Welcome, everybody. Good afternoon. Our speaker today is Dr. Lawton, Perry Hasan,
who is the head of the Centre for Jewish and Democratic Education and the Education and Management Program at the University of Haifa in Israel.
Her research interests include the intersection of law, religion and culture in education and children's rights in education.
Maybe I should mention that tomorrow she will be lecturing on children's rights in education.
Many of her studies have focussed on already education in Israel and other countries.
She's a graduate of NYU School of Law and the University of Haifa's Faculty of Law.
She was also a visiting scholar at various institutions in Europe, America and Australia.
And the title of her talk today is Ethnic Segregation in the Family, Education in Israel Policies and Practices.
Thank you for coming. Thank you for inviting me. The talk today will be based on two studies published lately.
One is a comparative studies and is a comparative study.
I'll focus on the section that deals with Israel.
And the other is a study about ready parents who complained about discrimination in their admission policies in the school.
We heard that you heard another talk last week about the division between Sephardic and this can ask strains or groups in the community.
So I'll try to be short in the introduction and then I'll see in your face if you are already familiar with that.
Yeah. Yeah. With the things that I'll say.
Well, the community in Israel is now around 12% of the population and 20% of primary school pupils.
Strong political influence. And during the last two decades, the parties are like a balance pivot in Israeli politics.
They recruit politicians to promote their own interests.
Usually it's a core curriculum in education, in the educational arena.
I think the two are the most pressing political issues and related to the core curriculum,
the admission policies are considered like an issue that is untouchable for the politicians.
And as because I will explain later a most current Sephardi code, the politicians who are members of the parties,
the Shas represent the Shas party represents the Sephardic Jews.
So most of them send their own children to the Ashkenazi yeshivas.
Okay. So they don't, like have an interest to promote the issue or issues that relate to admission policies in the Israeli Knesset.
And a few words about groups and subgroups that are considered to be ready, because ready Jews is not like one community we usually see like this.
They are all like wearing the blue cards and the special, special outfit.
But in fact, there are huge differences between the groups and we usually divide the community to three main groups which are Hasidic,
the Lithuanian or resistors poseur.
And the Sephardi community is a Hasidic and the Lithuanian groups are Skenazy and meaning.
They came like from Eastern European countries.
The main difference between the two groups in relates to their worldview.
The Hasidic community, Hasidic Jews was the most important factor in the worldview is the belonging to the court, to the Hasidic court.
The court is led by an admiral who is a spiritual leader.
And the most important factor for the Lithuanian Jews is the study of Torah.
Okay. Not just in schools, but among the life like to be a religious scholar, to study in a yeshiva and not to work for the living and.
The quality in Hebrew taught totalement. So this is the main difference between the Hasidic and the Lithuanian and the Sephardi community.
Actually it is in eukaryotic community because the traditional religious society in Morocco,
in North Africa was mostly all traditional and opened to modernity and to integration in the general society.
But after the Holocaust and I will explain it more later, Sephardic Jews became closer and closer to the Lithuanian group.
They wanted to study in the yeshivas, both in Morocco and in Israel.
And I would explain this process later. But the outcome is that now in Israel,
the Sephardic community focuses on religious studies in their schools and they try to resemble
the Lithuanian community in terms of emphasising the importance of religious studies.
Yet they are more integrated in the general society and in politics, in Israeli politics.
They are relatively more open to modernity, but within strict limits.
And there are a lot of variations between the Sephardic community.
And so we can divide also two or three or more groups.
And the Hasidic community are scholars usually divided to traditional courts like Bells Slonim, who if you know the names.
These are quotes that are entitled.
And according to cities in Eastern Europe where they are,
the communities were established and there are two sub streams within the general term in the communities.
One is about which for many are the Jews.
They are not worried at all. They say treat it like something else because the most important issue for Abboud is to
spread Judaism around the world to attract more and more Jews to the global community.
So the worldview is different.
And Chabad, usually the Jews do not integrate with other Hasidic groups and generally they are more integrated into Florida society in their schools.
Most of them are even public schools, which is different than the other schools.
