After a successful two-week premiere run at NYC's Cinema Village, we are focusing on screenings at synagogues and film festivals.

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SYNOPSIS

In New York, home to nearly half of the world’s Jewish population, tens of thousands of Jewish children are not receiving a basic education. Children in many of the most orthodox yeshivas often finish school without being able to read or write in English. Because of the extraordinary political power of ultra-Orthodox communities, their schools have never been required to comply with state law. Unorthodox Education lifts the curtain on these communities, revealing the human cost of actively depriving kids of a secular education. The 40-minute documentary, created by Jewish filmmakers, presents interviews with people who have left the ultra-Orthodox world as well as journalists, academics, and advocates. It chronicles a decade-long political struggle for these children that ended in disastrous defeat in May 2025, when the New York State legislature gutted the ability of state education officials to enforce the law. The film exposes the tragedy of forced ignorance hiding in plain sight in the biggest city in the United States.

“This is a documentary of rescue. To call out one’s own on this is a form of love, not betrayal. The conflation of ignorance with authenticity is, ever and always, anti-human.”

John McWhorter

Columnist, New York Times

BIOS

Joe Kolman’s publications as a print journalist range from the Chicago Reader (1979) to The Economist (2017). He began filming UNORTHODOX EDUCATION in 2020 after helping support a young woman from Hasidic Brooklyn who was struggling to get her college degree.

Joe Kolman

Director

Elana Sigall

Producer

Sigall is a consultant and attorney with an expertise in education-related legal and policy issues. She has served as the education advisor to the Governor of New York, as the head of special education policy for New York City, and as a professor at Columbia University. She consults and serves as an expert witness for people choosing to leave ultra-Orthodox communities and yeshivas and seeking a secular education for their children

George Itzhak

Editor

Itzhak is a Prague-based editor, producer and director with seven years of experience producing documentaries and TV features for both national and niche audiences. His work with NBC News has been nominated for Emmy and Webby awards. He oversees video projects from initial conception to publication or broadcast often taking on multiple roles including producer, director, cinematographer and editor.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

My grandfather, Shalom Harari, graduated from a yeshiva early in the 20th century. A photograph taken in Tel Aviv in 1935 shows him looking like many of the ultra-Orthodox Jews you'd find in Brooklyn today, with a beard and a large family. Although he was the chief rabbi of the Yemenite community in Holon, Israel, he believed in giving my mother and her siblings a good religious and secular education. I'm the direct beneficiary of his beliefs.

So, when I learned a few years ago that many of the ultra-Orthodox (or "Haredi") Jews of Brooklyn refuse to teach their children the basics of English, math, science, and history, I was horrified. I heard the details firsthand from a young woman who grew up in Hasidic Borough Park and struggled for years to make up for the secular education that she never received.

You can call it child neglect -- or child abuse.

Defenders of these Hasidic yeshivas argue -- correctly -- that some schools do give their students an adequate education in state-mandated subjects such as English, math, history and science. But most do not. And anybody who says otherwise denies the facts we demonstrate vividly in this film.