Jewish group revives religious charter school fight in Oklahoma, months after test case stalled at Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., is pictured on July 30, 2024. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

(JTA) — Months after a Supreme Court deadlock blocked an attempt by a Catholic church to create the nation’s first openly religious, publicly funded charter school, a Jewish group is now advancing a similar plan — one designed to sidestep the legal obstacles that doomed the first case.

The National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation has notified an Oklahoma state board that it intends to apply for a statewide virtual high school integrating Oklahoma academic standards with daily Jewish religious studies.

Local Jewish leaders say they were blindsided by the proposal and argue that such a school isn’t needed. But getting approval is not what the applicants are expecting.

Instead, the group’s legal team — led by Becket, a prominent nonprofit religious-liberty law firm — is preparing for the state board to reject the application, setting the stage for a federal lawsuit and, potentially, a precedent-setting ruling at the Supreme Court.

Anticipating that the application will likely be denied, “we would represent Ben Gamla challenging that decision in the federal courts in Oklahoma,” Eric Baxter, a vice president and general counsel at Becket, said in an interview.

Baxter said Ben Gamla expects to submit the application by the end of the year.

The resulting case could become the next major test of whether the Constitution permits government funding to establish religious charter schools. It would resolve a question the Supreme Court failed to decide when it deadlocked 4-4 last spring in the Catholic case, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case, reportedly because of her longstanding personal and professional ties to a Notre Dame law professor who had advised the petitioner in its early stages.

St. Isidore, backed by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, focused on school funding but it came amid a broader effort led by conservatives to weaken the legal doctrine of church-state separation. While many of the largest Jewish groups — including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Union for Reform Judaism — have long championed a strictly secular public sphere as a safeguard for minorities, an increasingly vocal contingent has advocated for greater public funding for private Jewish day schools.

One of the most prominent opponents of public funding for religious education is Rachel Laser, a former leader in Reform Judaism who now heads Americans United for Separation of Church and State. She argues that efforts to erode church-state deportation ultimately serve to advance the domination of Christianity in government.

“As a Jew and the leader of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, I feel obligated to point out that such a case would be using Jews to advance a Christian Nationalist agenda that is not ultimately in Jews’ best interest,” Laser said.

The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the St. Isidore school in 2023, prompting immediate litigation led by the state attorney general, who argued that a religious charter school was unconstitutional.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed, ruling that charter schools are “state actors” required to remain secular. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which seemed poised, based on the conservative composition of the court and the oral arguments preceding the ruling, to consider overturning longstanding limits on taxpayer-funded religious schooling.

But in May, the justices deadlocked, and the tie allowed the Oklahoma ruling to stand.

Now Ben Gamla, backed by a former Democrat congressman, aims to resurrect the issue, using a new legal pathway. The group will not sue in state court, bypassing the state Supreme Court ruling against St. Isidore, but in federal court, where they believe they will prevail.

By framing Oklahoma’s refusal as a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause, Ben Gamla hopes to build on recent Supreme Court rulings holding that states may not exclude religious organizations from generally available public benefits solely because they are religious.

“The school should be allowed there under existing Supreme Court precedent,” Baxter said. “The court has already previously ruled that in ways that make it clear it cannot exclude a charter school just because it’s religious.”

Ben Gamla is a newly formed Oklahoma nonprofit led by former Democratic congressman Peter Deutsch, who surprised many by endorsing Trump in 2024, citing his stances on Israel and education policy.

Deutsch previously founded a network of Hebrew-English charter schools in Florida with the aim of combating Jewish assimilation, though those schools, unlike the Oklahoma proposal, were required to operate as strictly secular institutions.

His aspirations led Deutsch to look beyond Florida — including to Oklahoma. After St. Isidore was initially approved in 2023, he traveled to the state and explored applying for a Jewish charter school of his own, telling JTA last February that the Catholic effort could be “a paradigm shift for American Jews.”

But he said that after speaking with local rabbis and parents, he decided the state’s Jewish community was too small to sustain such a brick-and-mortar school. The proposal for a virtual Ben Gamla school marks a shift: Whatever the local demand, the project is now positioned as a legal vehicle to test the constitutional question nationwide.

