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    ‘Patriotic and Honest Republicans’ Telling the Truth

    More from our inbox:But Your 2020 Election Was Not Fraudulent?The Supreme Court’s Ruling on Religion and SchoolsDon’t Erase Tolstoy’s NameBook Browsing, in a BookstoreThe Jan. 6 committee heard from a group of witnesses who were pressured by former President Donald J. Trump to overturn the election.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Pressured States to Comply on Fake Electors” (front page, June 22):There is a silver lining that I did not expect in the Jan. 6 hearings. I am a lifelong Democrat. The Republicans in the news over the last several years have been frightening in their cruel and vicious remarks and extreme agendas on race relations, gay marriage and abortion and, most important, in their devotion to the ex-president.But the hearings have brought some very reasonable, patriotic and honest Republicans to the front. There are people who voted for Donald Trump and supported his platform, but when faced with his drive to overturn a fair election, they are coming through. They are telling the truth about the lies and corruption and putting their careers and maybe their lives on the line.It gives me hope that there is a way out of the nightmare of the last administration’s corruption and a way forward with sane debate and compromise.Joan BancroftDenverTo the Editor:Of all the crimes Donald Trump may have committed, or inspired his deluded faithful to commit, the malicious attack on two election workers, Wandrea Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, is the single most shameless act of deceit and cowardice of his entire pathetic career.Two humble women worked selflessly during a pandemic to uphold our democracy. Donald Trump misused the power of the presidency to maliciously destroy the good reputation of these women in his quest to undermine our democracy.If no other details or testimony from these hearings are remembered, future generations will ask how someone who had no sense of decency could actually be president of the United States.Asher FriedCroton-on-Hudson, N.Y.To the Editor:As the victims of threats and verbal assaults, Wandrea Moss, her mother and other members of the family should be as eligible to receive 24/7 security and peace of mind as Brett Kavanaugh and other Supreme Court justices and their families. We owe them their lives back.Lois BerkowitzOro Valley, Ariz.But Your 2020 Election Was Not Fraudulent?A resolution adopting the false claim that former President Donald J. Trump was the victim of a stolen election in 2020 was passed by Republican state-party delegates in Texas.Leah Millis/ReutersTo the Editor:Re “Texas G.O.P. Adopts Stolen Election Claims” (news article, June 20):Many Republicans who reject President Biden’s 2020 victory are occupying seats in statehouses or in Congress to which they themselves were elected in that very same “illegitimate” election. If that election was so fraudulent, how could these same Republican election deniers (so conveniently) accept their own 2020 elections?David E. CohenNorth Haledon, N.J.The Supreme Court’s Ruling on Religion and Schools Pete Marovich for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Justices Deliver Win to Schools Based in Faith” (front page, June 22):Whatever you may think of government offers to pay the tuition for the private education of children, the paying of that tuition to religious institutions is clearly a violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition against the government establishment of religion, despite the current Supreme Court’s majority holding to the contrary.There is no more clear government support of religious institutions than sending public money their way, exactly the kind of government action that the First Amendment prohibits. It is not the court’s duty to support religion, only to guarantee that government stays out of the business of religion and does not prohibit its free exercise.What we have instead is a court bent on strengthening religion in this country. Never mind that the Constitution provides otherwise.Bruce NeumanWater Mill, N.Y.To the Editor:Once a state provides funding for private schools, it cannot then refuse to fund religious schools. People who believe that this exclusion is justified based on the “separation of church and state” are getting it wrong.Andrea EconomosHartsdale, N.Y.Don’t Erase Tolstoy’s NameTo the Editor:Re “So Long, Tolstoy Station? Cities ‘Decolonize’ by Erasing Russian Names” (news article, June 8):Having visited Ukraine, including Kyiv, in more peaceful times, I can certainly understand that eliminating the names of prominent Russians from public places in an effort to “decolonize” this wonderful nation is very much in order. However, the name of the author Leo Tolstoy, a true person of peace and good will, should remain.Tolstoy was one of the greatest, most positive influences on both Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Among many other actions, Gandhi named a farm he established, as a refuge for passive resisters and their indigent families, the Tolstoy Farm.James K. RileyPearl River, N.Y.Book Browsing, in a BookstoreApps have struggled to reproduce the kind of real-world serendipity that puts a book in a reader’s hand.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesTo the Editor:The headline on your June 9 article about browsing in bookstores read, “Can Any App Capture This Experience?” The answer is obvious — of course not.Book browsing is a physical experience, involving visual, tactile and sometimes even olfactory sensations. In a physical bookshop, people are moved to pull a book off a shelf and take a closer look for many reasons, some obvious, some subtle and some downright mysterious.Every book browser has experienced those magical instances in which they have found books they weren’t looking for or even knew existed, but which to some degree affected their life.The possibility of making another such serendipitous discovery is why people love to browse in bookstores. It can’t be engineered or made subject to an algorithm.M.C. LangChevy Chase, Md. More

