The whole project was a missed opportunity, because the story of New York’s effort to regulate its yeshivas does raise some interesting issues about the role of education and the history of New York’s compulsory education law.

The Times attacks the yeshivas for breaking the law, writing that the “schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education.” But New Yorkers break the law all the time. You can barely walk down a street or walk through a park in New York without smelling marijuana being used in violation of federal law. Why does this law, of all of them, deserve the Times’ extensive attention? If the Times had done its homework it might have investigated why and when that New York law was passed—amid an attack on Catholic education animated by anti-Irish bigotry.

The Jewish law studied in the yeshivas records, in the Talmudic tractate Kiddushin, the conflict over the purpose and content of education. The rabbis said a father was obligated to teach his son a trade. Rabbi Nehorai set aside the trades and taught his son only Torah. I write about this in the concluding chapter of the 2020 book Religious Liberty and Education: A Case Study of Yeshivas Vs. New York.

Instead of a thoughtful or empathetic, nuanced article, the Times produces a comically hypocritical hatchet job — precisely as the prebuttals in Tablet and the New York Sun predicted.

None of this is to say that the Hasidic yeshivas serving boys couldn’t be improved. But so could the public schools in these neighborhoods, which absorb far more taxpayer dollars. So why does the Times have such an investigative zeal for Orthodox Jews? The pretense is that the paper sincerely cares about the children in attendance or about the preservation of taxpayer dollars. I suppose that’s possible.

Whatever the underlying motive, the journalism is lame. It’s the sort of article that, rather than triggering improvements in Hasidic yeshivas, is more likely to generate a circling of the wagons. The Times investigation online, in the manner of an ambulance-chasing lawyer shopping for plaintiffs, carries a form for readers to submit their own horror stories. It amounts to a concession that this first installment, lengthy though it was, fizzled out when it came to producing anything close to evidence justifying increased state regulatory entanglement with religious schools.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.