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Yeshiva education reform activist launching independent haredi news organization
(JTA) — Naftuli Moster, the founder and former executive director of Yaffed, the advocacy group focused on improving secular education in haredi Orthodox Jewish schools, is launching a news organization focused on what he sees as a news desert in the haredi world.
With a board that includes seasoned Jewish journalists, Shtetl: Haredi Free Press will launch online in 2023, and Moster said he is exploring a print option as well. Shtetl’s online announcement said it had seed funding for two years; Moster declined to comment on who the funders are but emphasized that the media organization would produce independent journalism.
“Every community needs a free press,” Moster told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Members of this community, my community, deserve a free media as well. Shtetl’s existence is an exciting development in the Jewish and media spaces, and we are looking forward to making a big splash in early 2023.”
Moster, who grew up in a haredi Orthodox family in Borough Park, Brooklyn, stepped down from his position at Yaffed in September after a decade as its founder and leader. During that time, Yaffed got the attention of city and state education officials as the group filed multiple lawsuits meant to increase access to secular education in haredi yeshivas. In turn, he drew the ire of haredi Orthodox leaders, who resented an ostensible insider inviting scrutiny of their educational institutions.
The haredi communities of Brooklyn and New York’s exurban Rockland and Orange counties are currently served by successful print and online newspapers, in English and Yiddish, that tend to be protective of community interests, including the yeshivas.
Elad Nehorai, an ex-Hasidic writer and progressive activist, said these sites are more akin to community newsletters than journalistic enterprises, publishing local interest stories like death and wedding announcements, notices about community events and stories about construction of new synagogues or schools. National and world news coverage tends to focus on the haredi community in Israel and syndicated news copy about events outside of the religious world.
“The haredi world in general is not used to the kind of journalism that exists in the secular world,” Nehorai said. “In the secular world, investigating wrongdoing of leaders is a normal thing.”
For example, it was a secular newspaper — the Israeli daily Haaretz — that in 2021 reported on allegations surrounding Chaim Walder, a once-celebrated Israeli haredi children’s author, who was accused of having sexually assaulted more than 20 women, and several underage girls. Only after the allegations became a prominent topic of conversation in haredi communities did the press there begin to cover them — often with apparent sympathy to Walder.
“Very often if you look at the press there, it’s more about building community,” Nehorai said of the haredi world. By contrast, “If you open the New York Times it’s generally a lot of negative stories.”
Leaders of the haredi community were incensed when, in September, the New York Times published a major investigation that found that in New York’s Hasidic yeshivas, “generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.”Backlash from the Hasidic and other Orthodox communities began before the story was even published, with people claiming the New York Times and the Jewish reporters themselves were biased and even antisemitic in their reporting.
Moster envisions a role for Shtetl that will foster “important discussions that are crucial for the well-being of the Haredi community and beyond,” according to an online announcement. At the same time, “it will produce content that other outlets are unable, unequipped, or unwilling to provide to their readers, whether owing to the lack of resources, cultural competency, access to insiders or Yiddish language proficiency.”
The project is currently recruiting board members, full-time and freelance reporters, editors and marketing professionals. Its founding board includes journalists Larry Cohler-Esses of The Forward and Ari Goldman of Columbia Journalism School, neither of whom is haredi, as well as Adelle Goldenberg, a recent Harvard University graduate who grew up in the Hasidic neighborhood of Borough Park. Goldenberg was the winner of the 2021 Yaffed Changemaker Award for her assistance to haredi students who want to go to college outside of the yeshiva system.
Goldman, a former New York Times religion reporter who attends a Modern Orthodox synagogue, told JTA he became familiar with Moster’s work with Yaffed about five years ago. He said he was impressed by Moster’s efforts to get haredi young people a strong secular education and believed that haredi communities could benefit from improved journalism, as well.
“I want to be supportive of an effort that tries to shine more light on a community about which a lot is hidden and unknown,” Goldman said. “I’m also very interested in good journalism, which I think is a cornerstone of our society. And I want to see it put to the best of use in the haredi community.”
Critics of Shtetl, purporting to be from within the haredi and Orthodox world, have already voiced their opinions on social media, claiming that the new media endeavor has some sort of agenda to undermine their communities.
The backlash echoes the one that Moster has received for a decade already, when his education advocacy even earned him the label of “moser,” reflecting a dangerous accusation that he had inappropriately involved secular authorities in Jewish affairs.
“The people who are reacting negatively don’t see it as, ‘Oh they’re just writing negatively about us,’” Nehorai said. “They see it as traitorous. They see it as someone who’s turned on us. And what’s fascinating about that is that it doesn’t matter if you are haredi or you are ex-haredi, what occurs then is you are labeled as an outsider.”
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The post Yeshiva education reform activist launching independent haredi news organization appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Gaza ‘Board of Peace’ to Convene at WH on Feb. 19, One Day After Trump’s Meeting with Netanyahu
US President Donald Trump speaks to the media during the 56th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 22, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo
i24 News – A senior official from one of the member states confirms to i24NEWS that an invitation has been received for a gathering of President Trump’s Board of Peace at the White House on February 19, just one day after the president’s planned meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The meeting comes amid efforts to advance the implementation of the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire, following the limited reopening of the Rafah crossing, the expected announcement on the composition and mandate of the International Stabilization Force, and anticipation of a Trump declaration setting a deadline for Hamas to disarm.
In Israel officials assess that the announcement is expected very soon but has been delayed in part due to ongoing talks with the Americans over Israel’s demands for the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. Trump reiterated on Thursday his promise that Hamas will indeed be disarmed.
