Americans: would you be willing to give the Israelis a piece of the contiguous 48?

I’ll take all the people, but when they’re here, they’re Americans. And yes, it would make the US a better place, eventually.

Judea is the ancestral homeland, so any Israeli state belongs there. Relocating Israelis to somewhere in North America won’t end the violence in the Middle East. And no one could force them; that would be a form of ethnic cleansing.

Michael Chabon wrote a novel as if this had occurred and Isarelsi were relocated to Alaska ; The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.

One of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a 2007 novel by Michael Chabon. The premise is that Jews have made a homeland in Alaska in the 1940s.

Here comes the weird part. It was a real proposal. The Slattery Report “which dealt with Alaskan development through immigration, included a proposal to move European refugees, especially Jews from Nazi Germany and Austria, to four locations in Alaska.”

I don’t think this feasible. I brought it up for background and to plug a wonderful book.

Meanwhile, on Earth, I think the Israel in the 1967 boundaries is a workable solution. If Israel and Palestinians can be persuaded to live alongside each other in two separate states.

Millions of people in Israel/Palestine want to feed their families, educate their kids, have decent jobs and comfortable homes.

Sadly, both the Israeli and Palestinian sides are ruled by terrorists who use strife to keep themselves in power.

Ummm…hell to the no! That would just be inviting antagonistic countries to gang up to go to war with us. And what about all of the other peoples/countries who would say, “B-but what about us? We want a state, too! We have problems, too!”

I know (hope) this isn’t a serious question, but I’d say no.

That would just be inviting antagonistic countries to gang up to go to war with us

Who is “us”?

Israelis are genocidal. I wouldn’t trust Israelis as a nation-state any more than other genocidal nation. I don’t fully understand the compulsion of some Jewish people for their faith to also be a political entity in 2024 except to appease extremists who believe in some divine right to other people’s land. Zionism made sense in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Antisemitism was rampant, Pogroms were real and it all culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust.

In this era though, Israel’s actions are making Jews around the world less safe. Organizations like the Anti-Defimation League are cozying up to actual right wing anti-semites because they both support Israel’s mission to expand beyond the 1967 borders. It’s madness.

@gorillapaws If you give the Israelis a safe location in the US, the Palestinians you are worried about get their Greater Palestine “from the river to the sea.” Are you saying you think Israelis are going to start killing Americans if they come to America? You just think their goal is to kill people? What do you think? They want to rid the earth of anyone who isn’t Jewish?

It’s been tried before, and the Jews turned it down. First, a colony in African somewhere, and second in Birobidzhan see

So from the Jewish point of view, it’s a non-starter.

The idea would never make it through the US Congress even if it were viable. No state is going to want an independent country in its borders. The concept is absurd.

Finally, there are certain right wing antisemitic groups, and left wingers, who would want to destroy the new country before it is even created. Just look at some of the answers above.

This idea is nuts.

Additional note: For my two cents, let Israel have Florida. They can’t do any worse than DeSantis.

@elbanditoroso, They can have half of FL, but the thing is Florida is already very populated, there isn’t much room. Maybe up in the panhandle.

@JLeslie I think there are plenty of Israelis who might harm muslims in the US if given the chance. But why the need for a Jewish ethnostate that’s inherently exclusionary in 2024? During the Nakba, it wasn’t enough to have the land, they needed to depopulate the existing people, and then they wiped out all traces of the previous culture. Buildings were destroyed, olive trees burned. It was an ERASURE of the previous people. THAT was part of the compulsion, not just for there to be a home for Jews, but a place to exclude all others. It’s a sick fantasy.

Such a society will inevitably produce unhealthy and dangerous ideologies (just looks at historical and current examples with Christianity and Islam).

I’m ok with a 2-state solution, but at this point I think Israel needs some pretty serious consequences. If I were drawing the lines, I’d probably draw the lines for Israel around where the land was owned in 1947. I’d add a strip that connected it with 50% of Jerusalem build a tall wall around the entire country, and then create a 10-mile neutral zone boundary patrolled by the UN, pack it full of Iron Dome systems, and then another wall for the Palestinian state.

@gorillapaws You are talking about Israel in the Middle East and I am asking Americans about New Israel in the US. I don’t know the history well, but the Nakba was when the Jewish and Palestinian people were given Israel and the Palestinian territory by a UN decision, and I am not going to rehash the entire history nor defend the violence on either side.

