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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.”
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There’s something missing from John Fetterman’s memoir: Israel
There may be no senator who has committed more fervently to supporting Israel, at a greater personal cost, than Sen. John Fetterman.
In the weeks following the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the Pennsylvania Democrat began taping hostage posters to the wall outside his office and wearing a symbolic dogtag necklace. He embraced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a pariah to many Democrats. As the civilian death toll in Gaza mounted, he posted constantly on social media to defend the war.
The position has cost him followers, friends, staff and perhaps in the future his seat. But it has also made him a hero in parts of the Jewish community. He received awards from Yeshiva University and the Zionist Organization of America and he was brought onstage as a panelist at the national Jewish Federations of North America convention.
Given the centrality of Israel to his focus in office — he was sworn in only 9 months before Oct. 7 — and how often he posts about it on social media, one might anticipate Fetterman giving it a lengthy treatment in his newly released memoir, Unfettered. The title of the memoir, too, seems to promise candor.
Instead, Fetterman dedicates all of three paragraphs to Israel in a book that largely rehashes lore from before his time in the Senate and discusses his struggles with mental health. These paragraphs — which even pro-Israel readers will read as boilerplate — appear in the book’s penultimate chapter, which is about his declining popularity since taking office.
Some have suggested that the reason some of the media and former staffers turned on me was because of my stance on Israel. Others imply that my support of Israel has to do with impaired mental health, which isn’t true. My support for Israel is not new. I was quoted in the 2022 primary as unequivocally stating that “I will always lean in on Israel.”
There’s a paragraph here about sticking to his morals even if it means defying his party, then:
There was no choice for me but to support Israel. I remembered the country’s history — how it was formed in 1948 in the wake of the murder of six million Jews. Since then, the rest of the Middle East, harboring resentments going back thousands of years, has only looked for ways to eradicate Israel. It took less than a day after the formation of the Jewish state was announced for Egypt to attack it. Every day in Israel is a struggle for existence, just as every day is an homage to the memory of the Jews shot and gassed and tortured.
It’s also clear that war in Gaza [sic] has been a humanitarian disaster. At the time of this writing, roughly sixty thousand people have been killed in Israel’s air and ground campaign, over half of them women, children, and the elderly. I grieve the tragedy, the death, and the misery.
Satisfied with this examination of the hypothesis for his growing unpopularity, Fetterman then moves on to another possible reason: his votes on immigration.
It’s strange to read the Israel passages in light of Fetterman’s full-throated advocacy on any number of issues related or connected to the Israel-Hamas war, including the hostages, campus protests, and rising antisemitism. Even if he did not reckon more deeply with his support for a war that brought about a “humanitarian disaster,” he might have talked about meeting the hostage families, or visiting Israel, or his disappointment that some voices within his party have turned against it.
The production of Unfettered was itself a story earlier this year, and may explain the book’s failure to grapple with a central priority.
Fetterman reportedly received a $1.2 million advance for it, roughly a third of which went to Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger to ghostwrite it. But the two apparently had a falling out at some point, according to the sports blog Defector, which wrote in June that “in the process of having to work with Fetterman, Bissinger went from believing the Pennsylvania senator was a legitimate presidential candidate to believing he should no longer be in office at all.”
Bissinger is not credited anywhere in the book, and does not appear to have contributed. (He refused to discuss the book when a reporter called him earlier this year.)
But the mystifying section about Israel may have nothing to do with a ghostwriter or lack thereof. It may instead be explained by a letter his then-chief of staff wrote in May 2024, in which he said Fetterman “claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news — he declines most briefings and never reads memos.”
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How a Russian samovar connects me to the old country — and my black market dealing great-great-grandmother
For as long as I can remember, the golden samovar — a Russian teapot of sorts — has rested somewhere high in our home. In our first house, it sat imposingly on a shelf above the staircase. In our current home, it tops the boudoir in our guestroom. When I was growing up, I didn’t actually know what it was and, until a few years ago, I didn’t think to ask.
Spurred by some unknown impulse — possibly a quarter-life crisis or my mom and dad entering their 60s — I decided to interview my parents on the origin of every object and piece of furniture displayed in our home, gathering information that would otherwise die with them. Some of my questions yielded three-word answers (“It’s a lamp”); others evoked longer stories, like that of my black market-dealing great-great-grandmother.