I will explain it later. The legal status of the schools in Israel.
And there are also radical communities in Meshulam.
If you know the already neighbourhood in Jerusalem, which is a very famous holiday neighbourhood.
These radical communities, which are mostly in Satmar, told the town they don't take money from the states,
they don't pay taxes, and many of them even don't have like an Israeli I.D.
So. It's important to make the distinction between the mainstream Hasidic groups and the radical communities, because,
you know, the worldview is different, the lifestyle is different, and the relationship with the state is totally different.
Okay, so a few words about the Sephardic community, because my talk will focus on this community.
Some history already struggled to save the Sephardic Jews after the Holocaust.
I was in in Morocco, as I said earlier.
And in Israel, many young men from Eastern Europe came to Morocco after the Holocaust to save the Sephardic community from modernity,
mostly from Alliance School. Do you know Alliance Network?
It's a French network of schools which is very open to modernity and secular studies.
So they established yeshiva already young men in Morocco and in Israel to
attract Sephardic Jews to become more religious and join the family community.
So this, like safe struggle to save is a Sephardi community influence the relationship between this group until today,
because many Sephardic Jews still see the Lithuanian,
the Caridi as their saviours and they like it,
feel very thankful for the struggle to establish this Shiva's in Morocco and in Israel, and to save them from secularity.
But then Sephardic Jews who came to the Ashkenazi yeshivas in Israel and they encountered discrimination, they didn't accept them as equals.
And there are there were specific quotas for Sephardic students in the yeshivas.
So during the eighties, as the Sephardic community established its its own school network,
it is called My Young Heart Only and which is operative until today.
It's an official network in Israel, and it includes a lot of schools, Sephardic schools.
But still many of the strong families strong both politically and financially, as they prefer to send their own children to the Ashkenazi schools.
OC y. Generally they are considered more prestigious OC and we see this phenomenon in other places around the world, like acting white.
This is the term borrowed from the American context.
When someone is acting white or passing as white.
He's trying to resemble like people who are considered more prestigious than him.
Okay, so the whole vision of Chasse, which is in Hebrew here, the zeal of Tali,
of Schneid is says here Sha la zero to Hollywood is not a $0 not is to restore the former glory.
Okay. But in fact, chess, in terms of admission policies, they do not restore the glory of Sephardic, the Sephardic community.
But all of them are acting white and trying like to resemble the Ashkenazi Jews.
This is a picture of a Rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, who led the Shah's parties, and he was a spiritual leader for many years.
He died recently. But I think that's the most important quote or vision that represents trusted to restore the former glory.
And this acting white phenomenon or the relationship between Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
Jews are, of course, part of the broader political issues of relationships between Ashkenazi Jews and Mizrahi Jews in Israel.
And it portrays some a book and TV show, and the Israeli minister and minister of culture, which is it is Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews.
And she she's promoting issues relating to Sephardic Jews in Israel.
So it's part of a debate in Israel.
But in the community, the debate is stronger and the limits are much, much more clear between the different groups,
because in Israel, for example, you can find many couples which are like one over one spouse is Ashkenazi and the other is Sephardic.
Okay, so you find it a lot in Israel. And this is a debate, but the division I use in academic terms are less bright boundaries.
And there's a lot of literature about right boundaries between groups.
So there is no bright boundaries between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews in Israel.
But in the community the boundaries are very, very bright.
And they include, for example, the surname of his family,
which like it can and almost always hints to them to the fact of their affiliation, to that in Sephardi community or Ashkenazi community.
Okay. It's not mostly about skin colour, but the name of the family.
And they are doing in many cases they're doing like investigation actually to see where did the parents come from.
I use the terms Mizrahi and Sephardic, which are actually similar, but when we talk about the community.
Sephardic is like a religious group. Mizrahi is more like ethnic origin.
It's a same thing we see in Israel, like, you know, to indicate the same thing.
But usually when I talk about religious group, I say Sephardic and when I talk about the ethnic origin,
for example, in this debate, because this debate does not have any connection to the religious issue.
Okay. So I use the term Mizrahi. Okay.
So admission policies in the Israeli community.
