Religion, Education, and the Courts - Dena Davis

In this episode of ReligionWise, we talk with Dena Davis, Presidential Endowed Chair in Health and Professor of Bioethics at Lehigh University. In addition to her work in healthcare ethics, Dr. Davis has written on a brewing controversy over a group of ultra-Orthodox religious schools in New York. These Yeshivas concentrate their instruction, not on English, math, and science, but on the study of religious texts. The result of this curriculum is that students of these schools graduate without basic competence in skills necessary to navigate the modern world. Dr. Davis provides legal and ethical context for the collision between these religious and secular institutions.

Transcript

Chip Gruen: 0:03

Welcome to ReligionWise, the podcast where we feature educators, researchers and other professionals discussing topics on religion and their relevance to the public conversation. My name is Chip Gruen. I'm the director of the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding at Muhlenberg College, and I will be the host for this podcast. In this season two of ReligionWise, we will continue to consider a broad variety of religious and cultural beliefs and practices, and try to understand their place in the contemporary conversation. If you like what you hear, I encourage you to explore the 12 episodes from season one that are available in your favorite podcast app. Also, we would love to hear from you with your questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes. To reach us, please visit our website at religionandculture.com. There you will find our contact information and also have the opportunity to support this podcast and the work of the Institute. Today's guest is Dena Davis, the Presidential Endowed Chair in Health and Professor of Bioethics at Lehigh University. Her research interests are primarily in bioethics, but she's also interested in issues of church and state, religion and law. Today, we sit down with Dr. Davis to talk about a contemporary issue in the state of New York surrounding religious education. In particular, we're going to talk about a group of Hasidic schools in New York that, for a number of reasons, not least of which is a number of articles appearing in The New York Times have been the subject of some concern over educational standards at the schools. So as you'll hear Dr. Davis talk about the teaching of science, math, English, literacy in general, takes a backseat to religious education in Yiddish, and then in the reading of Hebrew. And you can start to see the kind of controversy that brews here, given the nature of private and parochial schools, and the protections that they are very often afforded under the banners of religious freedom, freedom of speech, etc, by the courts. As we'll see the issues involved here are not new to the courts and legal system. There's a precedent going back to the 1970s, in a famous case called Yoder versus the state of Wisconsin, which deals with these issues of the protection of religious communities to offer education may be different than the standards by the state. And there are reasons to think that that is a good precedent for this case, and other reasons to think that it may be it is not, I think that this is a really important issue for us to think about on ReligionWise because it deals with a lot of the places where the public conversation of religion might run up against bigger ideas about religious freedom. As we've talked about, in recent episodes, this idea of religious freedom is one that is being constantly redefined, reimagined re understood, when you go from religious freedom being a concern of religious minorities, to one that is used by more dominant religious systems in order to protect their own perceptions and their own rights, within issues like health care, and education. Though Dr. Davis does not speak on behalf of this organization in this interview, I want to make note that she does work with and consult with an organization called Yaffed, Young Advocates For Fair Education, that is an advocacy group highly involved in this issue of secular education in these Hasidic communities. So I think this is an important conversation in its own right to be thinking about the educational system in New York in this particular religious community in New York. But I think we can think about what the implications for this case might be for other places where religious and secular authorities, butt heads. Health care, education, taxation, other sorts of social and political sites, where we have potentially a conflict in the public versus the private or the religious versus the secular. I think, particularly considering shifts in the Supreme Court that have happened with recent appointments, that a lot of these laws or controversies are going to be revisited. And I think it behooves us all to think about the ways in which those winds might be blowing differently than they did a generation ago. Dena Davis, thank you for appearing on ReligionWise.

Dena Davis: 4:50

Thank you for having me.

Chip Gruen: 4:52

So let's start this topic by thinking a little bit about the context of the schools in question. So can you talk about the these ultra-Orthodox or Hasidic communities, historically, who are these people? How does the community as a whole fit into the larger network of Brooklyn and Queens?