Rivka Silberberg brought the samovar with her when she and her family — including my great-grandfather — immigrated to the United States from the Pale of Settlement sometime before World War I. According to my grandfather, while Rivka’s neighbors were fleeing religious persecution, she was evading authorities after a neighbor ratted her out for illegally selling items — some say tea, others tobacco — without the proper taxation. My mom thinks it was probably a combination of antisemitism and legal peril that motivated Rivka to leave.
Samovars were an important part of Russian social life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jenna Weissman Joselit, a professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University and former Forward columnist, wrote, “The samovar loomed large in Jewish immigrant culture” and “a hefty proportion of Russian Jewish immigrants … lugged the heavy and bulky contraption to the New World.”
They acted both as a comforting, familiar sight and as something that could be pawned when money was tight, Joselit wrote. Clearly, my great-great-grandmother valued her samovar enough to drag it across the Atlantic.
Learning about the items in my house has given me a new appreciation for the objects that were always just a part of my background. Since the samovar is one of the only pieces of my family’s old world life we still have, it’s imbued with a certain sacredness. This samovar is not simply a vessel for brewing tea; It is a symbol of my ancestors’ forced migration, a testament to their ability to make the hard choices necessary for survival.
I am the only grandchild on my mother’s side. My grandfather was also an only child, meaning I am the only great-grandchild of his parents. I alone carry this history. Like the samovar, I am a physical testament to my family’s survival.
It’s a lot of weight to have on your shoulders — or on your shelf.
Being an only child is what made me feel such an urgent responsibility to capture my parents’ stories; if I didn’t save them, no one else would.
But objects are impermanent. They tarnish (as our samovar has). They shatter. They get lost.
As these sacred objects become more enchanted, we also become more vulnerable to their loss. Any damage to them would feel like a devastating blow.
Since my grandmother passed away in 2020, I have been the owner of her wedding band. I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve worn it, primarily on occasions when I want to feel like she’s near, whether on Rosh Hashanah or my college graduation. Otherwise, I keep it in my jewelry box where it can stay safe.
My mom takes a much more relaxed approach. One Passover, a friend set down one of our dessert plates with too much force, and it cracked. My mom, in an effort to reassure the friend, said probably the last thing one wants to hear after breaking someone else’s belongings: “It was my grandmother’s.”
After the friend panicked for a moment, my mom realized how the words had sounded.
“No, no, no,” she said. “I mean that it’s so old.”
Old things break. It’s part of their natural course of existence. For my mom, this was just an inevitable fact of life. Even without the dessert plate, she has memories of her grandmother to hold onto.
It’s taken me longer to accept the impermanence of objects. Only recently has the loss of a cheap earring not felt like the end of the world.
Luckily, because of its size and shape, the samovar would be a hard thing to misplace. In the future, if it needs to be moved, I’ll make sure I do so with care. But if for some reason something should happen to it, I am comforted to know that the story of Rivka and her smuggling ways lives on within me.
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Mark Mellman, pollster who championed Democrats and Israel, dies
(JTA) — The talk was timed just ahead of the Ninth of Av, one of the most mournful dates in the Jewish year, so Mark Mellman came prepared with a drash — a Torah commentary — and delivered it to a rapt room.
That the room at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston was packed with political operatives, not all of them Jewish, did not seem to matter to Mellman, the veteran pollster pro-Israel voice within the Democratic Party whose death was announced Friday by his family.
For Mellman, Jewish values and Democratic values went hand in hand. As soon as he heard the appreciative murmurs of “yashar koach” (roughly, “well done”) marking the end of his drash, he launched into an endorsement of party presidential nominee John Kerry.
“Mark possessed a profound understanding for American and Jewish history.” the Democratic Majority for Israel, the group he founded in 2019, said in a statement. “His unwavering commitment to Democratic values will continue to guide and inspire us.”
Mellman died after a long illness, his family said in announcing his funeral, which will take place on Sunday in Maryland. They did not give a cause of death or mention his age, although some sources indicate he was born in 1955.
Mellman joined his first political campaign in 1981, three years after graduating from Princeton and while he was a graduate student at Yale. He successfully managed the congressional campaign of Bruce Morrison, a Connecticut Democrat who unseated a Republican, Larry DeNardis, in the 1982 election.