The Jews had just been through losing 6 million of their 9 million in Europe, and not many years before that hundreds of thousands. During the holocaust there were sometimes days in a row where 30,000 Jews a day were killed. My sister and I were just researching our maternal family and when she tried to look up my great grandparents what immediately popped up in her search was a roster of names killed in the holocaust with my great grandparents surname. It is jarring to come across history like that over and over and over again.

The Yemeni Jewish children in the early 1900’s were sometimes forcibly converted to Islam, and some were slaughtered by Arabs in the early years of Israel, I don’t know the full chronology. Both Palestinians and Israelis were violent and to some extent intolerant. The idea that the most Palestinians were ok with Jews coming to Palestine and all live together in peace sounds naive and incorrect to me.

2 MILLION Palestinians live in Israel. There are only 9 million people in the country. Plenty of the 2 million Palestinians rather live under Israeli sovereignty.

If you don’t agree with the creation of a Jewish homeland fine. You can have that opinion, I actually don’t have an argument with that. Maybe there should be no Italy, no Ireland, no homeland for any group.

The fact is the UN created Israel, it exists. I am offering to you the Jews leaving Israel and the Arabs can have the land and the Jews go somewhere else. I am not saying it should happen, I’m only asking if Americans are willing.

@Call_Me_Jay I mean the U.S. of course. That’s where the OP specified. Who did you think I meant?

@zenvelo and @Call_Me_Jay Alaska? I was hoping for a warmer state.

@JLeslie My point is the idea of an exclusively Jewish nation-state is a twisted fantasy, just as an exclusively Muslim or exclusively Christian one is twisted.

The UN created Israel. It exists, the biggest problem was that Zionists weren’t happy with a nation state with the land they owned. They rejected the initial proposal (which was already very generous). The UN totally fucked up the geography of the boundaries. They created a nation of Israel where Jews were going to the the minority. Of course the locals were pissed.

My point of bringing up the Nakba was that the philosophy behind Zionism that seems so problematic is that it’s preoccupied with the exclusion of others. For example if we gave Utah to Israel, there would be an element within that would not be satisfied until they burned down the Mormon temples and kicked them all out. It’s not “we want a safe place for Jews’ but “We want a place for Jews, and as few non-Jews as we can get away with—preferably zero.” There’s this notion of Jewish supremacy that they are “God’s chosen people” and when you start having chosen people that, by definition means that everyone else is not chosen by God. Ideologies where some humans are more human than other humans leads to twisted ideologies—the kind of ideologies that can create a society that’s ok with genocide of “inferior, evil people—Amalek, if you will.”

Beyond the obligatory jokes of “they can have texas/California nyuk nyuk nyuk”, any such scheme would involve the forcible deportation of the existing population (ethnic cleansing, if you will). If, say, you gave them Texas, 30 million people would immediately become refugees, being forced out into the rest of the colonies.
30 million people that are immediately unemployed and homeless, meaning the unemployment rate immediately quadruples, and the homelessness rate increases by a factor of 60. Nearly every Texan business collapses. The result would be an economic catastrophy of unmatched proportions. Not only would you piss off the 30 million Texans being driven out of their homes (assuming they would not immediately resort en Masse to lethal force to prevent being evicted) , but also the rest of the country now having to take care of these freeloaders. And guess who is going to get blamed for that? You think antisemitism is bad now, it would be really bad then. This was already done before when Israel was established, and the result was over half a century of uninterrupted violence, with no end in sight even now. You really want to repeat that on an even bigger scale?

@elbanditoroso Andorra, San Marino, Monaco, and Vatican City seem to do all right.

@ragingloli What 30 million? There are parts of Texas that are rural. Israel probably fits in Texas 10 times. We are just giving them a piece of Texas in this exercise. I do agree there will be people very upset about it though. The Israelis bring businesses with them. They will be employing people. They have wealth, it isn’t like when Israel was established and the lands were baron with very little infrastructure and many Jews came with barely the clothes on their backs.

@gorillapaws That really is unbelievable what you think. You basically equate us to the Nazis. The Israelis have preserved the religious sites of other religions. The Jews have come out for other minorities to fight for them over and over again, because we see ourselves in them. You don’t. You don’t see us as a minority that is persecuted throughout history, you see us as the bullies. You have things twisted.

You are idealizing the Arabs, I don’t know why. Making them sound like pacifists. You excuse the violence of the Palestinians, because you see them as the underdog. What about excusing the violence of the Jews when they were the underdog? The Jews still are extremely vulnerable. Don’t you see it? Six million Jews in a region of 300 million Arabs.

