The New York Times' smear campaign against private Jewish schools

After masked demonstrators engaged in violence outside a Los Angeles synagogue last week, Mayor Karen Bass declared that the city should consider restricting mask wearing or concealing one’s identities while protesting, joining New York and others calling for the same. Sensible mask banning is a commendable step toward curbing the violence in the short term, but it addresses a symptom of the hate and not the educational cause at its root.

After the spring’s hate-filled protests, elite universities are looking less like crown jewels and more like exemplars of moral failure. Perhaps a model that emphasizes disagreeing respectfully, critical thinking, and telling right from wrong is worth a look.

On the night of Oct. 7, after Hamas raped, tortured and beheaded civilians in their homes, killing 1,160 people and taking 251 hostage, more than 30 student groups at Harvard University justified it. A Cornell University professor exclaimed he was “exhilarated” by the terrorism. Widespread encampments and masked marauders canceled graduation ceremonies nationwide. Attacks against Jewish students have exploded into federal investigations against over 100 colleges.

It’s becoming hard to keep track.

Nor is the hate limited to colleges or to antisemitism. According to a recent FBI report, hate crimes have been rising in K-12 schools for years now, with Blacks and Jews facing the brunt of the attacks.

Reasonable people can spar over the cause, but it’s clear that many students have not received a solid moral grounding or learned how to exchange ideas rather than invectives. Here, Orthodox Jewish K-12 schools (known as “yeshivas”) can help.

While their exact curricula vary, yeshivas provide dual tracks: the typical subjects (math, science, social studies) and a Judaic studies curriculum. Yeshivas encourage the spirited intellectual debate of religious and moral concepts and one’s obligations to others, rather than attacking others.

Parents send their children to yeshivas to absorb this intellectually diverse and morally enriching proving ground. Academically demanding, yeshivas typically require more hours, discipline and study time than their wholly secular counterparts.

Yet The New York Times notoriously waged a war against yeshivas’ reputation. Between September 2022 and March 2023, the Times published no fewer than 17 separate articles portraying Jewish schools negatively. They accused the schools of “failing to provide an adequate education.”

The reporting reached such a fever pitch that Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, feared it could fuel more antisemitism.

Jewish students, many of them yeshiva graduates, have stood tall in the face of violence and inexcusable vitriol, even as they were trapped in a Cooper Union library, spat at, attacked, and on the receiving end of hateful vulgarities. These Jews generally responded neither with retributive violence nor with slurs in kind, but with dignity, patriotism, and sometimes even humor.

To be sure, all yeshivas are not perfect, nor are all secular universities breeding grounds for antisemitism. But as colleges undergo a reckoning borne of a trial by fire failed, they should crib some notes from an ancient, but suddenly avant-garde, yeshiva educational model.

Our country, and the minds of its future leaders, deserve an education that teaches nobility in addition to resumé utility. We need to unmask the hate by inculcating reason and respect over victimhood and violence. If there's a school system that has been failing its students on what matters most, it isn't yeshivas.

• Avrohom Weinstock is the chief of staff of Agudath Israel of America. Founded over a century ago, Agudath Israel of America is a premier umbrella group serving and representing American Orthodox Jewry .