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    How Andrew Yang Won Over Orthodox Brooklyn

    A slew of influential ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders endorsed Mr. Yang, motivated by one overriding issue: “Yeshivas, yeshivas, yeshivas.”The campaign material began appearing in Yiddish earlier than usual this year, declaring that the best defense that ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York City could have against a hostile world would be to elect Andrew Yang as mayor.One ad, invoking a passage from the Babylonian Talmud, told voters that Mr. Yang was the sort of honest man who is loved by God, not someone “who says one thing with his mouth but means another in his heart.”Another ad cast the choice in existential terms, urging people to vote for Mr. Yang because he alone supports “our right to educate our children according to our fundamentals” and “values our way of life.”With the June 22 Democratic mayoral primary roughly a month away, Mr. Yang, a former 2020 presidential candidate, has been able to push to the top of the contest through a potent mix of celebrity, optimism and tireless outreach, both in person and on social media.As he did in his presidential candidacy, which had support from a broad spectrum of disaffected voters, Mr. Yang has been able to widen his appeal in New York, attracting a significant following from influential ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders.There are at least 500,000 Orthodox Jews in the New York area, by some estimates, and the endorsement of ultra-Orthodox leaders is highly coveted because the community is seen as a formidable voting bloc, especially in a race that has so far not energized the electorate.The endorsement of ultra-Orthodox leaders is highly coveted because the community is seen as a formidable voting bloc.James Estrin/The New York TimesThe key for Mr. Yang was his early declaration that he intended to take a laissez-faire attitude toward Hasidic yeshivas, the private schools to which almost all ultra-Orthodox families send their sons, as well as toward the schools where they educate their daughters.The yeshiva system has faced intense criticism over the failure of some schools to provide a basic secular education. Some also operated secretly during the pandemic, in violation of public health rules.“We shouldn’t interfere with their religious and parental choice as long as the outcomes are good,” he told The Forward, a Jewish publication, in February.That approach has helped him undercut rivals, particularly the Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams, a former state senator who has a long working relationship with the Orthodox community.In the 2013 Democratic mayoral primary, Hasidic groups in Borough Park, Brooklyn, backed Bill de Blasio, who had once represented the area in the City Council.But in the last two presidential elections, neighborhoods with large ultra-Orthodox populations were islands of deep red in overwhelmingly blue Brooklyn. Some precincts in Borough Park voted for President Donald J. Trump by more than 90 percent in 2020.It remains to be seen how much influence Hasidic leaders will have in the Democratic primary; most ultra-Orthodox Jews support the Republican Party, according to a study published last week by the Pew Research Center, and the 2020 presidential election results in Orthodox Brooklyn seem to bear that out.Nonetheless, for Hasidic leaders, the decision to endorse a newcomer like Mr. Yang over a known quantity like Mr. Adams highlights their anxiety after a yearslong series of calamitous events: a devastating pandemic, a rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes and a long history of clashes with secular authorities over issues like social distancing, measles outbreaks and high school curriculums.Mr. Yang comes to city politics without the baggage of those past clashes. Capitalizing on that blank slate, he has won over allies with well-honed rhetoric on religious freedom, a sophisticated messaging campaign in Yiddish media and a willingness to adopt the hands-off approach favored by Hasidic leaders.“The most burning issue is yeshivas,” said Alexander Rapaport, a community leader who has organized voter registration drives in Borough Park in the run-up to the primary. “It’s not like something else is issue No. 2. Everything else is issue No. 25. The first 24 issues are yeshivas, yeshivas, yeshivas.”Alexander Rapaport, a community leader in Borough Park, said that for many voters, where candidates stood on yeshivas was a defining issue. Kevin Hagen for The New York TimesIn past elections, debates over yeshivas often centered on the allocation of public funds to the religious schools, which receive millions of federal, state and city dollars through education and child care programs.But the political conversation changed after a 2015 legal complaint filed by yeshiva graduates who said they had been given little secular education. That complaint led the city to open an inquiry that found that 26 of 28 yeshivas that were investigated were not meeting a legal requirement to provide education “substantially equivalent” to that provided in city public schools.No action was taken, but it prompted a citywide dialogue that cut to the heart of the yeshiva’s role in Hasidic society and profoundly insulted many in the community. There are more than 50,000 students in Hasidic schools in New York City, according to a 2017 report by Young Advocates for Fair Education, an ultra-Orthodox advocacy group.