New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.
The Social Order
In late 2014, I met with Naftuli Moster, a bright and charismatic graduate student at Hunter College who grew up in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community. He was interested in studying Hasidic parents’ attitudes toward secular (nonreligious) education an area that I have long researched and written about.
I gave him the best guidance I could: how to write a survey, how to get buy-in from the community, whether to use Yiddish or English, and how to ensure that his sample was as representative as possible.
I eventually realized that his aim was not data collection. A month later, the