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A court ruling has transformed — and limited — the way New York state can regulate yeshivas
NEW YORK (JTA) — What should happen when a yeshiva does not teach its students the legally required amount of secular studies? And who should be held responsible: the school, or the parents who chose it?
Both of those questions were at the heart of a bombshell ruling in a New York state court last week that, if it stands, will transform how the state can regulate private schools. It also poses a challenge to advocates for increased secular education in yeshivas, who have spent years pushing the state to more strictly enforce its standards in schools.
It’s the latest major development in a years-long battle between an education department that seeks to compel secular education standards across private schools and haredi Orthodox yeshivas resisting coercion from the state.
In a trial that pitted several yeshivas and their advocates against the state’s education department, a judge in Albany ruled that the state no longer has the power to effectively force yeshivas to close for not teaching secular studies in a way that is “substantially equivalent” to education in public school. According to the ruling, state law says it’s the responsibility of parents, not schools, to ensure that children receive a “substantially equivalent” secular education.
But the court also ruled that the education requirements themselves still stand. The yeshivas and their supporters had taken the department to court, hoping that the judge would fully strike down the regulations that mandated secular education standards.
Both advocates and critics of the yeshivas are celebrating parts of the ruling and lamenting others. What’s clear is that the state’s mechanism for enforcing secular education standards in private schools will have to change, though what shape it will take remains to be seen.
“It highlights and it notes that the statute itself requires parents to ensure that their children receive a substantially equivalent education, but it doesn’t impose an obligation on the schools to provide that,” said Michael Helfand, a scholar of religious law and religious liberty at Pepperdine University, explaining the ruling. “If that’s the case, there’s no authority under the statute to close the school because the school failed to provide a ‘substantially equivalent’ education.”
The regulations at issue were approved in September, soon after The New York Times published the first in a series of articles investigating Hasidic yeshivas, reporting that a number of them received public funding but fell far short of secular education requirements. The yeshivas, and representatives of haredi Orthodox communities more broadly, have decried the articles as biased and inaccurate.
According to the new regulations, if yeshivas (or other private schools) did not provide a “substantially equivalent” secular education to their students, the state could compel parents to unenroll their children and place them in a school that meets state standards — effectively forcing the school to close.
The judge who wrote last week’s ruling, Christina Ryba, found “that certain portions of the New Regulations impose consequences and penalties upon yeshivas above and beyond that authorized” by law. Ryba wrote that the regulations exceed the state’s authority by forcing parents to withdraw their children.
She added that state law does not mandate that children must receive the requisite secular education “through merely one source of instruction provided at a single location.” She added that if children aren’t receiving the necessary instruction at yeshivas, they can still get it elsewhere, in some form of “supplemental instruction that specifically addresses any identified deficiencies.”
What that ruling means, Helfand said, is that the state will have to turn to other methods to enforce those standards, such as choosing to “tie particular requirements to the way in which schools receive funding.” The state could also investigate parents, not schools — which he described as a much more arduous undertaking.
“It would then have to slowly but surely make its way through each individual family or each individual child [and] ask questions about what they’re supplementing,” he said. “It’s very hard to see exactly how the New York State Education Department could, given this ruling, ensure that every child is receiving a basic education.”
For yeshivas and their advocates, he added, “It’s not the constitutional victory that I think some hoped for but it’s a very practical victory that in the end may stymie the state’s ability to actually impose significant regulation.”
That’s the way advocates of yeshivas — including parties to the petition — appear to be reading this ruling. A statement from Parents for Education and Religious Liberty in Schools, known as PEARLS, one of the petitioners, said the ruling gives “parents the right to send their children to the school of their choice. …In sum, it provides parents and parochial schools with both the autonomy and the protections that the regulations tried to strip away.”
Another advocate of yeshivas that was party to the case, the haredi umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America, saw the ruling as “not the complete victory many were [praying] for,” according to a statement, because it didn’t strike down last year’s regulations entirely. But the group was grateful that Ryba did rule out “the egregious overreach the Regulations sought,” including the “prospect of forcibly shutting down schools.”
Rabbi Avi Shafran, Agudath Israel’s director of public affairs, told JTA that the organization was “obviously relieved” by the ruling but feels the battle isn’t over. At the beginning of the year, Agudath Israel launched a campaign called “Know Us” that aims to counter what it calls a “smear campaign” by The New York Times.
“But with elements out there bent on pressuring yeshivos to accept their own personal educational philosophy, we remain on the alert for any future attempts to limit yeshivos or parental autonomy,” Shafran wrote in an email.