Dena Davis: 5:11

Okay, great. So Hasidim makeup about 5% of the global Jewish population, which is way less than 1% of the global population as a whole. And even in the United States, Jews make up about 2% of the population. So this is a small percent of a small percent. Hasidism was founded in the Ukraine in the 18th century. And it quickly spread among Jews throughout Eastern Europe. And Hasidim were known for their extreme piety, their fervent religious devotion. A wonderful saying from one of them is, To sing is to pray twice. And they were organized in sects devoted and remain organized in sects devoted to the teachings of specific religious leaders known as Rebbes. Now, ultra-Orthodox Jews are a subset of Jews as a whole. They're also a subset of Orthodox Jews. So you, you know, readers may know modern Orthodox Jews, who are extremely observant, and you'd probably notice them on the street by you know, the man's wearing some kind of head covering. The women probably not wearing shorts and T shirts. But observant as they are, they are very much part of the world. And they often send their children to religious Jewish day schools. And those schools teach both religious and secular subjects, usually at a very high level. And usually these kids go on to college and careers and so on. So we're not talking here about modern Orthodox, we're talking about what we call ultra-Orthodox, and among ultra-Orthodox, Hasidim are not the only ultra-Orthodox. So all Hasidim are ultra-Orthodox, but all ultra-Orthodox are not Hasidim. Okay, given all of that. So, the Hasidim sort of flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries, among Jews in Eastern Europe. And in World War II, of course, many of them were murdered during the Holocaust. And due to their distinctive dress and demeanor, they stood out as easy victims. And those who survived left Europe for obvious reasons, mostly for the US and Israel. So now, it's kind of about half and half. There are you know, some in the UK, I'm sure. But mostly, it's split fairly evenly between Israel and the US. And they have done very well, in both those countries, in terms of rebuilding their population, the average number of children in a Hasidic family is eight. So when you start thinking, okay, eight children, and then they have eight children, and so on, and so forth. So the ideal in a Hasidic community for a man is that he spends his entire life studying Torah studying Jewish teachings and Jewish law. Unlike some other religions, this doesn't mean he doesn't also get married typically around age 19, and have those average of eight children. But the ideal is that he's just totally devoted to Jewish law. And that's how he basically spends all his time. Now, in Eastern Europe before World War II, that was an ideal, but relatively few boys, were actually talented enough and lucky enough to have lives like that. You know, maybe you became really well known. And you were lucky enough to have a wealthy father in law who wanted to support you or something. But, you know, most kids studied Jewish while they were growing up, and then they went on to become tailors and butchers and carpenters and so on. And the community could obviously not have survived for very long if every single man in the whole community was doing nothing, but having kids and studying Torah. So there was an ideal but it was balanced by the reality. After World War II, when these groups came to Israel in the US, they encountered something they'd never experienced before, which was some kind of modified welfare state. So we'll leave Israel side, it's not our issue for today. But in the United States, you know, particularly in New York, which has always had a pretty generous safety net. You know, there are food stamps and housing vouchers and other things that help you and help your families survive. Even if you the breadwinners, they, if you the husband are not the breadwinner, but are unemployed or underemployed. And therefore, what had been an ideal for the very few became possible for almost everybody. And that's kind of what happened is, there was no longer really any need for I mean, certainly, you know, there are Hasidic Jews who work on,there's a famous photography store, you know, camera store in New York, for example, that is run by ans employs ultra-Orthodox Jews. But the point is many, many, many, many more boys could have this life now in the US than could have been imagined in pre World War II Europe.

Chip Gruen: 11:30

So given the nature of these groups, how do they interact with the larger communities that they're interacting with in the City and New York, etc? And how does that shape what education looks like, in these yeshivas?

