Orthodox Jewish group lodges anti-Semitism claim as federal appeals court prepares to hear East Ramapo voting rights case

An Orthodox Jewish advocacy group is accusing NAACP lawyers of using “anti-Semitic stereotypes” to advance their voting rights case against the East Ramapo school district.

Agudath Israel of America says NAACP lawyers tapped into an “odious” stereotype when they suggested race — not issues like taxes, school budgets or education policy — is the prevailing concern of Orthodox Jewish voters in the district.

“This is an anti-Semitic trope that presumes that Jews have utterly no interest other than the most parochial Jewish concerns,” Agudath Israel attorney Nathan Lewin writes in court papers filed last week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

“It implies that Blacks and Latinos may organize to further their unique interests because their goals are presumed to be virtuous, but Orthodox Jews must be punished and condemned if they do the same,” Lewin adds. “This cannot be the objective of a civil-rights law designed to eliminate racial bias in voting.”

NAACP lawyers called the claim “baseless” and tried to block Agudath Israel from filing a friend-of-the-court brief in East Ramapo’s appeal of a lower court ruling declaring the district’s current method for electing its school board is unfair to Black and Latino voters.

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“Plaintiffs prosecuted this case in order to protect voting rights and oppose race discrimination in the political process in the East Ramapo Central School and Plaintiffs prevailed in showing that the minority citizens of East Ramapo do not have an equal opportunity to participate effectively in the political process,” the NAACP lawyers write.

Agudath Israel, which has been defending the rights of Orthodox Jews since 1922, took no position on the merits of the district’s appeal. Instead, it asked the appeals court to recognize the “anti-Semitic tropes” in the NAACP lawyers’ brief.

The exchange underscored the twin tensions of race and anti-Semitism that repeatedly surfaced during a 17-day trial in U.S. District in White Plains earlier this year and are likely to be on display again Wednesday when the Second Circuit hears arguments in East Ramapo’s appeal.

On May 25, U.S. District Court Judge Cathy Seibel ordered the district to abandon its at-large method for electing school board members in favor of a ward or neighborhood-based system that would increase the chances of Blacks and Latinos winning seats on the nine-member board.

“For too long, black and Latino voters in the District have been frustrated in that most fundamental and precious endeavor,” Seibel ruled. “They, like their white neighbors, are entitled to have their voices heard."

The Spring Valley chapter of the NAACP, represented by the New York Civil Liberties Union and the law firm Latham & Watkins, has consistently used “white” — not Orthodox Jewish — to describe board members who have come to dominate seats on the board for more than a decade.

“At the heart of the district court’s findings is the understanding, based on a searching review of extensive evidence, that school governance and politics in the District are inextricably intertwined with race and tightly controlled by a white slating organization that is backed by a white voting bloc,” they write in court papers filed with the appeal.

That slating organization is comprised of influential Jewish religious leaders working behind the scenes to select and endorse candidates who will look out for the interests of the private school community, testimony at the trial revealed.

(Agudath Israel took issue with claims of a secret slating organization, saying it had echoes in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a fabricated document used as a rationale to justify anti-Semitism at the turn of the century.)

White dominance of the board, according to NAACP lawyers, has led to public school budgets skewed to favor some 27,000 private school students bused to private yeshivas with money that comes out of the district’s $247 million budget. State law requires school districts to provide busing for private-school students.

In past years, hundreds of teachers were laid off and honors courses were eliminated at Spring Valley and Ramapo high schools while money for transportation continued to increase.

Graduation rates for the public schools, where the majority of some 11,000 students are Black and Latino, have dipped, down to 65 percent last year, below the statewide average of 83 percent. And state monitors have been brought in to oversee the district.

District lawyers say budget cuts were tied to an economic downturn in 2008 that forced the board to make painful decisions.

And they say the private school community won the right to make decisions on the budget by winning a majority of seats on the board.

"Orthodox Jewish voters prefer private schooling for religious and cultural reasons that have nothing to do with race," district lawyers write. "Preference for private schooling inevitably leads to policy preferences that drive outcomes in school board elections."

But the school board continues to be divided along racial lines.

Days after Seibel’s ruling, the school board’s three Black members — Ashley Leveille, Sabrina Charles-Pierre and Carole Anderson — voted against appealing Seibel’s ruling. Five of the board’s six Orthodox Jewish members voted in favor of continuing the appeal.

The NAACP says the district has already spent $7 million in legal fees defending the case and, in the coming weeks, Seibel is expected to rule on the NAACP’s request for $9 million in legal fees.

NAACP lawyers say that if the judge approves the award they will donate the money to a non-profit dedicated to assisting the district’s public-school students.

In June, district voters rejected a $247 million budget proposal adopted by the board, forcing the district to adopt a contingency budget with $2 million in cuts.

It was the lone school budget rejection in the lower Hudson Valley and one of 10 in the state.