane Dora passed south of Hawaii by several hundred miles, the storm was nonetheless driving wind gusts upwards of 80 mph that fanned the flames and made evacuations difficult.
→ Amid increased scrutiny over the subjective nature of ESG ratings, S&P Global said it will no longer designate ESG scores for corporate borrowers, a practice the debt-rating agency began in 2021. In the past, S&P had given out reports to companies like FirstEnergy, the Ohio utility operator recently charged with corruption, saying the “G” in its environmental, social, and governance risks was a four, the second-lowest grade. Now S&P will confine its ESG analysis to “narrative paragraphs,” providing new ammunition to critics who point out that ESG ratings were often inconsistent: One recent study of ESG rating firms found that more than half of all disagreements in ESG ratings were because firms used different sets of data.
→ Clients of the beleaguered WeWork are canceling their memberships in droves, leading the coworking company to issue a going concern warning to investors as they burn through their cash pile. Once valued at $47 billion, WeWork has since fallen 95% in value since its public listing, with an estimated market valuation of about $450 million. Company officials say WeWork could stay in business “upon successful execution of management’s intended plan over the next twelve months.” With too many offices left vacant and a shrinking but sizable portion of the workforce either partially or entirely working remotely, WeWork has struggled to convince employers and independent operators to sign up for their coworking facilities.
→ American banks are feeling the squeeze, too, as second-quarter losses across the banking sector reached $19 billion, the largest tally in three years as more credit-card and commercial-real-estate borrowers default on their loans. The number of reported charge-offs, or loan losses that cannot be recovered, were roughly 17% higher over the previous quarter and 75% above the same time last year. The defaults could soon get worse, however, as savings that consumers and businesses accumulated during the COVID-19 pandemic continue to dwindle. During the second quarter, American banks squirreled away $21.5 billion to cover potential upcoming loan losses, the third-highest amount of provisions for defaults in a decade.
TODAY IN TABLET:
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It wasn’t a reward for the agency’s failures in Kyiv and Kabul
Why Everyone Loves Daniel by Stuart Halpern
American politicians have turned to the story of the lion’s den for centuries
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.
This piece was originally published in Tablet, September 2022
The Plot Against Jewish Education
Why is The New York Times attacking Hasidic schools for raising happy, well-adjusted children?
Sometime soon, The New York Times is slated to publish its expose on the state of Hasidic education in New York. Several members of the community who were contacted by the Times expressed their grave concerns to Tablet about the paper’s biases and the likelihood, or lack thereof, that the Times will give Hasidic Jews a fair hearing. One member described the impending piece as “yet another assault.”
It’s a convenient feature of the Times these days that one hardly has to read it to divine what the Gray Lady might utter. And so, unless the muse of objective journalism intervenes in some way none of us should reasonably expect, we can assume the report will read something like this: We’ve talked to dozens of (self-selecting) people in the Hasidic community, reviewed documents handed to us (by interested parties), and were troubled to find that Hasidic schools have fallen far behind. Despite receiving enormous amounts of government assistance, these (money-grubbing) private schools don’t bother teaching children basic tenets like history or science, the result being graduates who are illiterate and an embarrassment. This Dickensian grimness is made possible because those crafty Hasidim vote en masse and hold local politicians under their sway—power these black-hatted Rasputins inexplicably choose not to exert when it comes to charging and convicting assailants who beat up members of their own community.
How to address such allegations?
You could play defense, and say that labeling what goes on in Hasidic yeshivot as strictly religious instruction that bears no relevance to the so-called secular world is woefully unfair. Study page 14 of Tractate Eruvin, for example, and you’ll come across the pronouncement that, “Whatever circle has a circumference of three tefachim must have a diameter of one tefach.” Aha! the average Times reader may growl. But this is wrong! Pi isn’t 3, it’s 3.1415 etc.!
Tosafot, the medieval commentaries on the Talmud, got there first: “But [pi] is a little more [than 3],” they write, “which means that the value [of pi] is rounded down.” The rabbis grapple with this, but can’t come to a good conclusion to explain this Talmudic error. “This is difficult,” Tosafot goes on to proclaim, “because the result [that pi=3] is not precise, as demonstrated by those who understand geometry.” It doesn’t take a Euclid to realize that for a young Hasidic boy to understand these concepts—appearing, again, in a most sacred text—he first needs to understand the basic premise of geometry.
Or history, given that so much of the Talmud is an account of about a millennium’s worth of movements and conquests, from Alexander the Great’s unprecedented empire to the rise of Christianity to the golden era of the Sasanian Empire. Go ahead and ask a public school graduate to tell you about Queen Shushandukht and see how far you get.
If you’re in a slightly nastier mood, of course, you can go on offense and argue that no one in their right mind ought to launch anything like an apologia for New York’s public education system. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, K-12 enrollment has dropped by a mind-boggling 9%. Maybe that’s because of the fact that despite receiving $14 billion for education courtesy of two federal stimulus packages, New York delivered one of the nation’s absolute worst performances. A survey of remote learning during the pandemic, for example, found that students in New York City’s schools received less than half of the instruction the state itself requires per year, a disgrace that Miami, say, or Houston, somehow managed to avoid, despite receiving significantly lower sums from Washington.