Mm hmm. First of all, I, I want to focus on, you know, issues of education because you are Israel studies.
But I have to explain the school system, which is extremely similar to England because we have religion in the public here.
It's a maintained system. Okay. So we have the public schools are organised across religious lines.
We have the main stream, which is the national stream.
And in the national stream we have three different sectors.
We have the Jewish sector, which is mostly secular. We have Arab sector and the sectors.
So the sectors in the three sectors study in different schools.
Okay. So the Jewish secular schools are Jewish.
We have the National Integrated Stream, which actually it's a new stream for Jews who want more Jewish studies in the schools.
They are not religious. They don't work.
POZZI Don't pray in the morning, but they want they want more joysticks, more study of the Bible in the school.
And we have the national religious stream, which is then modern, modern orthodox.
You are more familiar probably with the term modern orthodox stream.
And we have a very in your stream which is called National for the stream.
I have another study that the one present today about this new stream.
It includes this year 40 schools.
It's 2% very, very small stream.
2% of the entire population of the students study is initial and so it is an officially recognised news stream,
not in the law but in the Ministry of Education Policy.
Yeah, since 2015.
So most vast majority of these schools are not public schools that are public private schools and they can be recognised.
Schools are exempt schools. The difference between recognise and exempt and it doesn't matter so much for the talk,
but you should know that exempt schools are at schools that are actually exempt from compulsory education.
They don't have a lot of obligation in terms of curriculum, but they do have obligations in regard to admission policies.
Okay, you will have curriculum. If you will take the curriculum from the government, you will get the money from the government.
And if you will not implement the government. Okay. Well, my talk is about admissions policy, but I will say a few words about the curriculum.
You see here, the percent of the package was a public funding, a school that takes, for example, 75% of the funding.
So it is obliged to apply 75% of the curriculum.
Curriculum is exempt schools which take like 55% of the public funding, they are also obliged to implement 55% of the core curriculum.
In fact, it doesn't happen because there is no supervision.
Nobody knows what they're actually teaching. I just won a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation to explore this issue,
and we receive a lot of money for four years and we are now entering into schools.
We are interviewing principal school principals, teachers.
We are taking like the teaching materials and we are trying to see how many of them do implement the core curriculum.
And most of them are not,
especially not English and subjects which are actually required to a to do their matriculation exams and even enters universities.
So in terms of admission policies, public schools are not selective at all.
Okay.
And according to the lot of public schools that are doing a lot of like bypasses, but they are not allowed to select students according to the law.
And then I added a slide later, which says that not only already Jews discriminate against a low socioeconomic in this specific ethnic origin,
there are also public schools to do it. So I don't want to be hypocritical.
So I added the slide in the end of the of the talk, but according to the law,
they shouldn't be selective and private schools they are allowed to make distinctions.
But are based on religious affiliation, but they are not allowed to discriminate according to race or ethnicity.
This is very similar to England, according to the Race Relations Act, the Equality Act, which is in its new name.
So schools are allowed to make religious distinctions, but not distinctions that are based on race or ethnicity.
But the problem is that Sephardi group, Sephardic a heretic group, is both a religious group and a group that is based on its ethnic origin.
Okay. And in England, when you make distinctions between religious groups,
so basically you are making make making these distinctions between Jews and non-Jews.
For example, the first case rights of Jews and you know, the problems was the question if he was a Jew,
according to the definition of is it the Orthodox rabbi or not in Israel?
That's not the question. The question is, are you ready enough to be in this school?
Okay. So this is a really complex issue, like to make decisions, both decisions in the school and later legal decisions.
So a lot of litigation over the last two decades in 2006 and the court ordered the Minister of Education to shape regulations.
So there are new admission regulations that established pillars committees within the Ministry of Education,
which means that if a Sephardic already parents receive a negative answer from the school as well rejected as a boy or a girl.
So then instead of going to court, which is very expensive now and you need a lawyer and you need to lot of emotional resources to do it.
So you go to appeals committees within the Ministry of Education since 2006.
Still, as I will explain later, until lately, this appeals committee were ineffective.
