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Jewish group revives religious charter school fight in Oklahoma, months after test case stalled at Supreme Court
(JTA) — Months after a Supreme Court deadlock blocked an attempt by a Catholic church to create the nation’s first openly religious, publicly funded charter school, a Jewish group is now advancing a similar plan — one designed to sidestep the legal obstacles that doomed the first case.
The National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation has notified an Oklahoma state board that it intends to apply for a statewide virtual high school integrating Oklahoma academic standards with daily Jewish religious studies.
Local Jewish leaders say they were blindsided by the proposal and argue that such a school isn’t needed. But getting approval is not what the applicants are expecting.
Instead, the group’s legal team — led by Becket, a prominent nonprofit religious-liberty law firm — is preparing for the state board to reject the application, setting the stage for a federal lawsuit and, potentially, a precedent-setting ruling at the Supreme Court.
Anticipating that the application will likely be denied, “we would represent Ben Gamla challenging that decision in the federal courts in Oklahoma,” Eric Baxter, a vice president and general counsel at Becket, said in an interview.
Baxter said Ben Gamla expects to submit the application by the end of the year.
The resulting case could become the next major test of whether the Constitution permits government funding to establish religious charter schools. It would resolve a question the Supreme Court failed to decide when it deadlocked 4-4 last spring in the Catholic case, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case, reportedly because of her longstanding personal and professional ties to a Notre Dame law professor who had advised the petitioner in its early stages.
St. Isidore, backed by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, focused on school funding but it came amid a broader effort led by conservatives to weaken the legal doctrine of church-state separation. While many of the largest Jewish groups — including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Union for Reform Judaism — have long championed a strictly secular public sphere as a safeguard for minorities, an increasingly vocal contingent has advocated for greater public funding for private Jewish day schools.
One of the most prominent opponents of public funding for religious education is Rachel Laser, a former leader in Reform Judaism who now heads Americans United for Separation of Church and State. She argues that efforts to erode church-state deportation ultimately serve to advance the domination of Christianity in government.
“As a Jew and the leader of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, I feel obligated to point out that such a case would be using Jews to advance a Christian Nationalist agenda that is not ultimately in Jews’ best interest,” Laser said.
The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the St. Isidore school in 2023, prompting immediate litigation led by the state attorney general, who argued that a religious charter school was unconstitutional.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed, ruling that charter schools are “state actors” required to remain secular. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which seemed poised, based on the conservative composition of the court and the oral arguments preceding the ruling, to consider overturning longstanding limits on taxpayer-funded religious schooling.
But in May, the justices deadlocked, and the tie allowed the Oklahoma ruling to stand.
Now Ben Gamla, backed by a former Democrat congressman, aims to resurrect the issue, using a new legal pathway. The group will not sue in state court, bypassing the state Supreme Court ruling against St. Isidore, but in federal court, where they believe they will prevail.
By framing Oklahoma’s refusal as a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause, Ben Gamla hopes to build on recent Supreme Court rulings holding that states may not exclude religious organizations from generally available public benefits solely because they are religious.
“The school should be allowed there under existing Supreme Court precedent,” Baxter said. “The court has already previously ruled that in ways that make it clear it cannot exclude a charter school just because it’s religious.”
Ben Gamla is a newly formed Oklahoma nonprofit led by former Democratic congressman Peter Deutsch, who surprised many by endorsing Trump in 2024, citing his stances on Israel and education policy.
Deutsch previously founded a network of Hebrew-English charter schools in Florida with the aim of combating Jewish assimilation, though those schools, unlike the Oklahoma proposal, were required to operate as strictly secular institutions.
His aspirations led Deutsch to look beyond Florida — including to Oklahoma. After St. Isidore was initially approved in 2023, he traveled to the state and explored applying for a Jewish charter school of his own, telling JTA last February that the Catholic effort could be “a paradigm shift for American Jews.”
But he said that after speaking with local rabbis and parents, he decided the state’s Jewish community was too small to sustain such a brick-and-mortar school. The proposal for a virtual Ben Gamla school marks a shift: Whatever the local demand, the project is now positioned as a legal vehicle to test the constitutional question nationwide.
Deutsch declined to be interviewed for this story, directing all questions to Becket.