“The perceived threat to the autonomy of the yeshivas is greater now than it ever has been in part because there are critics from within the community publicizing what they see as the problems with the yeshiva system in a way that hasn’t happened before,” said Nathaniel Deutsch, a professor at University of California, Santa Cruz.Mr. Yang’s approach to the community was on full display at a recent event in Midwood, Brooklyn, where he received the endorsement of two local politicians, Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein and Councilman Kalman Yeger.Standing before a crowd of reporters, Mr. Yang vowed to fight anti-Semitism and told Hasidic voters they were part of the “beautiful mosaic” of New York City.But when asked by The New York Times about yeshivas, Mr. Yang stood quietly behind Mr. Eichenstein and Mr. Yeger as they heatedly defended the schools, attacked “so-called advocates” for reform and decried the city investigation.Mr. Yang appeared bewildered by their anger — at one point, Mr. Yeger accused members of the City Council of being “OK with our kids getting blown up” — and sought to calm tensions with a joke about the “high-value add” they made to his campaign.He then took the microphone and criticized the city for allowing investigators “to check for infractions of various kinds” in yeshivas. He said he would take a different approach as mayor..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-1jiwgt1{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:1.25rem;}.css-8o2i8v{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-8o2i8v p{margin-bottom:0;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“To the extent that there are issues in individual schools, I think we have to come together with the community and say ‘Look, like, is there something we can do to help?’” Mr. Yang said.“When there are issues, the approach should be one of correction and collegiality rather than contentiousness and adversarialness,” he added. “Which, unfortunately I think, has been the dynamic that the city has engendered for far too long.”Mr. Yang has expressed a willingness to adopt a hands-off approach to yeshivas, winning over many Hasidic leaders.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesMr. Adams has also praised yeshivas, saying he was “genuinely impressed” by one of the schools investigated by the city when he visited in March. But he has stressed that they must meet city standards and seemed to favor intervention when they do not.“We have to ensure that these yeshivas — those that are failing, which is not all the yeshivas, but those that are failing — we have to ensure that they meet the minimum standards,” he recently told The New York Times.The endorsements for Mr. Yang have been notable for how early they arrived. Hasidic leaders tend to wait until polls have established a favorite so they can try to back the winner, said David M. Pollock, the public policy director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.But the fact that ultra-Orthodox voters have voted as a bloc in the past does not mean they are a monolith, Mr. Pollock said.That has been especially clear at the local level. Even in 2013, when Mr. de Blasio won the Borough Park neighborhood, he did so only by a slight margin over William C. Thompson Jr., who beat him in other neighborhoods with large ultra-Orthodox populations.“The dynamic is not that there is one bloc vote, but that there are multiple political players who can deliver votes wholesale,” Mr. Pollock said. That can be especially potent in an election with ranked-choice voting, which this mayoral race is using for the first time.“If you’re not going to endorse someone as your No. 1, you can say, ‘You’ll be our No. 2,’” Mr. Pollock said. “That’s not bad if you can sway 6,000 votes.”Mr. Yang has sought to appeal to Hasidic voters on issues besides education, including support for the right of parents to choose a circumcision ritual, metzitzah b’peh, which is used by a minority of Hasidic mohels and has transmitted herpes to babies, and support for Israel in its conflict with Hamas.But yeshivas have become the dominant issue in part because they play a larger role in Hasidic society than schools do in the secular world, Professor Deutsch said.They employ many Hasidic people, act as a social network that connects people with jobs and marriage prospects and are a primary medium through which the community’s history, values and Yiddish language are passed on to new generations, he said.They are also an important lever of power for community leaders, who can threaten to bar a child from yeshiva to enforce standards of behavior on their parents, such as a prohibition on renting property to gentrifiers, Dr. Deutch said.Indeed, Yoel Greenfeld, a young man leaving prayers at a 24-hour synagogue in Borough Park, said he would vote for Mr. Yang in the general election because Hasidic leaders endorsed him. But he cannot vote in the primary because he is a registered Republican.“I’ll vote for Yang because the community here wants Yang, and when people say that they mean the leaders want Yang,” Mr. Greenfeld said. “My opinion is nothing compared to theirs. But personally, I want a Republican.” More