The Sexism of a Better Secular Education for Hasidic Women
The New York Times recently published an exposé on Hasidic education in New York. The article reviews the curriculum taught at these schools. Though curricula vary from school to school, they tend to focus very heavily on Judaic studies typically in Yiddish, often to the near exclusion of secular subjects like English, math, history, and science. The lack of focus on secular subjects and often even on knowledge of the English language are reflected in the results on state standardized tests. As further illustrated by the graphic below, the article finds that “[i]n 2019, when nearly half of all New York students passed the tests, 99 percent of the thousands of Hasidic boys who took the exams failed.” They did significantly worse than public schools serving only low-income students and mostly nonnative English speakers. Many criticize the failure to enforce minimal secular education standards in Hasidic schools for leading to tremendous consequences for these schools’ students: They can be left with few job options in the secular world, let alone the ability to pursue any outside secular education, and they can feel trapped in these communities even if they would like to leave merely due to their lack of secular schooling.
Interestingly, Hasidic girls’ schools provide more substantial secular education to their students than do the Hasidic boys’ schools. The New York Times exposé highlights that girls’ schools study fewer religious texts and secular subjects to a greater depth. This is reflected in their comparative results on state standardized tests. As the New York Times article emphasizes, “About 80 percent of the girls who took standardized tests last year failed.” While these results do not sound—and indeed are not—great, they are much better than those for the boys’ schools, as illustrated in the Times depiction of test results.
Yaffed, a nonprofit organization that advocates for better secular education in Hasidic and other ultra-Orthodox schools, emphasizes how and why Hasidic girls’ school receive a stronger secular education. A 2017 Yaffed report indicates that Hasidic boys should aspire to be rabbis, while Hasidic girls cannot do so. As such, more time is devoted to religious education in the boys’ schools and less to that in the girls’ schools. Girls’ schools tend to spend about 3-4 hours each day on secular education, whereas boys’ schools tend to spend no more than 90 minutes per day on it (and often none at all past age 12). Even though Hasidic women are often discouraged from studying in a secular college, as the Yaffed report discusses, Hasidic women are frequently expected to draw on their relatively better secular education to work, often in education or therapy roles. Indeed, in Israel, ultra-Orthodox women are more likely to be employed than the general female population. By contrast, Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox men are often encouraged to learn Torah, with the women expected to support the family economically.
From the outside world, then, it might seem that Hasidic girls and women get the long end of the stick when it comes to secular education, running counter to frequent assumptions of sexism against women in this traditional Jewish community. In this regard, Hasidic women have a leg up compared to Hasidic men to take part in the secular world because they are provided with better tools for doing so. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that internally—within Hasidic Judaism—the major reason that girls are given a better secular education is because girls are devalued with respect to being educated in religion the way that boys are. This differentiation reflects a strong internal sexism against girls, signifying how they are viewed in the Hasidic world. Ultimately, the irony is that Hasidic girls and women are given better tools than Hasidic boys and men to interact in the secular world because they are devalued. As New York hopefully takes further steps to improve secular education standards in Hasidic schools, it is important to make sure that both boys’ and girls’ schools prepare their students for adult life.