While Agudath Israel may see the ruling as a partial victory, that doesn’t mean advocates for secular education necessarily see it as a total defeat. Young Advocates for Fair Education, known as YAFFED, which submitted an amicus brief to the court in support of the Department of Education, said in a press release that the ruling “is of grave concern to all parents with children in non-public schools.” Beatrice Weber, YAFFED’s executive director, said the ruling will require the group to shift its strategy, which has until now focused on compelling the schools to teach secular studies.
But she is heartened that the core requirement to provide a threshold level of secular studies still stands for parents — and she’s skeptical that haredi communities will take the risk of asking parents to violate that requirement en masse. In the end, she believes more yeshivas will, in fact, become “substantially equivalent” in order to remove that risk.
“This victory they’re celebrating is really putting them in this corner,” Weber said. “We’ll see what they decide to do but none of the claims of [the regulations] being a violation of religious freedom — none of that was accepted.”
Weber acknowledges that the burden for secular education has now shifted to parents, and “there’s not going to be someone knocking on every door” to make sure parents comply. But she noted that many haredi families interact with the state because they receive forms of public assistance, which she said could provide a built-in mechanism to pressure them to comply.
“Any time they touch the government it’s going to come up,” she said. “Many Hasidic families deal with government programs a lot — whether it’s Medicaid, whether it’s food stamps. I can’t see community leaders saying, ‘Whatever, let the families figure it out.’”
A spokesperson for the state education department declined to say whether the state plans to appeal the ruling, or what it means for future oversight of yeshivas. But in a statement, the department said the ruling “validates the Department’s commitment to improving the educational experience of all students.”
The statement added: “We remain committed to ensuring students who attend school in settings consistent with their religious and cultural beliefs and values receive the education to which they are legally entitled.”
Whatever the future holds, Helfand says the ruling reflects a new way to read the law that, for years, has driven tensions between the state and yeshivas.
“I would have expected people reading the statute not to distinguish between whether ‘substantially equivalent’ is a parental obligation or a school obligation,” he said. “The fact that the court was able to slice the obligation in such a precise way — it’s something we haven’t seen before.”
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‘Marty Supreme’ is an outstanding celebration — and indictment — of chutzpah
Marty Mouser will have the beef Wellington and caviar, as they are the most expensive items on the menu.
The 23-year-old table tennis phenom, heralded as “the chosen one,” is dining at the Ritz in London. Seated opposite him, his recent opponent, Bela Kletzki. The two are friends, but this didn’t stop Mouser from telling a gaggle of reporters before their match of his plans to “do to Kletzski what Auschwitz couldn’t.” He can say that, he assured them — he’s a Jew.
This, like Mouser’s remark that he is the “ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat,” is all bluster. (He’s really a lowly Lower East Side shoe clerk who stole money from his shop to fly to the tournament.) But we soon see what Auschwitz meant for his survivor companion: defusing bombs on the camp outskirts and once managing to sneak honey from a beehive onto his person, which his fellow prisoners licked off him for nourishment.
We get a flashback of Kletzki. It’s lensed like a Renaissance painting, with honey glistening off of the hairy chest of actor Géza Röhrig, (Hungarian star of the Sonderkommando drama Son of Saul).
You may wonder what exactly this moment is doing in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, a walloping period piece that follows Mouser’s picaresque ploys to become a global icon by hustling, stealing and lying his way into a tournament in Japan. But there’s rarely a moment in the frenetic picture, set over eight months in 1952, where only one thing is happening. While Kletzki tells his haunting honey story, to pen magnate and potential patron Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary, Mr. Wonderful, indeed), Marty makes eyes at Rockwell’s wife from across the room, another sort of honeypot in mind. The contrast is the point.
Unlike Kletzki, Marty — very loosely based on ping-pong champ Marty Reisman — is an American, New York-born, and believes in the Augie March doctrine of first knocked, first admitted. To get his foot in the door so he can stare down from his rightful place on a Wheaties box, he will shove anyone and everyone out of the way. He refuses to demean himself by playing Harlem Globetrotter halftime shows with Kletzki, or throwing a match for Rockwell — but his principles are malleable when the straits are dire.
Mouser feels entitled to everything: the money in his uncle’s safe at the shoe shop; a suite at the Ritz; other men’s wives; a chunk of the pyramids, which he presents to his manipulative mother (Fran Drescher) with the words, “We built that.”