Dena Davis: 11:46

This is a very insular community, or I should say, insular communities, you know, there's the Satmar, and the Belz. And, you know, depending on which Rebbe from which place in Eastern Europe, they are organized around, they interact as little as possible with the communities around them, they dress extremely distinctively. And they do not allow members to have televisions, for example, or smartphones. Or you would, it would be astonishing to see a Hasid go into a normal movie theater, for example. They have nothing against electricity, cars, technology generally, but not in the way that it allows people to easily be "contaminated" by the outside world. So they send their children, of course, to religious schools, these schools are split by gender, even at the preschool, children generally start around age three. So the topic today is Yashivas the schools for boys know, from everything I've said, one could correctly infer that women were taking more of the economic burden. And were probably better educated in a practical kind of sense. It's very often women who are the bridge between the insular world and the outer world. So their education is not great, but it is better. Their secular education is better. So but in these boys schools, what is typical of many, not all, is that they study secular topics, from third grade through eighth grade. So they're not reading English at all. Now, readers need to understand Oh, sorry, listeners, need to understand that in this school, unless you're teaching a secular topic, everything is in Yiddish. So it's not really a question of the topic. That's, of course important. Are you studying geography, math, science, history. But if you're not studying those things in the time set aside for it, your education is entirely in Yiddish and or Hebrew. So it's in the third grade, that these boys begin to study English. And the majority of them never become literate. The and it ends at eighth grade as well. So the typical school day in terms of secular studies is 90 minutes a day, four days a week. Secular studies there's always that thing thing that gets marginalized if a kid needs to go to the dentist, or anything else, you know, and it tends to happen at the end of an extremely long day, when kids are tired and hungry, and the religious leaders whom the kids respect and who run the schools are, don't hide their contempt for the secular teachers or the secular subjects. So it's extremely common for the kids to turn their backs not listen, you know, these are little kids, right? You know, throw food, whatever, right? Um, so at best, 90 minutes, four times a week, ending, you know, beginning of third grade ending in eighth grade.

Chip Gruen: 15:47

So obviously, these are not the only private or religious schools in the New York area. There are lots and lots of these that are protected by law to provide an education for the children of their communities. What is the standard that the law in the state of New York mandates for these private schools?

Dena Davis: 16:07

The law New York is really pretty clear. In fact, it's quite clear. The New York State Constitution requires that children who do not attend public schools have a quote, substantially equivalent education, close quote. And there's been back and forth about exactly what that means. But there's no real debate that it includes some degree of English language, history, geography, math, and so on. Citizenship, you know, each state and each city has its own little little quirks, you know, some places require you to teach CPR, swimming, or whatever it might be. So, you know, the state of things is clearly illegal. But the problem is, legally speaking, it's extremely hard for private citizens to make government officials do things. Here's the law. This school is not fulfilling the law, the parents are not fulfilling their obligations when they send kids to these schools. But if public officials in the Department of Education in the city and the state refused to do anything, it's extremely difficult legally, for other private citizens to get traction. Now, these communities are very politically savvy. And they tend to be pretty much single issue voters. I've heard people in these communities say, they're the three most important issues to us right now are the Yashivas, Yashivas, Yashivas. And when you think about it, you might think, Well, gosh, you know, Black people often vote as a block for their interests, or Catholics might vote or you know, whatever, right. But they're also interested in other things. So this community, for example, you could be everything they totally hate. You could be a married lesbian, atheist, you know, I don't know, whatever they hate, they don't care doesn't matter to them. Right? If you agree to protect what they care about, they'll vote for you. And that makes them an extremely well honed precision political voting block, in a way most other people don't.

Chip Gruen: 18:42

So this has been recognized for some time that these schools are not meeting that standard that you mentioned, the substantially equivalent education. But this has become much more prominent issue in the past several years. Can you talk about why that is the case? And you know, who is raising this issue? And maybe how that connects to something you're talking about earlier, maybe is legal standing?