You are cherry picking to fit your antisemitic story, but there are hundreds of stories of Jewish people wanting and treating all human beings as equals. Not to mention almost half of us aren’t religious, so this God’s chosen BS is not in any part of our minds at all.

I included the possibility of Arab Israelis in my OP, which I personally am fine with.

Why bother asking them, let’s just do it. If we give this New Israel enough bombs and bullets to defend itself it will be fine.

@flutherother Who is them? The Israelis or the Americans?

@JLeslie Can you describe what the purpose of this question is?

@JLeslie Are you working on the premise that the Israelis would happily stay within the allotted borders? Why? And do you think that they would be willing to be entirely landlocked without benefit of shipping? Your designation of having a warmer climate (I noticed you changed your Q to “the contiguous 48” to accommodate that criterion) would eliminate most of the Great Lakes areas (where shipping is feasible) because the winters are harsh.

And I echo @janbb’s question, what is the purpose of this question? You have worded many things about Israel recently in such a way that indicates than you feel that anyone who doesn’t wholeheartedly support any Israeli and/or Jewish agenda is antisemitic.

@janbb I was talking about the Israel situation with some people and a person said “it’s too bad the Jewish people weren’t just given some land in the US.”

I’ve said in the past a similar type of statement, mostly I’m not serious, but there is a part of me that just wishes the Israelis could simply live in peace and safe. I know other pieces of land were offered during the UN discussions of where to create a Jewish states d rejected.

It got me thinking would Americans support giving up some land to let the Jewish people settle here. If there was a vote. It would have to be put to a vote.

@canidmajor The Great Lakes could be ok. You noticed I changed to the lower 48? I was always thinking the continental US for the Q, I edited solely to clarify. I like a warmer climate for a small country, I think it’s easier, but that’s just trying to have ideal circumstances. I have not accused anyone of being antisemitic as far as I can remember on any Q about Israeli until this thread. Caravanfan has, some other jellies, but I don’t remember doing it, because I don’t remember thinking it.

A blanket statement that the Israelis will always be war monger killers sounds antisemitic to me. You and your jelly friends throw around the word racist a lot, and I don’t, same with antisemitism, I rarely accuse anyone of it.

@canidmajor AND, I don’t wholeheartedly agree with the current Israeli agenda put in place by Netanyahu, so your accusation is flat out bullshit.

Are the Israelis themselves are on board with this? I wouldn’t expect so. Assuming they magically were . . .

Is it at all feasible? No, I really don’t think it is something that can be done with our technology, resources, situation, etc. Assuming it were . . .

Personally, in choosing where, my main consideration would be to minimize damage to the natural environment, so I’d choose a settled area with the people I dislike the most, the most secessionists, and maybe the lowest property values (though that’s part of the “it’s not feasible objection we’re already ignoring at this point). I’m thinking Texas or Florida or somewhere else in the Gulf Coast states.

I’m fine “with them coming.”

I don’t think many, if any, of the people inclined to attack Israel where it is, would come to North America to attack them here.

The most violent opposition I’d expect, would be from the people displaced or suddenly part of a different state, and from anti-Semites and so on.

@Zaku Yes, in the scenario the Israelis are on board, although I would have to concede the hardcore zionists would either stay behind or only come come kicking and screaming. The Q was only asking Americans how they felt about it, which you answered, thanks for your answer.

I would be opposed to it. I would be opposed to whittling away at the United States to provide a place for people who live in a war torn area. Then it would become “what about the people who live in an area where they’re starving?” “What about the people who live in an area where there’s gang activity?” etc.

What about the people who live in those areas? They’d just lose their homes, their businesses? Or they’d be compensated by who? The US (what remains of it) doesn’t or wouldn’t have the amount of money to pay off the property owners and business owners for their lost land and businesses. Where would that money come from? What about the resources that those states have (Texas oil, Florida farms, etc.)? How would that work?

I don’t see it as practical.

@jca2 Makes sense. “Everyone” wants to come here already. Lol.

This is different than letting people into the country, since it would be a separate country, but giving up land seems like it could become a slippery slope of lots of groups wanting to set up a new country using US lands.

@JLeslie “You basically equate us to the Nazis.”