We know from how he speaks about this hunk of Egyptian rock — and about Kletzki, the Holocaust and Hitler — his entitlement comes in part from a legacy of immiseration and violence he never suffered personally. But Mouser, this New Jew coming of age after the Shoah, claims redemption as his birthright while also striving to float above his people’s history of oppression and retail drudgery, concocting a mythology of self-invention and radical individualism. (Meanwhile, Kletzki, a world champ before the war, is all too happy to be treated kindly and paid decently for hitting balls with skillets for the Globetrotters.)
The tension between the horror of the recent past, and the just-dawning promise of an America where antisemitism is unfashionable, plays through Marty’s vision of what’s to come. He dreams up orange-colored ping-pong balls, a hue only approved for use by the International Table Tennis Federation in 2019. The 1980s synth-pop needle drops remixed by composer Daniel Lopatin, lean into futurism. Our hero is ahead of his time, chafing at the present to which he’s tethered. He wants an unready world to acknowledge his greatness now. He has no patience for a rocky transition.
If the opening credits of Uncut Gems bespeak a past-one’s-prime ritual — a colonoscopy — Marty Supreme‘s titles are set to a burst of youthful virility. (Inventive, hilarious, if something I’ve seen before.)
Timothée Chalamet, outfitted with prosthetic acne scars and eye-shrinking contact lenses, is incandescent and somehow stays to the right side of insufferable as he wrecks the lives of all around him with his singular focus. Unlike Gems’ Howard Ratner, a sleaze with a gambling addiction and little else to offer, Mouser’s talent is undeniable, but like any Safdie protagonist, he takes his licks.
The film, co-written and co-edited with Safdie’s constant collaborator Ronald Bronstein, is a rich Jewish text that alternates between wish fulfillment and nightmare. Mouser competes for the WASPy Rockwell’s patronage while shtupping his icy blonde wife (Gwyneth Paltrow). On the other side of the ledger, his lover, Rachel (a pitch-perfect Odessa A’zion), is attacked near a Forverts delivery truck. Marty’s uncle Murray (music journalist Larry “Ratso” Sloman) calls a cop goyische kopf for ordering the roast beef over pastrami at the Garden Cafe. It’s no mistake that, at his lowest, Mouser faces a treyf humiliation orchestrated by Rockwell: lose and kiss a pig.
But Marty Supreme is too dense with plot points and people to insist on a solely Jewish gloss, even as critics for the non-Jewish press have been tempted to apply one.
Exploring the warrens of postwar New York — the wings of a Broadway theater, the back alley of a Chinatown restaurant, stockrooms, airshafts and fire escapes — all outstandingly revived by legendary production designer Jack Fisk, Safdie proves he’s not only ready for a solo effort away from brother, Benny, but ready to leap over space and time. He may not be ready to say goodbye to all that (New York stuff), the backdrop for all his features up to now, but he easily could.
In this epic of chutzpah, we have a mature work via a singularly immature avatar. Mouser may have never reached the recognition he felt he was owed, but coming into awards season, there’s little doubt that Safdie’s film is a cross-category contender.
Should the gentleman order the caviar, there’s no doubt he’s earned it.
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The Future of War: Israel Takes Global Lead on Military Innovation With New AI Division, Iron Beam Laser System
A part of Iron Beam laser anti-missile interception system, developed by Israel, is seen in this handout image obtained by Reuters on Sept. 17, 2025. Photo: Israel Defense Ministry/Handout via REUTERS
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced this week a revolutionary reorganization of the technology and artificial intelligence capabilities of the Jewish state’s military, unveiling new plans to prepare for future warfare with cutting-edge advancements.
Israel’s major defense overhaul, unveiled on Tuesday, comes in preparation for the deployment of the long-anticipated “Iron Beam” laser interceptor system, which will be delivered to the military at the end of the month.
Under the name “Bina” — Hebrew word “intelligence” — the IDF has chosen to shut down its Lotem Unit from the C41 Corps, replacing it with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Division and the Spectrum Division. The latter will focus on communications and electronic warfare with an emphasis on threats from Iran, China, and Russia.
The AI Division will grow through merging other sections within the IDF, including Mamram (the abbreviation for the Center of Computing and Information Systems) and software development units Shahar and Mitzpen. This consolidation of AI-development related divisions intends both to intensify security and avoid accidentally duplicating research efforts. The project will align with Israel’s Project Nimbus cloud computing program supplied by Amazon and Google.
The IDF also announced the ICT Division, which will focus on satellite warfare in outer space.
According to the military, about 50 percent of the new divisions are composed of women soldiers, with female officers comprising 40 percent of the senior command including two of the five top leadership positions.
