Last week, the New York Times published an article about the purported inadequacy of secular education in many ḥasidic schools and the efforts to convince municipal authorities to do something about it. The article, notes Ira Stoll, is one of several recent pieces on the subject and is deeply flawed:

This report is faulty [in part] because it quotes four different people complaining about the supposedly inadequate education offered by the yeshivas, but not a single person defending the schools from the accusation. . . . Another flaw was the article’s conclusion, an anonymous negative quotation. . . . The Times doesn’t subject [the informant’s words] to any of the skeptical scrutiny that other news sources are often subject to. . . . The anonymous quote appears despite a recent and highly publicized supposed New York Times crackdown on the use of such anonymous quotes in news articles. . . .

It’s certainly possible that some yeshivas could indeed do a better job of educating children in math, English, and science, and that some parents and former students are upset about it. But I know, too, that plenty of other schools that aren’t run or attended by Orthodox Jews are also doing sub-par jobs at teaching those topics, without even trying to teach the children any Talmud along the way. It’s certainly not clear to me that bringing down the government bureaucracy, [the civil-liberties activist] Norman Siegel, or the New York Times on the Jewish schools will do anything to improve the education offered to the children there. . . .

If the Times is going to choose to cover, rather than ignore, the topic of Jewish education, it would be nice to read some success stories, instead of just the complaints and scandals. In the long view, this whole area is such a success story, and quite an incredible one at that.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.