But this ain’t the Times; we’ve no interest in playing partisan politics here. Instead, let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that everything the Times will argue is absolutely true. Let’s assume that Hasidic schools are failing to teach children the basic foundations of secular education, and let’s assume also that public schools would do a much better job giving them these tools.
So what?
The community that runs these schools produces individuals who grow up in multigenerational homes, live close to and support each other throughout life, raise children, live according to their virtues, and spend their days doing things they love and believe are of the utmost importance. As a result, they are happier. Don’t believe me? Maybe you’d like to glance at that hotbed of Haredi propaganda, The Journal of Psychology, which, in a 2020 study titled “Prioritizing Patterns and Life Satisfaction Among Ultra-Orthodox Jews: The Moderating Role of the Sense of Community,” came up with the following conclusion: Haredi Jews are happier. “The results,” read the survey, “demonstrated that prioritizing meaning and sense of community were positively associated with life satisfaction … Our findings suggest that even in extremely close-knit community-oriented societies, a strong sense of belonging to a community enables individuals to prioritize more hedonic aspects of their lives in order to promote their life satisfaction.”
All of which should lead us to what ought to be the crux of this and any other conversation about education—which is what, precisely, is its ultimate goal. Education is a means to an end; what, then, do we want our well-educated children to be?
This approach forces us to do two things. First, it demands that we look at output, not input. The zealots trying to use state power to curb Hasidic liberties to educate their children as they see fit are demanding that yeshivot be compelled to teach as many hours of English, math, and other core subjects as do public schools, no matter how spotty the actual outcomes. Instead, we must demand better and judge an educational system by how well it succeeds in actually meeting its goals.
Which leads us to a second, and much trickier task: answering what, precisely, these goals ought to be. Here’s a radical idea: Above all, we want students invested in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We want them to become neighbors who care for the needy next door. We want them to become children who care for their parents as they age. We want them to become siblings who support each other through life. We want them to become spouses who treat their husbands and wives with respect and reverence and love. We want them to become individuals who are self-confident, grateful to their Creator for all of His bounties, and mindful that true joy means balancing personal appetites with communal needs. We want them to be happy.
With these perfectly obvious yardsticks at hand, let’s ask a much more pressing question: How well are our schools doing? And because roughly 50 million American students, or about 90% of all school-age children, attend public schools, a more accurate way to phrase this question is this: How well are our public schools doing?
To hear Nobel Laureate economist Angus Deaton tell it, not well at all. Together with his wife, the Princeton economist Anne Case, Deaton researched the rapid surge of so-called “deaths of despair” caused by suicide or drug overdose or alcohol-related diseases. Consider the following: In 2017 alone, the last year for which dependable data is available, 158,000 Americans died deaths of despair—the equivalent, Case and Deaton wrote, of “three fully loaded Boeing 737 MAX jets falling out of the sky every day for a year.” Nearly 92,000 Americans died in 2020 from drug overdoses, a number that continues to climb. Another estimated 95,000 die each year from alcohol-related causes, which is more than double those we lose to gun violence, two-thirds of whom are victims of suicides. With so many Americans rushing to put an end, one way or another, to their miserable existence, it’s no surprise to read the Times report that “the average life expectancy of Americans fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021, the sharpest two-year decline in nearly 100 years.”
And then there are the Americans never born at all. America’s birth rate has plummeted by a whopping 20% since 2007. To maintain a so-called “replacement rate” and keep the population stable, we need an average of 2.1 births per woman of childbearing age; America’s now at 1.6. With 4 in 10 Americans aged 25 to 54 now unpartnered—a steep 29% increase from 1990—it’s not hard to understand why.
Let us recap: Of the overwhelming majority of Americans who attend public schools, an increasingly alarming number go on to live solitary lives that drive them to choose infertility and turn to drugs and alcohol in record numbers to numb their pain. This is stark proof of an education system failing on the grandest scale imaginable, a catastrophic collapse that should terrify us all, parents and nonparents alike.
How to fix it? The answer may be simpler than we think. If the problem we’re facing is despair, the cure may be hope, that precious metal that is best mined wherever a sense of belonging is strong and a higher purpose evident. Hasidic communities have all that in droves, which is why they’re faring much, much, better than their nonobservant neighbors.
What we need, then, isn’t another Times hit piece suggesting that observant Jews are using their political clout to mask a vast cultivation of ignorance that borders on child abuse. What we need is a committee of Hasidic rabbis investigating New York’s failing public school system and offering ways to imbue it with the moral and ethical education it currently lacks and which it so clearly and desperately needs.
Breitbart and Liel hit the nail on the head and especially Liel with his comments about the goals and results of education in America today
The article from Liel is outstanding. Why? Because it enlightened me about aspects of education that I never considered. I’ve never read Talmudic studies quite explained like that and I thank for opening up my mind to the important advantages this education can offer.