Brig. Gen. Yael Grossman now heads ICT and the Cyber Defense Division, and Brig Gen. Racheli Dembinsky will head the Spectrum Division. Others in leadership positions include Chief Signals Officer Brig. Gen. Omer Cohen and Maj. Gen. Aviad Dagan.
“I have no doubt that the world is heading towards a space war, especially after the US and China defined space as a possible war arena,” Dr. Moshik Cohen, CEO for defense technology company AIPEX which focuses on missiles, told the Israeli publication Globes.
“Rival powers are already using it on the battlefield,” Cohen continued. “The Chinese have developed a way to detect stealth aircraft using satellites, and the Russians have jammed GPS signals from US satellites, which have dropped thousands of smart bombs on earth and blocked satellite communications for the Ukrainians. At the same time, the US is promoting Golden Dome, which will consist of a network of low-flying satellites able to perform military missions such as intercepting ballistic and hypersonic missiles and blocking enemy communications.”
Dagan said that the new divisions aspired to use technology to “turn one tank into 100 tanks, one soldier into 100 fighters.”
On Monday, meanwhile, Danny Gold, the head of the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Directorate of Defense Research and Development, revealed that the military would soon receive the “Iron Beam” laser interception system, a project a decade in development.
“With development complete and a comprehensive testing program that has validated the system’s capabilities, we are prepared to deliver initial operational capability to the IDF on Dec. 30, 2025,” Gold said. “The Iron Beam laser system is expected to fundamentally change the rules of engagement on the battlefield. Simultaneously, we are already advancing the next-generation systems.”
Created by Rafael Advanced Systems Ltd., the Iron Beam is intended to supplement rather than replace Israel’s Iron Dome and other air defense systems, focusing especially on smaller targets. As long as the weapon maintains a power source then it cannot run out of ammunition. However, the system does not function optimally in situations with clouds or low visibility.
The IDF chose to rename the laser weapon from Magen Or (Light Shield) to Or Eitan (Eitan’s Light) in honor of Cpt. Eitan Oster, a member of the Egoz Commando Unit killed in October 2024 while fighting the Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon.
Brig. Gen. Benny Aminov also announced this week an Israeli breakthrough in countering enemy drone attacks.
“We are now working on interception solutions using drone-based systems that enable response to swarm scenarios while accelerating the development of new directed-energy weapons,” Aminov said. “The issue of low-altitude threats is an example of a challenge that requires our defense establishment to fundamentally change its operational approach, responding within compressed time frames, spiral development, accelerating testing during the development process, and bridging small defense-tech companies with major defense contractors.”
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‘Dancing With the Stars’ Airs Its First Dance Dedicated to Hanukkah During Holiday Special
Alan Bersten, Val Chmerkovskiy, Gleb Savchenko, Emma Slater, Onye Stevenson, and Hailey Bills dancing to “Miracle” by Matisyahu on “Dancing with the Stars” on Dec. 2, 2025, on ABC. Photo: Disney/Eric McCandless
“Dancing with the Stars” aired a holiday special on Wednesday night that included the show’s first celebration of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, which begins later this month.
The reality show and dancing competition aired its first full holiday special, titled “Dancing with the Holidays,” which highlighted the skills of its professional dancers without their celebrity partners. The dances mainly honored Christmas, but for the first time in the show’s 20-year history, there was a dance dedicated to Hanukkah.
Professional dancers Alan Bersten and Val Chmerkovskiy, who are both Jewish, along with four non-Jewish pros – Gleb Savchenko, Emma Slater, Onye Stevenson, and Hailey Bills – danced to “Miracle” by Matisyahu. Bersten choreographed the dance, which included the men linking their raised arms to form a menorah, a hora, a sit-spin as a nod to a spinning dreidel, and a take on some of the dances from the classic Jewish musical “Fiddler on the Roof.”
“We have a lot of work to do,” the Mirrorball champion told the dancers in rehearsal. “We need a miracle.”
In the intro package for the dance, Bersten, who is the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, talked about not seeing much Hanukkah representation around the holiday season when he was growing up. Bersten said he wanted to create something that Jewish kids today could identify with.
“Everyone celebrates holidays in a different way. Growing up Jewish, you don’t really see a lot of Hanukkah representation, so tonight we’re doing a special performance to celebrate Hanukkah,” he said. “Hopefully a Jewish kid’s watching this, and they feel seen, and they feel proud.”
Following the dance, DWTS co-host Alfonso Ribeiro reminded the audience and viewers at home “that the holiday season is for everyone.”
The “Dancing with the Stars” holiday special was released on Disney+ and Hulu.