Dena Davis: 19:09

Sure. So there's a group called Yaffed, Young Advocates For Fairness in Education. And I've been working with them a little bit. They are based in New York City they were started by a young man named of Naftuli Moster. And Naftuli and the others who began this were young men who were raised in these schools, and who wanted more for their lives and realized how terribly they'd been shortchanged. So they graduated , I'm putting scare quotes around this because they didn't get what we would work legally recognize as a high school diploma that would then allow you to go to college but they graduated so to speak, unable to go to college unable to pass a GED. Typically, they would take remedial courses, and then maybe go to community college, and then maybe eventually, in some cases, sort of, you know, are able to go to college and so on. But it's extremely difficult. And it leaves them. I mean, Naftuli says that, even though when you meet him, he's extremely articulate and very savvy about a lot of things. But certain words will just like, oh, what's a molecule, I never heard that word molecule. And he's also a super slow reader in English, because he didn't start reading English at a time when you're sort of primed to do that. So some of these young people got together and they formed this organization to try and pressure the political powers in the state and the city to enforce the law. And that was in 2011. So you know, a little more than 10 years ago. I, has there been progress? Well, in some ways, yes. In the last couple of years, the New York Times after, you know, kind of years of talking with journalists, The New York Times suddenly started to do, I think, two really good articles. And then there was recently, a third one, The Washington Post picked it up some of the smaller newspapers, all of a sudden, we're getting a lot of publicity, which of course, is a wonderful thing. Doesn't change, you know, anything about the lives of these little kids. But it's it's good that more people are aware of this. Legally, it is extremely difficult to as I say, kind of get traction on this. You said the word standing. So in the United States, you can't walk into court and complain, because you don't like something, you have to be personally injured or at risk in some way. And just being a taxpayer usually is not enough. So you know, if this was a public school that wasn't teaching secular topics, then you as a parent of a child in that school would have standing. But in this case, if a parent doesn't like the school, they take their kid out and put them elsewhere. If they're in the school, presumably, it's because the parents think what the school is doing is good. So it's extremely hard to get any kind of traction on this. And we have been Yaffed has been trying for years. Now, a couple of years ago, we found a plaintiff, a wonderful, courageous woman who has now taken over from Naftuli. As forget her title, Executive Director or something of Yaffed, Beatrice Weber. She's in a very unusual position, usually when people in this community divorce, because one person is leaving the community there is a legal policy in New York State, and probably elsewhere, that when deciding on custody, one should prefer that a child remain in the environment that they had grown up in. So if two people split, and one of them leaves the community, the court is very likely to award custody to the parent who remains in the community. So now the person who has become perhaps more secular is upset that her kid is not getting a secular education, but she doesn't have custody and therefore does not have standing. Now, Beatrice and I don't understand the ins and outs of her personal situation, but she is divorced. She did get custody of her three youngest of 10 children, even though she is living a fairly secular life. But the divorce agreement requires her to send her child to a particular Yeshiva. So she's in an unusual circumstance. She doesn't like what the Yeshiva is doing in terms of not having enough secular teaching, but she's trapped in it. So in that way, we've been able to get some traction. And you might say that some grudging gelidly slow legal progress has been made. The Commissioner of Education in New York City. Now she said a couple of years ago, they looked at 28 Yeshivas, and found that 26 of them failed to meet the state's requirements. And there were a couple that didn't even allow inspectors through the door. So City Commissioner Rosa, ordered the city to complete its report by this coming June. This is a report that's been you know, hanging around while the City dragged its heels forever. And Yaffed keeps filing complaints. So okay, maybe the City will complete its report in June, we don't really know. But none of this has changed the educational experience of a single fourth, fifth or sixth grader. And meanwhile, you know, as anyone would know, from their own kids, every year makes a difference. And every year they're losing ground every year, it gets harder for them to become fluent in English. So that's kind of where we are legally.

Chip Gruen: 26:08

Yeah, so given you know, not only your scholarly background is a PhD, religion, but you're also a lawyer? How hold a JD degree?

Dena Davis: 26:18

I'm not a lawyer but I do have a JD, Yes.