The upset made Mellman’s reputation and, still in his 20s, he launched a career in Washington as a pollster and a consultant. His company was eventually known as The Mellman Group.
Within a couple of decades he was the go-to pollster, not just for Democrats but for a wide variety of firms, including the NBA’s Washington Wizards, United Airlines and both Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
He never let it get to his head: “The truth is we know damn little about what works in campaigns,” he wrote in The Hill, the insidery Washington newspaper, in 2006. “Most of what passes for evidence in this business is nothing more than dimly remembered anecdote or thinly disguised salesmanship.”
His self-deprecation came through after Kerry lost in 2004. Mellman was the campaign’s pollster.
“You can’t imagine how much time it takes to lie on the floor in a fetal position, it really takes a lot out of me,” he told a conference a week after the election.
Mellman made himself accessible to Jewish groups, frequently appearing at events organized by the Jewish Federations of North America and at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and often opposite a Republican counterpart.
The debate was always friendly, with the understanding on both sides that ensuring the full-throated participation of Jewish Americans in the political process outweighed partisan differences.
“I always respected him and the fact that he was committed to fighting the rise of antisemitism and anti-Zionism in the Democratic Party,” Matt Brooks, the CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JTA. “Mark put principle over politics. He and his voice will be missed.”
He was sought-after mentor to younger Jewish operatives. “When I started working in Jewish Dem politics and needed a poll, we looked to Mark. When I first spoke at a JCC, I spoke alongside Mark,” Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said on X. “I learned from and appreciated Mark, and he’ll be deeply missed.”
William Daroff, now the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, recalled that Mellman’s mentorship crossed party lines, when Daroff was the RJC’s deputy director.
“During my own partisan youth, when I was loudly advocating for President George W. Bush and Mark was working just as energetically on the other side, he never treated me as an adversary,” Daroff told JTA. “He cared more about the Jewish community than about partisan labels and made a point of saying that pro-Israel voices in the GOP mattered.”
When Daroff a couple of years later sought to transition to nonpartisan work, applying for the top Washington job at JFNA, Mellman was one of his fiercest advocates.
“He backed me, he vouched for me, and he helped open doors that I could not have opened alone,” Daroff said. “Mark believed deeply in communal unity, and he acted on that belief.”
Mellman was one of the first to warn fellow Democrats that the obituarywas a trend, not an anomaly.
“It is a small problem that could get bigger,” he told The Forward in 2013. The numbers then of progressive Democrats holding negative views of Israel were not large, he said, “but you need to address problems when they are small.”
He was proved correct after the 2018 election, which swept into office four Democrats, known as “The Squad,” who made criticizing Israel their brand. A year later he launched DMFI.
“Our mission at Democratic Majority for Israel is to strengthen the pro-Israel tradition of the Democratic Party, fight for Democratic values and work within the progressive movement to advance policies that ensure a strong U.S.-Israel relationship,” Mellman said then.
DMFI occupied a unique place in the Democratic firmament: Other partisan groups tread lightly in countering adversaries within the party. Mellman and his group did not.
“We’ve got two words in our name that are important,” he told JTA in 2024, when DMFI helped lead the successful effort to oust New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman in a primary challenge. “One is ‘Israel.’ The other is ‘Democratic.’ We believe in the Democratic Party, we believe in a Democratic agenda. We find fault with Jamaal Bowman because he’s anti-Israel, but also because he’s not supportive of a Democratic agenda.”
It was a statement typical of Mellman, who was not afraid to smash taboos. He freely aligned himself with opponents to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, crossing a red line for many in the pro-Israel community, who prefer to stay out of Israeli politics. He consuklted with opposition leader Yair Lapid.
“He was one of the architects of the 2013 election success,” when Lapid’s party, Yesh Atid, barely a year old, earned 19 seats and a place in the governing coalition, “and of the campaign that led to us forming the government in 2021,” Lapid said on X.
“Mark embodied a love of the strong, successful, democratic Israel we believe in and worked tirelessly to secure the strategic relationship between Israel and the United States,” Lapid said. “His contribution to the Jewish people is far greater than most people will ever know.”
“A world class pollster and advocate for Israel, but a world class mensch, too,” Steve Rabinowitz, a longtime Washington PR maven told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “His loss is stunning.”
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