A federal judge ruled that a majority-Orthodox school board in the suburbs of New York City violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered it to adopt a new voting system before its next election in order to foster more equitable representation of the community’s Jewish, Black and Latino populations. In an almost total defeat for…
The judge in the East Ramapo voting-rights trial accused a key witness of lying on the stand Thursday, leading the school district’s lawyer to suggest that the case was all but lost and sending it into uncharted territory as testimony is slated to wrap up soon. The heated outburst came during testimony by Harry Grossman,…
Soon after Jean Fields moved to Spring Valley, in Rockland County, N.Y., in the early 1990s, she drove around to get the lay of the land. One memorable moment was when Fields and her husband, both of whom are black, unwittingly drove into New Square, the Hasidic village run by followers of the Skverer rabbinic…
Are Jews white? And if a white majority is overwhelmingly made up of Orthodox Jews, does it make any legal difference? These are among the fraught questions at the center of a trial unfolding in U.S. District Court regarding the East Ramapo School District, which serves a spread of suburbs about an hour’s drive north…
Testimony from two witnesses Thursday at the trial over the East Ramapo Central School District spoke to a key question at the center of the case: Are elections won and lost over questions of race, or of policy? Outside of a courtroom, it is often hard to separate the two things. For example, consider the…
It’s a courtroom trial, but it felt like a math class. Wednesday saw expert testimony on racially segregated voting in the East Ramapo Central School District, a majority Orthodox suburban district that has been plagued by a battle over funding to the district’s public schools. The case concerns East Ramapo’s at-large voting system, which a…
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — Lawyers on Monday presented starkly different perspectives on identity politics in a suburban New York school district, as a federal trial opened in a voting-rights case that caps more than a dozen years of battle over funding between Orthodox Jews and their mostly black and Latino neighbors. The case concerns the…
Sometimes, when Katrina Hertzberg sees a visibly Jewish person in her neighborhood in Nyack, N.Y. — a woman wearing a wig, say, or a man in a black suit and hat — she thinks to herself, “Oh my God, are we next?” She wonders whether her area of Rockland County, N.Y., is next to receive…
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