Chip Gruen: 26:21

So yes, you So you hold a JD degree. So you're kind of uniquely positioned to talk about the legal issues in this case. And I've noticed with Yaffed, this seems to be a lot of what you're writing about are sort of the legal, the legal aspects of the case. So can you talk a little bit about that legal framework? I mean, are we talking about free exercise? Are we talking about parental rights? Like what are the suite of issues that we're dealing with when we're dealing with this legal case?

Dena Davis: 26:51

Right, so there's all kinds of legal, complicated minutia about New York State and New York City Education law that I frankly just have decided that I can't spend my time on. You know, it's not what I know, we have some wonderful pro bono lawyers who are working with us. But what I have contributed is our constitutional perspective. And a lot of us think that this case will eventually land in the Supreme Court. Because the I should say it might be worth saying that a number of groups of people who themselves do educate their kids quite adequately, have nonetheless teamed up to support these Yeshivas, which is really a shame. Education is a big value in Judaism, and it's really a shame that they're willing to let these kids you know, go without in the service of some political agenda that I don't totally understand. But, for example, fairly, you know, modern Orthodox. So there's a lot of sort of money and firepower behind this way more than the 26, or however many schools are actually involved. So it does seem like, you know, we'll go to the Court. And the case that everybody keeps talking about, is a 1972 case called Wisconsin versus Yoder. And basically what happened there was, Wisconsin had a law, which required kids to go to school until they either graduated or reached the age of 16. Now, a bunch of Old Order Amish said no, they didn't want their kids to go to to have any schooling after grade eight. They didn't want them to go to parochial Amish school, for example. And they didn't even want to do homeschooling as we know it, which is to say, well, we're doing more or less the same thing, but we're doing it at home. No, they said that in order to attain the right attitudes and fit into the community of Old Order Amish children needed not to be exposed to education after the eighth grade. And they needed to wasn't just about spending their time it was also about developing attitudes that were appropriate for the you know, somewhat gender inflected lives of boys and girls growing up in this community. So the case went to the Supreme Court, and it was kind of a messy decision for some reasons I've never tracked down only seven of the nine justices were involved. Two of them were out of it for some reason. And they found all kinds of, you know, different opinions that agreed and disagreed and so on. Justice Burger wrote the majority opinion. And the opinion came down on the side of the Amish. But why? That's what matters. So the state of Wisconsin had two basic arguments. The first one was that the state had an interest in having an educated voting participatory citizenry. Secondly, the state had an interest in making sure that it's grown ups were not, you know, were gainfully employed and weren't on welfare, basically. Right. So the Amish, were able to show well, working backwards, they were able to show that Amish virtually never ended up on welfare, because they were working within the community and the community took care of its own and so on. Secondly, as far as the educated citizenry is concerned, they argued to the court and the court accepted. I think they were wrong about this. But the court accepted that the difference between leaving school at eighth grade and leaving school at age 16 was, quote, only one or two years. How old were you when you left eighth grade?

Chip Gruen: 31:33

Not 14, right?

Dena Davis: 31:35

And not 15, one or two years? Right? Me too. But courts tend to see facts the way they want to see them. And therefore, they said, the education lost was, quote, de minimis, it wasn't a real important gap. As weighed against the Amish's claims to the free exercise of their religion. They claimed, I think this is really fascinating. They claimed that if they were forced to send their kids to school to age 16, even by the way, just like anyone else, they could have had an parochial Amish school, right? But if they were forced to send their kids to school, to age 16, their kids would fail to develop these important attitudes and their community would disappear. Such an amazing thing, it seems to me to admit that your way of life is not attractive enough that kids who are educated through age 16 can make the choice to remain in it. That that strikes me as mind blowing. But the court did not comment on on that. So the court, in my opinion, made the wrong decision, which is, you know, kind of a parentheses to our discussion here. But on the one hand, a four out of seven justices agreed that all children in the US had, you know, should have the ability to decide what they want to do in their lives. And justices used terms like at, you know, child might want to be a ballerina, an astronaut, an oceanographer, a nuclear physicist. On the other hand, they said to the Amish, well, you can keep your kids out of school after eighth grade. Well, I don't know any oceanographers or nuclear physicists with a great educations. So the court was, I think, you know, somewhat disingenuous about all this. But it was a time in American jurisprudence, when free exercise was getting a great deal of deference.