“Us?” Are you a right wing Israeli? I’m talking about Israelis and not all Jews for one thing. Furthermore, I’m referring to a subset of the people within Israel (though they do have political control of the country). There are millions of Jews around the world and in Israel who disagree with the genocide that’s happening. I don’t think Jewish people are inherently bullies.

I do think creating an explicit ethnostate will result in dangerous ideologies developing regardless of the ethnicity or faith (whether that’s in the Middle East or in the lower 48). This is exactly what we’re seeing in Israel right now. The national Security and Finance Ministers just attended an ethic cleansing conference in direct contravention of the ICJ’s ruling requiring the prevention and punishment of genocidal rhetoric.

@JLeslie “You don’t see us as a minority that is persecuted throughout history”

I literally wrote this earlier: “Zionism made sense in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Antisemitism was rampant, Pogroms were real and it all culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust.”

I’m not sure how I could have been more clear about acknowledging the persecution of the Jewish people in history.

@JLeslie “You are idealizing the Arabs, I don’t know why. Making them sound like pacifists. You excuse the violence of the Palestinians, because you see them as the underdog.”

Where did I say that? I’ve always insisted that 10/7 was an act of terrorism and that war crimes were committed by Hamas and that they should be held accountable. I’ve also said that Israel has been maintaining an illegal occupation for decades and that occupied peoples in history have always resisted violently to occupation, especially when it’s been as brutal as the Israeli one has been.

Imagine that when the US invaded Afghanistan we bulldozed local villages, poisoned their wells, built settlements and then advertised for Christians anywhere in the world could move in. Wouldn’t that be completely psychotic? Would you be surprised if the local people responded violently against the civilian population there? Of course the violence wouldn’t be JUSTIFIED, but it’s unsurprising, and I don’t think the US (as a nation) would be right to play the victim card—the individual victims and their families certainly would.

Nothing in this is an EXCUSE for violence. It’s wrong. Full stop.

@JLeslie “The Jews still are extremely vulnerable. Don’t you see it?”

Not at all. Israel has one of the best militaries on the planet, and the unconditional support of the US. The only existential threat they face would be a nuke, and the shit they’re pulling right now makes that MORE LIKELY, NOT LESS.

@JLeslie “You are cherry picking to fit your antisemitic story, but there are hundreds of stories of Jewish people wanting and treating all human beings as equals. Not to mention almost half of us aren’t religious, so this God’s chosen BS is not in any part of our minds at all.”

What’s my antisemitic story? That some radical Israelis are Jewish supremacists? Have you ever heard that Jews were God’s chosen people? I never said all Jewish people believe this. I was careful to qualify it as ”...there would be an element within…”

@JLeslie “A blanket statement that the Israelis will always be war monger killers sounds antisemitic to me.”

I don’t think Jewish people are inherently violent or “war mongers.” I think eventually all ethnostates universally create that mentality, regardless of the faith or ethnicity.

I don’t see how that can be denied at this point. Israel is currently engaging in what is unquestionably Genocide. Palestinians are eating grass, kids are having their limbs amputated without anesthesia, nearly the entire population is homeless, grandmas with white flags are being assassinated with sniper rounds, graveyards are being bulldozed to erase the people’s connection to the land. IDF soldiers are laughing about the massacres, and yet the Majority of Israelis support withholding aid to Gaza until captives returned, even after being found by the ICJ that “At least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the (Genocide) Convention,”

That doesn’t happen in a healthy society. Healthy sodieties don’t commit genocide. That can only happen when you’ve dehumanized the other people. My contention is that this is NOT a unique characteristic of Jews, but of the citizens of ethnostates.

And this returns me to my question back to you: “Why is a Jewish ethnostate necessary in 2024?” What’s wrong with large, robust Jewish communities in cities and towns across the world? Why does there have to be Jewish fighter planes and Jewish submarines? I was raised to be a Protestant and I’ve never once wished that there was an exclusively Protestant state with a military and Protestant police force. I would have felt that way even if there were only a few million Protestants in the world and that many had been massacred in a genocide.

@gorillapaws Do you see the Arab countries of the Middle East and Iran as Ethnostates?

To answer your Q, the Jewish people want a state because we still have to hire police at our synagogues and extra police for our Chanukah events, and see parades of WS chanting “the Jews will not replace us” and now we even have genetic tests scientifically labeling us Jewish even if the census doesn’t, even if we deny our Jewishness. We will always be a very small minority except if we have our own country, because we are so tiny in numbers.

