About Immanuel: I'm not sure what was said in last week's program reflected the facts of the case. It is true that horrible racism and prejudice was involved, but from what I've read it was not as much about admission to the school, but that AFTER students were admitted, & 30% of the admitted students were Sephardim, then the people in charge decided they're going to put up partitions and separate into different classes, different recess playground, etc on ethnic lines. The court originally forced the partitions to be taken down and remove separations. However, there were one or two sephardi families that were ok with the separations or their kids even ended up on the "ashkenazi side," so certain spokespeople for ashkenazi haredi Jewry were claiming that these Uncle Toms are proof that this was not race-based but chumrah/religious based separation.
While racism is involved and it is wrong to downplay it, still this reflects a bigger problem, which is rampant in the haredi school system, whereby insane and arbitrary standards are employed in the admission to these schools such as examples my rabbi informed me of: To a health professional he knew: "You work in your profession with secular people, your kid can't go here." To another: "Your cousin is Sephardi, your kid can't go here." Or the classic "You have a tv in your house, kid can't go here" etc etc. While the protest was against court intrusion into private decisions (ie the parents who wanted to switch their kids to different schools after partitions removed, were being forced to send to that school) and may be justified on libertarian grounds, it seems to me some type of oversight and some type of standardization is needed for these schools' admissions processes. Would a Kahanist govt introduce oversights that come attached to the govt funding these schools receive?
Also, it seems one half of the 'haredi world,' the ashkenazim, rallied behind the anti-court protest while the other half (Sephardi haredim) were against it and did not. Can these groups ever really unite and does this reflect a historic mistake by some groups of Sephardim to adopt the haredi identity?