Chip Gruen: 33:57

So given that the Yoder case would be seen as the precedent this formative case from the early 1970s, that appeared before the Supreme Court, what do you think would happen if this case involving the Yashivas in New York went to court? What can we expect? How would this precedent be used or disregarded in order to come up with a ruling in the 2020s, particularly given the nature of the Supreme Court today?

Dena Davis: 34:27

In my view, even forgetting whether or not you know, it was decided correctly, that's not the point now, in my view, there's no way that should prevail. For two reasons. Most importantly, in Yoder, the children all had English language, eighth grade educations. That's not great, but it's a lot more than the kids are getting in in[Yashivas]. They could read they could write they could, you know, go to the library and find books for themselves and, and so on. Um, and Yoder explicitly said, this is not the same as if a child, as if a parent said, I don't want to educate my child at all. They said that very explicitly. So I don't think that what's available in these schools comes close to the situation in Yoder. And if Yoder was decided, because the supposed one or two year difference was, quote, de minimis. This is not anything like a one or two year difference. This is really, you know, you know, a very stark and substantial difference. The other interesting thing to the extent that the court would think that it matters now, is that this community is among the poorest in the nation. That's not surprising if you figure eight kids is the average. And the parents are extremely underemployed. So if you look at a community Satmar Hasidic community called Kiryas Joel, in upstate New York, it's kind of an interesting community, because everybody in it is Hasidic. So statistically, it's kind of easier to look at. So that is the poorest community in the entire United States. And in terms of I think, about half the people there use food stamps, about a third of them use housing vouchers, and so on. So if that matters, as it did matter in 1972, then that also is an extremely different situation than the one that the Amish were in in Yoder.

Chip Gruen: 36:56

So you mentioned that in 72, there seemed to be a high time for deference to the Free Exercise Clause. It's like that this was proclivity of the court. And the implication there is that then hasn't been more recently. But now I wonder where we where we are now with the contemporary Supreme Court?

Dena Davis: 37:16

Well, absolutely, absolutely. We haven't seen anything that would really be like this. But we've seen, you know, there was that case recently about the football coach who in a public high school, who was insisting on praying very publicly at the 50 yard line, for example. And there have been a number of cases where the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause, were clashing. So you know, where a state would say, well, a state can give financial assistance to all schools except religious ones. And the court said, No, you can't do that. That's like discriminating against the religious schools, which, you know, I think there's arguments to be made on both sides there. What the court would do if this came, I don't know, one of the things that's true in many, many important court cases, but I tend to think is more true in church and state cases, is that the court just sees the facts and wants to see them. And there was a case I can't believe I don't remember the name of it. But anyway, was one of the very, very early post World War II religion clause cases. And it also it came out of New York. And what had happened was the regents who run the public school system in New York State, they were, their hearts were really in the right place. They wanted, they knew that, you know, schools across the state were having various kinds of opening prayers, which were problematic for kids. You know, like Jewish kids, if it was a Christian prayer, blah blah. So in keeping with the 1950s in America, that we're gonna write a really nice namby pamby kind of generalized prayer that would offend nobody, right? Very 1950s. So they wrote one, it was clearly a prayer, it spoke of God. But, you know, it wasn't, I don't, you know, wasn't explicitly Christian or Jewish anyway. So in wrote the prayer, as the thing that children would say, in homeroom every morning. Now, you can't get more of an Establishment Clause problematic than that, right. You know, since when do public officials go around writing prayers for kids to say in public school, right. And in fact, the Supreme Court saw that and struck it down. But the dissent said, Well, wait a minute, if some kids want to pray in the morning, why should we stop them? And I'm thinking, your facts and their facts are just completely different facts. And that is often the case. It was the case in that football coach case where if you look at the majority, and then you look at the dissent, you would think you were in two different factual universes. You know, from the majority's perspective, here's this guy who wants to pray and how, you know, it's his free exercise right to do that. From the dissents perspective, he's a publicly paid football coach, there's all that aura around football coaches, kids on the team have been saying that they're uncomfortable if they don't want to pray with them. The majority didn't see that world at all. So who knows what the court would see looking at it. It seems to me if they see the facts, as you know, the report that the city will surely show when it ever gets out there, as The New York Times has clearly reported that this is just not acceptable. And that the New York State law that requires all kids to have a substantial, substantially equivalent education, you know, has to be upheld. But who knows?

