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I remember reading a story about how in a certain area, the kids were declared to be special needs and that they would be sent to a school for children with such disabilities, and it was set up that way, but it was a yeshiva. They got public funding for special needs education and funnelled it to religious education in order to bypass laws about that. And the objections are not "they are getting public funding for special projects like other schools", but that "they get onto school boards and get voted in to be the majority members, then they start diverting all the funding to their yeshivas and stripping out funding for the secular schools". You're right that the NYT has to prove this happens, but you're not representing the story correctly with "this article should never have been written, this is just the same as funding for free meals for underprivileged kids".
This is a very touchy subject, because it's very easy to make a mis-step and fall right into stereotypes about 'the Jews'. But I think it's evident that the Hasidim are, in effect, what would be called a cult elsewhere and that even within Judaism they're on an extreme edge. They do think of the outside world, the Gentiles, as foreigners and strangers among whom they live, and so despoiling them is permissible because it's the spoils of Egypt.
I give you the Rogan Formulation:
1: In a cult, it's run by one guy who knows the whole thing is bullshit.
2: In a religion, that guy died.
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