A lot of politics and they were basically ineffective.
And in 2010 inches Emanuel case, I'm sure that at least some of you heard the name the Emanuel case.
It was a case about very visible segregation in this city.
EMANUEL And actually the school put like a wall inside the school and established
two different tracks for Ashkenazim for the girls and Sephardic girls.
They even change the hours of the day so they won't see each other like the breaks in the hour when the school starts and ends.
They established like different rules, different school code that were basically in the same school,
two different schools for Sephardic girls in the scheme, lots of kids.
So Sephardic lawyer named Alan submitted a petition to the Supreme Court and the
Supreme Court after many months of discussions and attempts to reach a compromise.
So the Supreme Court ordered as Minister of Education to stop the segregation and the committee Nazi parents refused.
So there was another another request from the court to declare contempt of court.
And then the court declared contempt.
And what do you do when there's a contempt of court? They're both fines.
So the court gave fines for every day of segregation.
The network, Ashkenazi network, the transit school should like pay the minister of education a certain amount.
And also they, quote, imprisoned the Ashkenazi clergy,
parents who refused to send their children to the integrated school, which was actually a mistake.
Because what's going on when you ordered the Jews, like from a secular court to make an order,
especially when you imprisons them a lot, a lot of struggles in the middle of Jerusalem.
And it becomes like an issue which is like a religious issue, is everybody comes to the streets and a lot of mess.
The case was closed and after many, many months of struggles in the court and the court actually agreed,
this can ask parents to establish a different school, but it put like a condition or to ask for state funds.
The court actually says segregation is illegal.
We will not accept segregation and discrimination.
It's illegal. You can do it. But if you want to establish a different school, it can be in the same building.
It like authorises a different school.
But it says, I really, really hope that you didn't establish a different school in order to, you know, maintain the discrimination.
But you can request state funds.
And it is one of the only private schools in Israel that cannot receive state funds because there's a court order, but it cannot receive state funds.
So I will present 1 to 1 of my studies.
Which is which was an empirical study.
And we asked what was the direct and indirect impact of litigation on the admission policies to Israeli credit scores?
And we also asked which social mechanisms facilitated or hindered it?
We started the study around 2016, something like this.
And and we actually wanted to know if the court order,
the admission regulations and the Emanuel case actually influenced what's going on on the ground.
Because as a legal scholar who works in education, they know that the law doesn't matter at all.
What matters is what you do with the law in the schools.
So we did a qualitative research.
We collected legal and policy documents, school codes, of course, for us.
We looked into corrective websites and we also interviewed 14 policy officials and mostly quality parents.
And it was really, really hard to find the Sephardic parents who will be willing to take part in this research.
We looked for parents who complained that it was like the, you know, the basic requirement.
We wanted to do why did they complain? And to here's a story about to complain and what was the outcome of the case?
So eventually we reached those parents who were willing to be interviewed to the study.
We're also very, very activists. It was not like, you know, accidental that they agreed to be interviewed.
So we called them like the rights agents. We'll explain it later.
There are social activists really like helped other parents and spread information.
So they knew a lot about what's going on in the schools and they knew many, many other cases except for the case of their own children.
So we found that since 2006, until around 2013, I will explain what's what happened in 2013.
There was a lot of politics in the admission in the appeals committee, in the admission policies,
and specifically in the admissions appeals committee and the Ministry of Education.
Political more political motives were pulling the strings.
For example, one of our interviewees said the institutions have studied all tweets, nothing to overcome, all committees, all appeals.
We heard everything is fine. Everything is so sophisticated, sophisticated, sophisticatedly managed, making it tough to specifically locate a problem.
I know that the administrative level is deeply contaminated.
This is a political problem.
So this is one of many examples of the political motives and interests that were like pulling the entire process in the appeals committee,
in the Ministry of Education. As I said earlier, Israeli politics is deeply influenced by the parties.
So there are also various obstacles, the tender for the parents from asserting their rights.
So except for all the politics in the admission committees, so we have factors like in Parliament, ostracising and threats,
because if the parents complain about the school,
there's a high communal price you can pay in the synagogue in the other, you know, communal institutions.