According to its letter of intent, filed Nov. 3 with Oklahoma’s charter board, the proposed Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School would operate as a statewide virtual high school for grades 9-12 and open with roughly 40 students in the 2026-27 school year. The school plans to offer daily courses in Jewish texts, practices, ethics and other forms of religious study.
The school would deliver “Oklahoma’s state-approved academic standards alongside Jewish religious studies, enabling students to achieve college readiness while developing deep Jewish knowledge, faith, and values within a supportive learning community,” the letter says.
The founding team includes Brett Farley, the executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma and a former St. Isidore board member.
The new proposal immediately triggered a response from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which had led litigation against St. Isidore.
Last week, the organization announced that it had filed Oklahoma Open Records Act requests seeking all communications between the state charter board and Ben Gamla. Americans United argues the proposed school is unconstitutional.
“Despite their loss earlier this year in the U.S. Supreme Court, religious extremists once again are trying to undermine our country’s promise of church-state separation by forcing Oklahoma taxpayers to fund a religious public school. Not on our watch,” Laser, the president of Americans United, said in a statement.
Within the Jewish community, the Ben Gamla plan lands in the middle of longstanding divisions over public funding for Jewish religious education.
Orthodox-affiliated organizations, including the Orthodox Union and its affiliated Teach Coalition, have supported efforts to loosen restrictions, arguing that Jews should not be penalized for choosing religious schooling. Several conservative Jewish groups backed St. Isidore’s Supreme Court petition.
Deutsch supports lowering the wall between church and state, at least when it comes to education funding, citing low levels of Jewish knowledge and rising assimilation among American Jews.
“If you think Jewish peoplehood and faith have value in terms of continuity, looking at American Jews today and saying that’s a success story today is absurd,” he told JTA in February. “Clearly, Jewish individuals have done extraordinarily well, but the Jewish community is in a death spiral. The only way to prevent what’s happening is through education.”
In Oklahoma, where the Jewish population is estimated at fewer than 9,000 people, the proposal has drawn skepticism from local Jewish leaders — including those who say they first learned about it not from organizers, but from reporters.
Rabbi Daniel Kaiman, who leads Congregation B’nai Emunah in Tulsa, said he was surprised to discover that an application was being pursued “in the name of the Jewish community” even though, he said, no one he is aware of in the community had been consulted.
“I was surprised to be learning about it through a reporter,” he said. “When I called around to other Jewish leaders in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, none of us knew anything about it.”
Kaiman said he opposes the proposal and worries about the implications of a national legal campaign being waged through a tiny Jewish community that has to manage delicate relationships with state officials and interfaith partners.
“As a Jewish community in Oklahoma, we are an extreme minority,” he said. “I don’t know if this is the type of political attention our Jewish community would have asked for — and I wasn’t asked. Anything that could threaten the key relationships we have with our neighbors and with state leadership is something we need to think about very carefully.”
He added that he is uneasy about being thrust into a public debate that pits one Jewish group against another.
“I don’t love the fact that this forces me to be speaking, even potentially, in opposition to another Jewish group,” he said. “That doesn’t feel very good.”
Kaiman also questioned the underlying practicality of a Jewish charter school in a state with such a small Jewish population, and noted that existing Jewish educational institutions — including a day school, preschools and synagogue-based programs — already meet the community’s needs.
The local Jewish community is tight-knit and exceptionally charitable, a dynamic shaped in part by local oil and gas wealth that has given it an outsized impact on the wider Jewish world through philanthropies.
“We have robust educational offerings for Jewish kids in Oklahoma,” Kaiman said. “I don’t know who this new proposal is for.”
Still, he was careful to leave space for ongoing conversation within the community.
“We really value Jewish education, and maybe this is a good idea,” he said. “But it’s hard to learn about it through public discourse alone. Partnership and conversation would be a better way forward.”
The post Jewish group revives religious charter school fight in Oklahoma, months after test case stalled at Supreme Court appeared first on The Forward.
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New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America
The new documentary Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience, produced by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, is fast, entertaining and a good introduction to the topic.