Basically, we need a state because of antisemitism. We have every reason to fear it can and will happen again. The Mizrahi Jews have lived in the Middle East for thousands of years, so their choice is live in an Arab country or a Jewish one. The idea that the Arab countries at this point in history are welcoming to Jews sounds naive to me. They are only becoming more and more Muslim in the last 50 years from what I can tell. Moreover, most Jews are not religious and are socially liberal, and the Arab countries are not.

I am American not Israeli, and as an American I completely buy into and prefer a secular government and a country without a designated religion or ethnicity, but I am just explaining some of the reasons why the Jewish people want an Israel.

@JLeslie “Do you see the Arab countries of the Middle East and Iran as Ethnostates?”

Many of them, yes. I think they’d be better places as secular democracies. There’s been centuries of sectarian violence within those countries. It happened in Europe as well, until those countries mostly become secular. We have plenty of examples in Asia and Africa too.

@JLeslie “Basically, we need a state because of antisemitism”

Do you think the existence of Israel has increased or decreased antisemitism in the world? Would American Jews be safer if the ADL was not partnering with antisemitic right wing Christian Zionists and instead focused its attention on combating right wing white supremacist groups instead of defending a genocidal state’s actions? The ones with the guns and the psychotic ideas?

@JLeslie ” The idea that the Arab countries at this point in history are welcoming to Jews sounds naive to me. They are only becoming more and more Muslim in the last 50 years from what I can tell.”

Do you think Israel has made Arab countries (1) more hostile to Jews, (2) less hostile to Jews or (3) had no effect?

@gorillapaws I think the world has always been hostile to Jews off and on throughout time. I don’t think Israel increases the antisemitism, I think Jews existing and being successful and a small number makes is constant scapegoats. People hate us even when we are poor farmers and peddlers with barely a nickle. There are people who hate us no matter what. The hard core antisemites are all over the world and many of them are not pro-Arab either they are White Supremacists. We are on the radar of the haters always, it is passed down generation to generation.

The more I think about it, pretty much all of Eurasia is ethnostates. It’s the new world that created a new dynamic, and the US in particular having a secular government at it’s founding while most of the other countries in the Americas had a heavy Catholic influence.

I actually would, if it avoids WWIII which we seem to be approaching rapidly. Give them an Israel-sized slice of California along the southern border. It’s not that much but they don’t get an inch more.

Good point, @Blackwater_Park I just googled the size of Israel compared to Texas, and Israel is 3.24% of the size of Texas, so I don’t know why someone would think that, even if this idea were feasible, they would get a piece of land the size of Texas when they, right now, are so much smaller.

@JLeslie “I don’t think Israel increases the antisemitism…”

I would argue that if Theodor Herzl had never been born, there would be more Jews alive in the world today and that relations between Jews and Arabs would be much as it was in the early 1800’s, with mutual respect and coexistence. I’m not saying things would have been perfect, but history would have been radically different. Saddam Hussein would not have fired SCUDs into Israel, that may or may not have drawn the US into Desert storm, which may or may not have drawn US forces into Saudi Arabia. To the degree that this might have happened, is unclear without the close ties to Israel whether Osama bin Laden would have objected to US presence there, and likely 9/11 would never have happened. Without 9/11, we would never have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Without those distractions, it’s possible that Putin wouldn’t have felt emboldened to attack Georgia and then Ukraine.

It’s also possible that it could have escalated to WW3 and the planet would be a nuclear hellscape. Playing “what if” with history is always a silly exercise, but I’m pretty confident that there would have been much less antisemitism.

@jca2 I never said the size of Texas. In the OP I said Israel is about the size of New Jersey and to take some land from part of a state or states. It could be a little bit of California and a little bit of Oregon so neither state loses much of anything. I must not have worded it well, because @ragingloli is talking about displacing 30 million people. What 30 million? I never said an entire large state. I named some of the larger states, because those states would barely feel the land loss. It’s still not nothing though. There would be some impact.

I’m not going to rehash the entire last 100 years of middle eastern history, nor am I going make excuses for either arab stats or Israel. It would be an impossible task and fall on deaf ears anyway.

That said, I need to react to @gorillapaws and his rather obtuse denial of Israel’s historical (like: 2400 year) ties to Israel, and his unsupported (and actually rather bogus) assertion that Hitler was somehow motivated by the Zionist movement to kill Jews.