Matchmaking is really, really important issue in the family community.
And so also negative perception of secular courts and unequal battle against school.
The school almost always is part of a big network which has a lot of money, which is it has a lawyer and the parents are individual parents.
And we should, like find their own lawyer and try to navigate their way in the process.
And there's also lack of knowledge about rights and skills to assert them.
And this is where it connects to the core curriculum. You know, and we have a lot of lawyers in Israel,
but we don't have a lot of already lawyers because they usually don't go to higher education, so they can't acquire a law degree.
Two of our interviewees were lawyers. It is not accidental.
They are both parents who whose children were discriminated, but they were lawyers so they could help other parents.
From judicial spaces to political spaces. So what happened that brought the issue of the discrimination,
the issue of admission policy from judicial judicial spaces, manual case to the political spaces.
First, there was extensive media coverage of the litigation.
Emanuel was all over Israeli news. I knew the case from 2008 because I wrote my Ph.D. about ready education.
But when I told people they couldn't believe there was such a case in Israel, like, you know, this is the most.
It was such a visible segregation like in the US between whites and blacks.
But in 2010, after the contempt of court, the media covered it extensively.
It was really important. Because in 2013 there was after many, many years and the government was out ready parties.
And one of the first missions of the new Minister of Education, whose name is Shai Pujan.
R was to reform the admission policies of early schools.
So the extensive media coverage contributed, you know, to this passage of the issue of admissions policies from the courts to politics.
And then the Ministry of Education reformed the appeals committees.
And there were more and more successful appeals that encouraged parents to mobilise their rights.
Between 2013 to 2015, which were the years without holiday parties in the Knesset,
98% of all the complaints against the schools were found were found justified.
And the Ministry of Education also put a lot of pressure on the school principals to accept the children.
They even threatened like to take their pension and things like that.
A lot a lot of pressure to reform that admission process and a lot of pressure on the school principal to follow the decision of the ministry,
the decisions of the Ministry of Education. So it was like, you know, you put a stone in the water.
The more and more parents found that the appeals are actually successful, and then they decided to submit their own complaints.
There's also a very aggressive campaign within the communities.
They distributed flyers. They went through, you know, from one person to another and said,
there are appeals committees and you should submit an appeal by this specific date and we will help you.
And the process is very, very simple. So there was a change.
But we found this a mobilisation of rights could not have occurred without a group
of the agents of rights that was formed and expanded due to the litigation.
So as a political change myth, no specific layer of insecurity community that was ready for the change this agents of rights.
So you heard about the Emmanuel case and the change like in narrative within the Sephardic Florida community.
They call it like rights consciousness explore.
Right, right. Consciousness is, Yaakov said earlier in many aspects this consciousness is, you know,
the moment when you like know that something bad happens to you in your life is not something that you should accept.
You derogate your rights and you if that's, you know, the basic distinction between, you know,
on unpleasant things that we all have to accept because they are part of life and practices that infringe our rights.
And we can go to court and ask for a remedy.
So these parents were already active when the political situation changed in 2013 and they helped the Minister of Education.
The Agents of Rights were a key features in raising the rights consciousness of
already parents and translating the judicial language from theory into practice.
For example, they mobilised legal knowledge. Two of them were lawyers.
The other had legal knowledge from other sources because there was a mother, for example, who helped many other mothers.
So they had the experience. And the knowledge is not so complicated.
You know, discrimination is not a complicated legal issue.
All you have to know is like the procedures of the appeal.
They facilitated access to lawyers and they spread the echo of successful cases, which was very,
very important because for the most for any people, they don't trust the states.
So a lot of alienation towards the states. So it's important that people from within the communities,
they can encourage parents to submit appeals and they recruited rabbinical support, which of course is a very important issue as well.
An example from one of the interviews and then there was a long interview in a radio station.
I was talking anonymously about my experience.
I explained what ethnic discrimination meant that we should not discriminate and that we should not legitimate such cases.
And if there were additional similar cases, I would assist them.
And then I was told, You won't believe it. Since you're talking through radio calls and faxes have not stopped pouring in.