Focusing mainly on the musical side of the story, but covering ‘straight plays’ as well, the film opens with a superb ‘warm-up act’: “Hu Tsa Tsa,” a stock Yiddish vaudeville number performed by the widely mourned Bruce Adler, who died in 2008 at age 63. Bursting with charm and talent, Adler, scion of a top Yiddish vaudeville family, demonstrates that Yiddish theater used to be pretty damned lively.
What follows is the oft-told story of the rise and decline of the American Yiddish theater, beginning with its prehistory in the Purimshpiels — the annual performances that for centuries served as the only secular entertainment in the Ashkenazic world. From there the film takes us to Yiddish theater’s 1876 birth in Romania, courtesy of Avrom Goldfadn, a.k.a. “The Father of Yiddish Theater.”
The film also describes Yiddish theater’s arrival in America, which, thanks to massive Jewish immigration, quickly became its capital. We learn of its influence on American theater’s styles of acting and set design. And the film describes the decline of its audience, due to assimilation and the immigration quotas of the 1920s.
There’s an excellent section on “The Big Four” Yiddish theater composers — Joseph Rumshinsky, Alexander Olshanetsky, Abe Ellstein, and Sholom Secunda. All in all, the documentary does a fine job of teaching the aleph-beyz, the ABCs, of the history of Yiddish theater to the uninitiated.
The most impressive aspect of Immigrant Songs is its well-crafted pace. Though there are a few snippets of vintage Yiddish cinema (Yiddish theater’s “kid brother”), most of the film consists of recent concert footage, some well-selected photographs and ephemera, and a lot of talking heads. Almost every prominent Yiddish theater historian was interviewed for it, along with several musicologists, an archivist, Yiddish actors, directors, producers, etc. (Full disclosure: I am one of them.) Director Jeff Janeczko cuts between the interviewees so smoothly — sometimes in mid-sentence — that it feels like they’re in the same room and feeding off each other’s energy. The movie just flies by.
There are a few errors. Marc Chagall is described as an important designer of Yiddish theater; actually he designed one minor production in Russia in 1921, and never did another. In a bizarre, and biblically illiterate, statement, one interviewee claims that Jews hadn’t developed a theater culture earlier because the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” forbade the construction of sets. (Actually it’s about idol worship.)
Another interviewee claims that the Yiddish play Der Yeshiva Bokher; oder, Der Yudisher Hamlet — The Yeshiva Student; or, The Jewish Hamlet (Yiddish plays then often had subtitles), is closely patterned on Shakespeare’s tragedy. In truth, the play — written by Isidore Zolotarevski, the prolific writer of shund (“trash”) melodramas — is not only awful, but is as close to Shakespeare as baked ham is to your grandmother’s kreplach.
The film’s biggest fault, however, is its short running time (45 minutes). This is a rich topic, and too much is left by the wayside in the interest of brevity. There’s nothing about what shund melodramas felt like, why they appealed to their audiences, and why they became the only thing a lot of people know about Yiddish theater.
There’s also nothing about the World War I-era wave of shtetl plays, which reflected immigrants’ homesickness without indulging in nostalgia, and provided some of Yiddish theater’s shining moments with plays like Green Fields, The Empty Inn and Tevye. And the most important play in the Yiddish canon, The Dybbuk, is never mentioned.
Perhaps most surprisingly, considering the film’s emphasis on music, there is no examination of Yiddish theater’s influence on Broadway’s music. (Cole Porter — ironically, the only gentile among the major composers of Broadway’s Golden Age — had a pronounced Jewish lilt in a number of his songs, and he actually attended Yiddish theater regularly.)
The film’s last section is about the renewed interest in Yiddish that began in the 1970s and ’80s with the klezmer revival. Much of it focuses on the 2018 Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, whose success was predetermined the moment the production was announced.
For the overwhelming majority of American Jews, from the Orthodox to the unaffiliated, Fiddler is all they know about the lives of their ancestors. And though it’s a world-class piece of musical theater, as a work of social history Fiddler is as phony as a glass eye. Nevertheless, for American Jews it’s a sacred text.
Fiddler was a huge hit, but it was a gimmick, a one-off, whose success does very little for the future of Yiddish theater. Worse, the Yiddish — not the text, but the lines spoken by most of the actors — was often mispronounced and had the wrong intonation. (One elderly gentleman of my acquaintance, a native Yiddish speaker from Czechoslovakia, told me he didn’t understand a word the actors said, and spent the whole evening reading the English supertitles.)