Chip Gruen: 41:29

Yeah, well, I mean, the thing that strikes me about the contemporary Supreme Court, I mean, I think it's clear that they're going to be interested in defending the rights and of evangelical Christian communities of Christian communities of all kinds, Catholic education, homeschooling of those communities. I just wonder if they're interested in using these Hasidic schools as the vehicle for that agenda or if there's a problem there?

Dena Davis: 41:57

Well, right. I mean, to my mind, all the things you've said, you know, they can be very insular, they can, you know, some parents homeschool, because they want to keep their kids in a particular religious bubble. But they give the kids the tools to break out of that bubble when the kids grow up. Because they can read English, they can go to a library, they can access the internet, to my mind, and no one else is saying this. To my mind, this is about free exercise. It's about free exercise of children. So there's a very important legal philosopher, he's gone now named Joel Feinberg. He wrote an article about this case called 'The Child's Right to an Open Future'. And in this article, he came up with a theory that was about much more than education. But what he said is that there are different kinds of rights, you know, there are rights adults have, but kids don't, that's kind of obvious. There are rights kids have, you know, to be you and I don't have the right to go to school for free anymore. But a 10 year old does, for example. And then there are rights, that he said a kind of cluster of rights that adults hold in trust for kids. Kids can't do them now, can't express them now can't act on them now. Because they're kids. So for example, a child of 10 cannot get married. But when that child becomes whatever 18, or whatever the relevant age is, then they have the right to marry whom they want. So that means you and I cannot marry off our kids at age 10. Right? We hold that right in trust for the child. And the right to freedom of religion to free exercise is one of those rights. That doesn't mean that we have to raise our kids without inculcating our own religious values. But it means that we have to make it not impossible for them to decide when they are grown up whether they want to live in a Hasidic community, or whether they want to go on to a secular high school and get a secular diploma and go to college and become I don't know, a nuclear physicist or whatever it might be. And if you keep children, so uneducated, that it's almost impossible, not impossible, but almost impossible, extremely difficult to break out of that community. And it's a religious community, then you are trampling on these children's free exercise rights.

Chip Gruen: 44:45

So that ends up being an issue of causing the children to be dependent on the community then.

Dena Davis: 44:51

Right, um hm. And they think it's worth noting that from a sociological perspective, this community has gotten this is true of modern Orthodoxy as well. But it's also true of ultra-Orthodoxy has become more conservative over the years. So for example, it used to be that English was spoken in the home much more. Now, there's a lot of pressure coming from these schools, which are super important in this social structure of the community, these schools are pressuring the home, not to speak English to speak only Yiddish at home, I was reading one account in which a woman said when she was growing up, she and her girlfriends had could go to the public library and take uout books. But now if her daughter was discovered with a library card in her backpack, she'd be expelled. So the community has really pulled in its its fences, even more, so that if a child isn't getting English in school, he's probably not getting it elsewhere either he's not getting it in the home, for example, and he's not watching television, where else is he getting any kind of, you know, language exposure?

Chip Gruen: 46:18

So how does this fit in? I mean, obviously, in places like New York, there are a lot of small communities in which the language in the home isn't English. And one could imagine that there parochial schools or private schools generally where the language isn't English. And I'm just wondering...