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If US Attacks, Iran Says It Will Strike US Bases in the Region
FILE PHOTO: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi meets with Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi in Muscat, Oman, February 6, 2026. Photo: Omani Ministry of Foreign Affairs/ Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
Iran will strike US bases in the Middle East if it is attacked by US forces that have massed in the region, its foreign minister said on Saturday, insisting that this should not be seen as an attack on the countries hosting them.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi spoke to Qatari Al Jazeera TV a day after Tehran and Washington pledged to continue indirect nuclear talks following what both sides described as positive discussions on Friday in Oman.
While Araqchi said no date had yet been set for the next round of negotiations, US President Donald Trump said they could take place early next week. “We and Washington believe it should be held soon,” Araqchi said.
Trump has threatened to strike Iran after a US naval buildup in the region, demanding that it renounce uranium enrichment, a possible pathway to nuclear bombs, as well as stopping ballistic missile development and support for armed groups around the region. Tehran has long denied any intent to weaponize nuclear fuel production.
While both sides have indicated readiness to revive diplomacy over Tehran’s long-running nuclear dispute with the West, Araqchi balked at widening the talks out.
“Any dialogue requires refraining from threats and pressure. (Tehran) only discusses its nuclear issue … We do not discuss any other issue with the US,” he said.
Last June, the US bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, joining in the final stages of a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign. Tehran has since said it has halted uranium enrichment activity.
Its response at the time included a missile attack on a US base in Qatar, which maintains good relations with both Tehran and Washington.
In the event of a new US attack, Araqchi said the consequences could be similar.
“It would not be possible to attack American soil, but we will target their bases in the region,” he said.
“We will not attack neighboring countries; rather, we will target US bases stationed in them. There is a big difference between the two.”
Iran says it wants recognition of its right to enrich uranium, and that putting its missile program on the negotiating table would leave it vulnerable to Israeli attacks.
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My university wants me to sign a loyalty oath — am I in America or Vichy France?
As a historian of modern France, I have rarely seen a connection between my everyday life in my adopted state of Texas and my work on my adopted specialization: the period we call Vichy France. Apart from the Texan boast that the Lone Star Republic is bigger than the French Republic, and the small town of Paris, Texas, which boasts its own Eiffel Tower, I had no reason to compare the two places where I have spent more than half of my life.
Until now.
Last week, professors and instructors at the University of Houston received an unsettling memo from the administration, which asked us to sign a statement that we teach rather than “indoctrinate” our students.
Though the administration did not define “indoctrinate,” it hardly takes a PhD in English to read between the lines. Indoctrination is precisely what our state government has already forbidden us from doing in our classes. There must not be the slightest sign in our courses and curricula of references to diversity, identity and inclusion. The catch-all word used is “ideology,” a term Governor Greg Abbott recently invoked when he warned that “Texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation. We must end indoctrination.”
This is not the first time in the past several months that I have been reminded of what occurred in France during the four years that it was ruled by its German occupiers and Vichy collaborators.
Very briefly, with Germany’s rapid and complete defeat of France in 1940, an authoritarian, antisemitic and collaborationist regime assumed power. Among its first acts was to purge French Jews from all the professions, including high school and university faculties, and to impose an “oath of loyalty” to the person of Marshal Philippe Pétain, the elderly but ramrod straight and clear-headed hero of World War I.
The purpose of the oath was simple and straightforward: By demanding the fealty of all state employees to the person of Pétain, it also demanded their hostility to the secular and democratic values of the French republican tradition. Nevertheless, an overwhelming majority of teachers signed the oath —even the novelist and feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who needed her salary as a lycée teacher, as did the writer Jean Guéhenno, a visceral anti-Pétainist who continued to teach at the prestigious Paris lycée Henri IV until he was fired in 1943.
Vichy’s ministers of education understood the vital importance that schools and universities played in shaping citizens. Determined to replace the revolutionary values of liberty, equality and fraternity with the reactionary goals of family, work and homeland, they sought to eliminate “godless schools” and instill a “moral order” based on submission to state and church authorities. This radical experiment, powered by a reactionary ideology, to return France to the golden age of kings, cardinals and social castes came to an inglorious end with the Allied liberation of the country and collapse of Vichy scarcely four years after it had begun.
The French Jewish historian Marc Bloch — who joined the Resistance and sacrificed his life on behalf of a very different ideology we can call humanism — always insisted on the importance of comparative history. But comparison was important not because it identified similarities but because it illuminated differences. Clearly, the situation of professors at UH is very different from that of their French peers in Vichy France. We are not risking our jobs, much less our lives, by resisting this ham-handed effort to demand our loyalty to an anti-indoctrination memo.
But the two situations are not entirely dissimilar, either. Historians of fascism like Robert Paxton remind us that such movements begin slowly, then suddenly assume terrifying proportions. This was certainly the case in interwar France, where highly polarized politics, frequent political violence and a long history of antisemitism and anti-republicanism prepared the ground for Vichy. In France, Paxton writes, this slow, then sudden transformation “changed the practice of citizenship from the enjoyment of constitutional rights and duties to participation in mass ceremonies of affirmation and conformity.”
As an historian of France, I always thought its lurch into authoritarianism was shocking, but not surprising. After all, many of the elements for this change had existed well before 1940. But as a citizen of America, I am not just shocked, but also surprised by official demands for affirmation and conformity. One day I will find the time to think hard about my naiveté. But the time is now to think about how we should respond to these demands.
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