What follows the Fiddler section in Immigrant Songs is mostly bromides. But the best current Yiddish theater reflects the kind of fresh thinking that keeps the form alive.
An occasional well-presented museum piece, like the Folksbiene’s 2016 revival of Rumshinsky’s operetta The Golden Bride, is a very worthwhile project (though it, too, suffered from poorly spoken Yiddish). But the most dynamic contemporary Yiddish theater is, in Jeffrey Shandler’s apt phrase, “post vernacular” — i .e., the use of Yiddish is self-conscious, a deliberate choice rather than something that’s done automatically, as it would have been a century ago when there were a lot more Yiddish speakers in the world.
An example of this is the 2017 neo-realist film Menashe, which could far more easily and conventionally have been made in English. Or a well-known piece done in Yiddish translation, like Shane Baker’s stunning Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot, can become something much more valuable than a mere stunt. The Yiddish version, under Moshe Yassur’s straightforward direction, humanized the play, stripping it of the encrusted pretentiousness that had hidden its soul. (When it was presented in the International Samuel Beckett Festival in Ireland, multiple audience members approached the cast afterwards with the same reaction: “I don’t speak a word of Yiddish. But I’ve seen Godot five or six times, and this is the first time I understood it.”)
There’s a lot to be learned from Immigrant Songs. If you find yourself hungry for more, you couldn’t do better than to seek out YIVO’s online Yiddish theater course “Oh, Mama, I’m in Love!” But by all means, start with Immigrant Songs. It’s a very entertaining and informative appetizer.
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UK PM Starmer Says There Could Be New Powers to Ban Pro-Palestinian Marches
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor/File photo
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government could ban pro-Palestinian marches in some circumstances because of the “cumulative effect” the demonstrations had on the Jewish community after two Jewish men were stabbed in London on Wednesday.
Starmer told the BBC that he would always defend freedom of expression and peaceful protest, but chants like “Globalize the Intifada” during demonstrations were “completely off limits” and those voicing them should be prosecuted.
Pro-Palestinian marches have become a regular feature in London since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that triggered the Gaza war. Critics say the demonstrations have generated hostility and become a focus for antisemitism.
Protesters have argued they are exercising their democratic right to spotlight ongoing human rights and political issues related to the situation in Gaza.
Starmer said he was not denying there were “very strong legitimate views about the Middle East, about Gaza,” but many people in the Jewish community had told him they were concerned about the repeat nature of the marches.
Asked if the tougher response should focus on chants and banners, or whether the protests should be stopped altogether, Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.”
“I think it’s time to look across the board at protests and the cumulative effect,” he said, adding that the government needed to look at what further powers it could take.
Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” on Thursday amid mounting security concerns that foreign states were helping fuel violence, including against the Jewish community.
“We are seeing an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions in the UK,” the head of counter-terrorism policing, Laurence Taylor, said in a statement, adding that police were also working “against an unpredictable global situation that has consequences closer to home, including physical threats by state-linked actors.”
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War Likely to Resume After Trump’s Rejection of Latest Proposal, Says IRGC General
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – A senior Iranian military figure said that fighting with the US was “likely” to resume after President Donald Trump stated he was dissatisfied with Tehran’s latest proposal, regime media reported on Saturday.
The comments of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi, one of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, were relayed by the Fars news agency, considered as a mouthpiece of the the powerful paramilitary body.
“Evidence has shown that the Americans do not not adhere to any commitments,” Asadi was quoted as saying.
He further added that Washington’s decision-making was “primarily media-driven aimed first at preventing a drop in oil prices and second at extricating themselves from the mess they have created.”
Iranian armed forces are ready “for any new adventures or foolishness from the Americans,” he said, going to assert that the Iran war would prove for the US a tragedy comparable with what was for Israel the October 7 massacre.
“Just as our martyred Leader said that the Zionist regime will never be the same as before the Al‑Aqsa Storm operation [the name chosen by Hamas leadership for the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel], the United States will also never return to what it was before its attack on Iran,” he said. “The world has understood the true nature of America, and no matter how much malice it shows now, it is no longer the America that many once feared.”