Naftuli Moster: Leaving Haredi Education Activism [Teshuva 5/6]

Naftuli Moster was the face of the campaign to force Chasidic yeshivas to teach more secular subjects. He ran Yaffed (Young Advocates for Fair Education), landed a New York Times investigation, and became a lightning rod in a bitter communal battle. But in a recent interview on the 18Forty Podcast, Moster describes a slow, painful reversal: he now believes the campaign was misguided, that his alliances were toxic, and that the institutions he once fought are worth protecting. His story is less a tidy redemption arc than a case study in how a just cause can corrupt the people who wage it—and how hard it is to walk back.

The Campaign and Its Uncomfortable Alliances

Moster explains that his disillusionment began long before his public renunciation. By September 2022—more than a year before October 7—he had already left Yaffed. The problem was not the goal of basic secular education, but the company he kept. On a panel, he found himself nodding along to a comment about teaching transgender topics in yeshivas, even though he personally opposed it. A reporter later clipped the video to claim he supported it. More broadly, his funders and allies were people who wanted to tear down not just Chasidic education, but the entire structure of Jewish institutional life—groups he now compares to J Street or Jewish Voice for Peace. “I felt like some of these alignments were just serving