The fight for religious charter schools is back in court — and this time with a new protagonist: Jews. Late last month, the Ben Gamla Charter School filed suit in Oklahoma after the state charter school board denied its application solely because the proposed school is religious. But while the stakes of the debate over religious charter schools — competing views of religious liberty and church-state separation — have by now become familiar, this time around a darker line of criticism has emerged: that the effort to establish a Jewish charter school in the Sooner State is not a genuine case at all, but the product of Christian nationalist actors using Jews to advance their broader aims.

In making this claim, separationist critics argue that, after an earlier Catholic charter school effort in Oklahoma stalled at the Supreme Court last year, proponents have simply propped up a Jewish plaintiff as a more sympathetic stalking horse for advancing a broader strategy to reintroduce religion — and, more often than not, Christianity — into publicly funded schools…

Read the full piece in the Jewish Journal