Dena Davis: 46:36

I don't know of any other than these.

Chip Gruen: 46:37

You don't know, oh you think this is this is it?

Dena Davis: 46:39

Oh yeah, I mean, I'm sure there. I mean, first of all, I think a kid I mean, I wish I had grown up in a household which spoke say French, and then I went to school in English. And now I'd be bilingual. That would be wonderful. I don't know of any schools that teach primarily in German or Mandarin or whatever. Other other than these.

Chip Gruen: 47:03

So, I mean, you've said, you don't know where this is going. But even like, timeline, is there any possibility or or hope of any resolution to this anytime soon? Or is this just going to drag on as it has been for the last decade?

Dena Davis: 47:23

I think it's going to drag on, Yaffed would probably be unhappy to hear me say this. But I think it will drag on. I mean, children are politically weak. Right. If their parents don't stand up for them, and who's going to stand up for them? It's not in anybody's interest, really. So yeah, I think it's going to take a long time. And I think that even if Yaffed, you know, if we get what we want, on paper in the courts, that will be wonderful. But these schools have a long history of deception. There's a really great book listeners might want to read, it's by a man named Shulem Deen, D-E-E-N, who grew up in New Square, which is a Hasidic community in Upper New York State. And it's called, 'All Who Go Do Not Return'. And it's kind of about growing up and getting married, I think around age 19, and so on. And he just, it's really kind of hair raising, he talks about the completely commonplace deception. So he, for example, is looking for some income, because you know, he's got three or four kids. And the school offers him a job as a tutor, where he'll be paid with. I forget whether it's state or federal money. So this is so ironic. So the school isn't teaching kids basic subjects, and then it gets taxpayer money to hire tutors to give remedial tutoring because the kids are not at grade level in these subjects, right? And then so they're paying Shulem Deen to tutor kids after school one on one. And he's supposed to be tutoring them in math or whatever. But he's actually teaching Torah and they just tell him Okay, write down, you know, Jakub spent the time learning his multiplication tables, so they just told him what to write which was total fabrication, and there was just a whole system around that. So even if you if Yaffed wins on paper, which would be great. I think it will be a long haul. And maybe more inspectors than anybody's got the money or the will to hire to see that, you know, these kids really are getting this education.

Chip Gruen: 50:14

Yeah, as it turns out the court the court decision is different from the enforcement mechanism that is probably non existed, right?

Dena Davis: 50:21

Right, look at Brown v Board in school desegregation.

Chip Gruen: 50:24

Yeah, yeah exactly.

Dena Davis: 50:26

So this is kind of my take on this situation in terms of free exercise.

Chip Gruen: 50:32

Yeah.

Dena Davis: 50:33

People, including, you know, ultra-Orthodox Jews, including my own grandparents, you know, who were Jews in Eastern Europe, they're not of this type. But, you know, they came to this country for safety and religious freedom. And they got it beyond anyplace else in the world, right? I mean, you can walk down the street looking extremely exotic, right? And that's absolutely your right. And you can, you know, go to your religious place on Saturday when everyone's going on Sunday, and you're, you know, whatever, right? More than anywhere else, literally, in the world, more than Canada more than the UK. But there's a flipside to that, which is your kids get it too. Because the, the American project, the Enlightenment project, the Constitution is not made with groups, or even families. It's made with individuals, individuals have rights. Groups do not have rights. Families don't really have rights. People, individual people have rights. And if you come here, because you want your right to worship as you please, then the flip of that is so do your kids. And you have to accept that.

Chip Gruen: 52:01

Dena Davis, Presidential Endowed Chair in Health and Humanities and Social Science and Professor Department of Religion Studies, thank you very much for sitting down with us. This has been really fascinating a topic I didn't know very much about at all.

Dena Davis: 52:14

Well, thank you so much. It's really been a lot of fun.

Chip Gruen: 52:20

This has been ReligionWise. A podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement. Please visit our website at religionandculture.com. There you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you next time.