So this was one mother who was interviewed in the radio, and we also had two other interviewees who were journalists.
One of them in credit journalism and the other in general journalism in the Wanat, which is a very famous website in Israel.
Another example I urge I urged her to go to the Ministry of Education.
I told her about my personal struggle.
I asked her to talk to the media that she should turn the world upside the upside down for her precious daughter.
I asked her, Do you know why your daughter is being discriminated?
She is rejected because others to follow the girls who had been discriminated before.
Before you stayed passive as well. So these are just like few examples from the interviews.
The interviews interviews were really, really fascinating because as I said earlier, we like the agents of rights.
We didn't mean to do it, but it was like, you know, we always talk in research about when you don't have a representative sample,
okay, because you have a very high rejection rate.
So that's what happened to us. We didn't have like a representative sample,
but we we made the lemonade from the lemon and we talked about agents of rights because this is where our interview is.
So conclusions of the of this specific study of we had time until and were until full rights and I should talk until 1015.
Okay. Okay, great. And I prepared a very, very long presentation.
So I choose what I want to talk about. Okay.
So I was very short with the theory because it is this is an Israel studies seminar and not the article has many legal aspects.
This is a book, The Hollow Hope Can to Bring About Social Change, a very, very famous book of Gerald Rosenberg from the US.
The basic argument is that courts can never bring about social change without political supports, that they are actually ineffective.
So what Gerald Rosenberg's, Gerald Rosenberg is actually saying that education policy,
litigation in, you know, social issues don't doesn't have all direct impact.
So it's ineffective. But in the long run, it can have indirect impact in terms that it can change the political and public discourse.
And it happens in the monarchies. It changed the public discourse and when there was a political change.
So, you know, the issue was on the table of policymakers.
So we need political cooperation. But what our study.
This shows that there was another kind of indirect impact.
The litigation also raised the rights consciousness of disempowered groups,
in this case the Sephardi Corridor parents and created grassroots activities.
So we showed that riser mobilised in a bi directional process.
The top down judicial rulings empowered the agents of rights who mobilised rights from the bottom up to the appeals committees.
So that's all I say about the legal theory. And they'll come back to the Israelis.
So why was it Courts Hollow hopes in our case?
So as I said, the the Zimmerman case was not effective at all.
But in the long run, the courts the court was not a hollow hope because it did change the discourse.
It did change rights consciousness. The discrimination continues.
Um, I brought you like from May 2019 and the discrimination they read from the Hebrew around 200 simple Sephardic girls.
What's it? Don't have a seminar, which is a school for girls.
What? Simple Sephardic girls. These are girls whose parents don't have political, you know, status and they don't come from high socioeconomic status.
That's that's firms that encourage the media and the term simple Sephardic Jews is very, very strong in the Florida community.
Okay. So the discrimination continues, but still.
I just received this a few days ago before he went to Oxford.
Very interesting. One of my interviewees was a lawyer and he established an association that fights in
the organisation like NGO that finds the discrimination in the Florida community.
And this is like a journal. It has a few pages. It is called blacklists.
Okay, let's see what's called blacklists. And they'll read from the Hebrew Bible.
This is a special issue to raise that awareness to the prohibition on discrimination and exclusion in the educational institutions.
And is it the first page opened with it says, Dear parents know your rights and the rights of your children.
And then it like elaborates the regulation of the appeals and the appeals committees.
Okay. So it elaborates. And he's a lawyer.
So he is dealing with these issues a lot. And then the other pages, they are like bringing stories from parents, from children.
Very, very interesting. So this is like something that they call these like rights consciousness.
Very, very effective in the community. And to finish this specific story, I have to say that the unlawful admissions policies in Israeli education,
they are not only in schools, they are not the only group who discriminate against other children.
So the national religious schools, that they discriminate a lot against the mostly Mizrahi families and families from low socioeconomic status.
So you do it in very creative ways. For example, fees, very, very high fees in the schools, the magnet public schools.
If a special schools, they put here some picture of the nature and environment school in Tel Aviv,
which was a subject of several lawsuits in the last two or three years,
of parents who said that the process of admission discriminates against children.
