Jews Against Jewish Education

Oklahoma has become the unlikely battleground for one of this generation’s most consequential religious liberty fights. In that struggle, some of the most determined opponents of Jewish children receiving a Jewish education are left-wing Jews.

In 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court barred St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School from participating in the state’s charter program, preventing it from becoming the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. The U.S. Supreme Court took the case and heard oral arguments last April, with the conservative majority appearing strongly inclined toward the school’s sponsors. But the Court deadlocked 4-4 after Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, leaving the Oklahoma ruling in place without precedential effect.

Now the debate is back, in a different form. Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School applied to open a virtual K-12 school in Oklahoma that is “deeply rooted in Jewish knowledge, values and lived tradition,” according to its application. The Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board—which actually supports the school and hired the First Liberty Institute to represent it in court—argued that the state Supreme Court ruling compelled it to reject the application twice.

The school’s board promptly filed suit in federal court, asserting what should by now be obvious: its exclusion violates the First Amendment. As my Manhattan Institute colleague and Notre Dame law professor Nicole Stelle Garnett has argued extensively, charter schools are privately operated institutions—the state does not run them, staff them, or control their curriculum. When a state creates a charter program and invites the full range of private organizations to participate—environmental-themed schools, language-immersion schools, arts academies, schools rooted in Native American culture—but singles out religious organizations for exclusion, it is engaging in targeted discrimination.

The Supreme Court has said as much, repeatedly. In Trinity Lutheran (2017), Espinoza v. Montana (2020), and Carson v. Makin (2022), the Court made clear that once a state elects to fund private activity for a public purpose, it cannot disqualify participants solely on account of their religious character. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing in Espinoza, put it plainly: “A state need not subsidize private education. But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

The logic extends to chartering. As Garnett noted in First Things last year, it “beggars belief” that a Catholic school becomes a government entity the moment it signs a contract with a charter board.

The Court’s deadlock failed to recognize that constitutional reality, but it ensured that the question would return. Ben Gamla is making sure it returns quickly.

Which brings us to Rabbi Daniel Kaiman. Kaiman is the principal rabbi of Congregation B’nai Emunah in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he frequently delivers sermons on the misdeeds of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump administration and myriad other progressive political causes. He is, by his own description in court filings, passionate about Jewish education. Nevertheless, he opposes charter schools like Ben Gamla, ostensibly because of a principled commitment to the separation of church and state.

His record makes that claim dubious in the extreme. In the fall of 2021, Kaiman turned his synagogue into a State Department-designated refugee resettlement agency following the Biden administration’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan. He spoke about the effort with evident pride, framing it as an expression of Jewish values.

The synagogue leased a warehouse for items to distribute to migrants. The program director’s office was inside the house of worship itself. The “state”— the federal government—was not merely adjacent to Congregation B’nai Emunah; it was writing taxpayer-funded checks to it and certifying it as an official instrument of executive branch policy.

Rabbi Kaiman did not worry, in that context, that the “mixing of religion and government creates opportunities for religious coercion,” as he claimed in his filing in the Ben Gamla case. He enthusiastically embraced that mixing when it aligned with a cause he supported: the importation of Muslim immigrants to the United States.

For Kaiman and others who joined his motion—including a “nonbinary” high school senior who leads a left-wing Jewish LGBTQ activist organization and her mother, a social worker for the Cherokee Nation—the separation of church and state is a principle that operates in only one direction: against traditional religious groups seeking access to public programs on equal terms with everyone else.

My Manhattan Institute colleague Tal Fortgang hit on the deeper issue here in an essay for the journal SAPIR. For decades, American Jews have operated on a flawed strategic premise—that strict church-state separationism protects Jewish flourishing. He traces this view to the mid-twentieth century, when Jewish organizations, haunted by European Christian anti-Semitism, concluded that keeping religion out of public life was the surest guarantee of Jewish safety and equality in America.

That premise has not aged well. The secular public square was supposed to produce a shared, objective moral language that would transcend religious division and protect minorities. Instead, it produced postmodernism, corrosive DEI ideology, and the campus anti-Israel movement—all of which have been awful for Jews who understand their Judaism to be something distinct from mere progressive politics. The public schools where American Jews “traditionally thrived,” as Fortgang notes, are increasingly hostile environments, saturated with progressive orthodoxies that treat traditional Jewish identity with suspicion.

Meantime, Jewish day schools—the private religious institutions that produce deeply identified, educated Jewish adults—are crushingly expensive. The “tuition crisis” puts rigorous Jewish education out of reach for families who cannot afford to pay as much as $40,000 per year per child. Jewish charter schools would change that calculus, delivering public funding to schools that integrate Jewish knowledge and values into a full K-12 curriculum.

Opposing Ben Gamla, in other words, is not defending Jewish interests. It is sacrificing them on the altar of a constitutional theory that was always contested, has been substantially eroded by the Supreme Court over the past decade, and has delivered considerably less for Jewish flourishing than its champions promised.

Rabbi Kaiman has dedicated his life to Jewish education—or so he says. But when Jewish families in Oklahoma want to use their own tax dollars to give their children a Jewish education, he goes to federal court to stop them. That’s not a principled stand for the separation of church and state—it is progressive politics consuming Jewish identity from the inside out.

God willing, he will lose in court.