Deutsch declined to be interviewed for this story, directing all questions to Becket.

According to its letter of intent, filed Nov. 3 with Oklahoma’s charter board, the proposed Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School would operate as a statewide virtual high school for grades 9-12 and open with roughly 40 students in the 2026-27 school year. The school plans to offer daily courses in Jewish texts, practices, ethics and other forms of religious study.

The school would deliver “Oklahoma’s state-approved academic standards alongside Jewish religious studies, enabling students to achieve college readiness while developing deep Jewish knowledge, faith, and values within a supportive learning community,” the letter says.

The founding team includes Brett Farley, the executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma and a former St. Isidore board member.

The new proposal immediately triggered a response from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which had led litigation against St. Isidore.

Last week, the organization announced that it had filed Oklahoma Open Records Act requests seeking all communications between the state charter board and Ben Gamla. Americans United argues the proposed school is unconstitutional.

“Despite their loss earlier this year in the U.S. Supreme Court, religious extremists once again are trying to undermine our country’s promise of church-state separation by forcing Oklahoma taxpayers to fund a religious public school. Not on our watch,” Laser, the president of Americans United, said in a statement.

Within the Jewish community, the Ben Gamla plan lands in the middle of longstanding divisions over public funding for Jewish religious education.

Orthodox-affiliated organizations, including the Orthodox Union and its affiliated Teach Coalition, have supported efforts to loosen restrictions, arguing that Jews should not be penalized for choosing religious schooling. Several conservative Jewish groups backed St. Isidore’s Supreme Court petition.

Deutsch supports lowering the wall between church and state, at least when it comes to education funding, citing low levels of Jewish knowledge and rising assimilation among American Jews.

“If you think Jewish peoplehood and faith have value in terms of continuity, looking at American Jews today and saying that’s a success story today is absurd,” he told JTA in February. “Clearly, Jewish individuals have done extraordinarily well, but the Jewish community is in a death spiral. The only way to prevent what’s happening is through education.”

In Oklahoma, where  the Jewish population is estimated at fewer than 9,000 people, the proposal has drawn skepticism from local Jewish leaders — including those who say they first learned about it not from organizers, but from reporters.

Rabbi Daniel Kaiman, who leads Congregation B’nai Emunah in Tulsa, said he was surprised to discover that an application was being pursued “in the name of the Jewish community” even though, he said, no one he is aware of in the community had been consulted.

“I was surprised to be learning about it through a reporter,” he said. “When I called around to other Jewish leaders in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, none of us knew anything about it.”

Kaiman said he opposes the proposal and worries about the implications of a national legal campaign being waged through a tiny Jewish community that has to manage delicate relationships with state officials and interfaith partners.

“As a Jewish community in Oklahoma, we are an extreme minority,” he said. “I don’t know if this is the type of political attention our Jewish community would have asked for — and I wasn’t asked. Anything that could threaten the key relationships we have with our neighbors and with state leadership is something we need to think about very carefully.”

He added that he is uneasy about being thrust into a public debate that pits one Jewish group against another.

“I don’t love the fact that this forces me to be speaking, even potentially, in opposition to another Jewish group,” he said. “That doesn’t feel very good.”

Kaiman also questioned the underlying practicality of a Jewish charter school in a state with such a small Jewish population, and noted that existing Jewish educational institutions — including a day school, preschools and synagogue-based programs — already meet the community’s needs.

The local Jewish community is tight-knit and exceptionally charitable, a dynamic shaped in part by local oil and gas wealth that has given it an outsized impact on the wider Jewish world through philanthropies.

“We have robust educational offerings for Jewish kids in Oklahoma,” Kaiman said. “I don’t know who this new proposal is for.”

Still, he was careful to leave space for ongoing conversation within the community.

“We really value Jewish education, and maybe this is a good idea,” he said. “But it’s hard to learn about it through public discourse alone. Partnership and conversation would be a better way forward.”