For example, they do like interviews for six year old year old children, interviews and dynamics.
And then you can say, like, who pass the interview? These are not like a correct answer for this.
Okay. And then the court decided it's in unlawful like to do interviews for six year old children.
It's non-Jews who are entering the first grade and are also other private schools in Israel.
This is a picture of the Green Village, which is like a complex of schools which are very like elite schools.
Instruct children from Tel Aviv alumni to Sharon and like from high socioeconomic families.
They have really, really high fees. So we just had a big case about parental fees in these well, I won't say much,
but it is actually a mechanism to be very, very selective and create them in the long run discrimination in schools.
So this was the first study. The second study included the comparative perspective of Israel, England and Belgium.
And they don't want to say much about England and Belgium because we don't have time and because this is a of Israel studies,
they just say that they selected the cases because in this case,
the data that I had enabled me to see how the legal rules are translated on the ground, like in in the schools,
in the local authorities in England, they had documents of specific documents of they always say, I will explain in a minute.
And in Belgium, I did an empirical research. I did interviews in the Florida community, in Antwerp.
In Antwerp. So in England, as I said earlier, the law is very similar to Israel in terms of religious based classifications.
And there is a supervisions of the Office of School Adjudicator, which is called the OCA.
So I read all the decisions of the what we say about the Jewish schools.
So it was a line action. I'm sure you will know the JFS case from 2009, which is really famous here in England,
and also reports revealed that many Jewish schools were not in compliance with the school admissions.
It's cold because, for example, in many schools there's a request to receive a recommendation from the rabbi.
So, as, say said, that's not equal.
It cannot be an objective factor to receive a recommendation from the rabbi.
And there are also social selectivity in other faiths, schools.
So it's not, you know, not about only about the Jews.
So I'm really, really fast, too.
In Belgium, we have in other situation, school are not authorised at all to classify pupils by their religious affiliation.
Okay. Not in private schools. Not in public schools.
Public schools, of course, because they are like for many children, for many faith, but not in the schools, for example.
They can't have like admission policies into, say, this girl can be admitted into the school and this girl cannot be admitted to the school.
So anyone who can pay should go. Yes, I told them, for example, I asked very, very conservative build school in Antwerp.
Can I apply for the school? Can I? Can my daughters apply for the school?
They said, No problem, but you must agree to the educational scheme and the school rules.
You should respect the rules. You know, you should come with the proper outfit and to behave according to the rules.
That's your choice. But they said, no problem.
Your daughters and I'm secular can come to this school.
And this is a very conservative school already school,
not a modern Jewish school in and with a commission on pupils rights was established to supervise enrolment
procedures and to treat complaints related to infractions of the right to involvement in action.
Jewish community schools integrate various priority groups.
And the Commission on Pupils Rights has consistently maintained that it's not the school's
responsibility to predict whether the pupil will be able to adhere to the educational scheme.
And there is a very effective when I talked to parents, they said there's a lot of quiet in Antwerp.
This was like, you know, the term quiet. We don't have to fight all the time in the first grade.
And then in another fight in the seventh grade when you finished like the primary school or in some of the school is a seventh grade.
In other school, it's a ninth grade. There's a lot of quiet.
You start in the first grade and you finish in the 12th grade within the same school.
Most schools, like they include 12th grades. Nobody complained, not even the Ashkenazi credentials noncompliant and said the quality is not enough.
And there's problems regarding the integration.
And there's there are no secular Jews on answer ready Jews in the Florida schools because no one want to send his children to a school that,
you know, the children will feel unwelcomed or that they don't belong.
So it happens naturally. Those schools from the for the modern also this community from the secular community and from for the haredi communities.
There are transitions between this between the schools. I talked to people, for example, who are builth and they prefer a school of another group.
Why? So they had their own reasons. Sometimes one mother told me that she even wants her children to be familiar with other groups.
One mother, who was actually a vice principal, she was she wasn't sympathetic.
She had like a very high status in the community.
And she even said that she sent her daughters to, like,
be a guide in the secular schools during the summer for the young children in the secular schools,
because she really wanted her girls to be more open and to know many kinds of Jews.