Point 1: Hitler was only interested in Israel (and the Zionist movement) because was approached by Husseini and various other Arab leaders, who thought that Germany could help the Arab cause. They weren’t terribly successful in convincing Hitler.

Hitler was motivated by his view of German (and particularly Protestant) identity and his view of the Reich and destiny of Aryan civilization. Remember, his thing was purity of the race, and the Arabs, like Jews, are semitic and decidedly NOT protestant christians. So to claim that Hitler was in some way motivated by anti-Zionism is a tenuous claim, at best.

Point 2: @gorillapaws seems to assert that Zionism – which was a nationalist movement – is in some way distinct from other nationalist movements. He doesn’t say that in as many words, but it’s a subtext in his answers 6–7 above this.

So the question is: Why does he dismiss a Israel (Jewish) based nationalist movement as illegitimate? Are all nationalist movements illegitimate (Darfur in Sudan, Chechnya in Russia, South African blacks, Basques in Spain, Houthis in Yemen, Kurds in Turkey, Tibetans in China, and so on)?

Or, as seems more likely, are only Israel-based nationalist movements (homeland for the Jews) not acceptable?

What I’m trying to understand is the rationale for what @gorillapaws wrote, and how consistent he is.

No. We don’t do it for other nations in wars so why would we do this solely for one nation? Did we do it for Ukrainians? If we start this will we do it for every nation we like and only the ones we like?

@elbanditoroso I never said the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened! It still would have.

I’m okay with it and I think many in red states would be.

Sure. Let’s give them California.

This may not be the place to post this but for anyone looking for information on the background history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is an excellent discussion of the issues before 1948 in the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine. It is a conversation among Palestinian, Israeli and American historians with opinions on what has happened from many perspectives. It is far too long to post, but you should be able to get your hands on Sunday’s NY Times at a library.

It’s already happened in NJ and NY.

@Blackberry Lol. You forgot Florida. That’s not quite the same as the question though. I know when there are 5 Jews in a room of 100 people feel like there are 50. It’s the minority thing.

@JLeslie
I was more referencing how in NJ at least, they already have entire neighborhoods that have grown the past 20 years, with their own ambulances and police.

@Blackberry Gotcha. Good point.

Let’s be clear what we’re referring to when we talk about the issues. All Israelis are not Jews and all American Jews are not Zionists. And even within American Judaism there are many different strains and factions. I assume @Blackberry is talking about some of the Hassidic sects that have formed very separate religious communities in NYC and other parts of New York and New Jersey and not about Israelis.

For example, Kiryas Joel, NY. All Hasids, the public schools teach Hasidic teachings (which I believe is technically not keeping with the separation of church and state).

Some of the ultra-orthodox are actually anti-Israel.

All sorts of variations.

I know there are ultra-orthodox neighborhoods in Brooklyn that literally have their own ambulances and police as @Blackberry mentioned.

I’m not a Zionist in the most fundamental sense of the word. The Zionists probably wouldn’t leave Israel even if the majority of Israelis moved to a new location and a New Israel. I do however support Israel where it is, because I think it was created legitimately by the UN decision, I’m just tired of the violence and want the Jewish people to have peace and have their own country if they want it.

@jca2 I doubt they are public state supported schools in Kiryas Joel; I think they would all be private yeshivas perhaps paid for by the town. Do you have a citation for that?

@janbb Slightly different, the Chassidic schools are getting some public funding and not really up to par. Here’s an article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/nyregion/hasidic-yeshivas-schools-new-york.html

I remembered reading about it previously, so it was easy for me to find.

Sure do, @janbb. The article I have says “how public money goes to support a Hasidic village’s private schools.” There are probably more because the NY Times has covered Kiryas Joel extensively.

If you can’t read the article because of paywall, I’ll cut and paste, although you won’t be able to see the photos.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/20/nyregion/kiryas-joel-hasidic-school-district.html?searchResultPosition=1

More specifics about the Kiryas Joel School District, specifically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiryas_Joel_School_District

@jca2 Thanks for posting. In Lakewood, near me, Hassidim are on the school board and use public school busses to take their students to private schools separately by gender but their is also a public school system for the other students. There certainly has been a lot of graft in some Hassidic communities and I know there is a lot of contention about the poor secular education they are given. There were many articles about the NYC yeshivot in recent years.

But we have strayed far off the topic.

@janbb Yes, I think it evolved because @Blackberry mentioned it already happening (Jewish areas) in entire towns in NY and NJ.

^^ I understand.