So my normative argument in the paper was, first of all, that we have to study and this is this is a basic argument about education policy.
You know, some of the some of the agents here create laws.
Okay? Many of them, actually. But it doesn't matter at all if you create a rule and you can't like, you know,
put the ball in the right place, you have to think about how education policy is constituted.
It's like cog wheels. You have to be smart to know how the cog wheels are actually working,
to know the context, to know the society, and then to decide how to shape the law.
Because the law can sound great, but it can have like no impact at all.
So if you look at the admissions policies, we see a slippery slope.
A slippery slope is a legal term. It actually says the slippery slope is when you have a legal war, which sounds really great,
but then it's is very, very reasonable that you will go from this point to this point very easy.
It happens a lot in privacy law because when we agree for, you know, a certain practice,
the debates are in privacy, it's very reasonable that we will see more and more practices and we will get used to.
Everyone is collecting information about us. And it's the same thing here.
It's a slippery slope. You allow one school to choose pupils according to religious affiliation and you can very,
very first serious self allowing distinctions that are based on social class and ethnicity.
That in this radical ready community.
The religious aspects of the Sephardic community are really close to the ethnic origin aspects, so you can't really make the distinctions.
There is no reasonable way to make such such distinctions.
For example, many schools and they put in the school code a requirement that some prayer in the school will be in an Ashkenazi style.
So that's discrimination or a reasonable requirement.
It's very hard to make these distinctions.
So this is one aspect that we should take into account.
It is a slippery slope, and you can always say that it is a religion, but actually it's also ethnicity and social class.
And the other aspect that we should take into account is there are asymmetric power relations between individual parents on one hand and very,
very strong institutional systems in the other site.
And they said, they say institutional systems and not schools because the schools are always part of an institutional system.
It can be the school association, it can be the rabbis.
It can be even a political party, because most Corelli schools are affiliated with certain political parties.
Okay. So we have an unequal, extremely unequal power relations.
And when we have extremely unequal power relations, so the strong usually wins.
We should take that into account when we shapes the law. The parents don't have many chances in view of this asymmetric power relations.
And I think if we connect it to what we do, cultural issues in Israel.
Do you know the tribes speech of an hour a president who all very Rivlin.
It's a very famous speech that he gave two years ago.
And it has really, really high impact on Israeli society.
He actually said that Israeli society is composed of four tribes Arab, secular, national, religious and ultra-Orthodox.
Well, I don't like this speech at all because he looks at many other people in Israel, looks at ultra orthodox a tribe as a tribe as a same quarrel.
Okay. And it's really it's a wrong view of reality.
They have so many qualities and some of them are much closer to the secular tribe and others are in really extreme.
And if you see the ultra-Orthodox as a tribe,
so you don't see these internal variations and you don't see what we call in political theory, minority within a minority.
So when you have a minority within a minority,
you have the state has to recognise this and equal power relations and to help minorities within the minorities to assert their rights.
The state has a moral obligation, especially when the minority is an illiberal community,
especially and you have many political theorists write about this issue will can become is one of the famous.
But this is a classic issue of minority within a minority who needs the help of the state to assert the rights.
And and the tribes are really a wrong picture, I think, of Israeli society with a venom.
Okay. So this is this is a last word.
What I suggest, I suggest. I think that we don't have in Israel, we don't have another option.
But to prohibit in distinctions, to prohibit the schools actually to make distinctions between students,
because equality is sometimes like antibiotics. You have like to kill good intentions with bad intentions.
Okay. You can't. Of course. Sorry.
It can be very, I think, positive in certain circumstances to allow a minority group to handle admission
policies to its schools and make sure that the school actually fits the group.
But in Israel, at least in it comes with a lot of bad intentions.
And because we can't we don't have like a reasonable way to make the distinctions between the good and the bad.
We should kill all the intentions together and to like the Belgian example, like in Antwerp,
we should like creating the law a very, very clear prohibition on this, on the discrimination and on selective admission policies.
And the schools can set school codes, but not selective students.
Okay.