Turkish YouTuber Ruhi Çenet, known for documentaries exploring unusual places and relatively closed communities around the world, has turned his attention to New York’s Hasidic Jewish population.
Çenet published the roughly 40-minute documentary, titled “America’s Most Secretive Jewish Community: Hasidic Jews (I Spent 48 Hours Inside),” on August 26.
The video quickly attracted tens of millions of views, but its massive audience is only part of the story.
Several segments focusing on large families, employment, religious education and participation in U.S. public assistance programs began circulating separately across social media, turning the documentary into a broader debate about America’s welfare system.
“Are American taxpayers paying for this lifestyle?”
One of the most controversial parts of the documentary concerns the use of programs such as Medicaid and SNAP among low-income Hasidic households.
As clips from Çenet’s documentary spread across American social media, the discussion increasingly shifted away from Hasidic religious practices and toward a politically sensitive question:
To what extent are American taxpayers financing the living costs of large, low-income households within these communities?
The debate gained additional attention after prominent U.S. streamer Asmongold reacted to Çenet’s documentary, exposing portions of the video to another large American audience.
Critics began questioning whether a lifestyle characterized in some households by very large families, relatively low incomes and extensive religious study can result in unusually high reliance on taxpayer-funded programs.
The numbers behind the controversy
The debate is not based solely on claims circulating on social media.
A 2025 analysis by Young Advocates for Fair Education (YAFFED), using 2018-2022 American Community Survey data, found significant economic differences between New York’s Hasidic population and comparison populations.
According to the analysis, approximately 63% of Hasidic New Yorkers were poor or near-poor, compared with roughly 27% among non-Hasidic New Yorkers in the comparison group.
Public-benefit participation showed an even more striking difference.
The study found that more than 40% of Hasidic residents received SNAP food assistance, while approximately 70% were covered by Medicaid.
According to the analysis, Hasidic New Yorkers participated in SNAP at roughly three times the rate of comparison New Yorkers and in Medicaid at more than twice the rate.
The report also found economic differences among men. Approximately 30% of employed Hasidic men worked fewer than 35 hours per week, while median earnings among Hasidic men were about 30% lower than those of the comparison population.
Could benefits for a family of 10 exceed $100,000?
One calculation featured in Çenet’s documentary became particularly controversial after the video reached American audiences.
Using a hypothetical family of 10, the video presented figures of approximately $26,160 in SNAP food assistance, $13,600 in child-related tax credits, and around $75,000 in estimated Medicaid coverage value.
Combined, the theoretical economic value exceeds $100,000 per year.
That number, however, requires an important qualification.
It does not mean that a family receives a $100,000 government check.
Medicaid represents health coverage and medical expenditures rather than a direct cash payment to a household. Eligibility and the actual value of benefits also depend on household circumstances and the rules governing individual programs.
Furthermore, Medicaid, SNAP and child-related tax benefits are not special programs created for Hasidic Jews.
They are generally available to qualifying Americans based on factors including income, household size and other eligibility requirements.
Large households are a major part of the equation
Household size helps explain why public-assistance eligibility can be particularly significant within Haredi and Hasidic communities.
Research from UJA-Federation of New York found an average Haredi household size of approximately 4.7 people, compared with 2.4 people among non-Haredi Jewish households.
The same research found that approximately 53% of Haredi households were poor or near-poor.
Larger households combined with relatively low household incomes can make families more likely to qualify for income-based programs such as SNAP and Medicaid.
That dynamic sits at the center of the debate triggered by Çenet’s documentary.
But the claim that “they don’t work and taxpayers support them” is misleading
There is another side to the numbers.
UJA-Federation research indicates that approximately 80% of adults in poor or near-poor Haredi households are employed.
That makes broad claims that the entire community simply refuses to work and lives off government assistance inconsistent with the available data.
The economic picture is considerably more complicated.
Large families, lower earnings, religious education, employment patterns and the income thresholds built into U.S. public-assistance programs all contribute to the unusually high participation rates.
The real policy question is therefore not whether the U.S. government has created a special welfare system for Hasidic Jews — it has not — but whether existing income-based programs produce unusually large public expenditures in communities with these demographic and economic characteristics.
Public funding of Hasidic institutions has faced scrutiny before
Çenet’s documentary did not create the broader controversy surrounding public money and Hasidic institutions in New York.
The issue has been debated in the United States for years.
In 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Brooklyn’s Central United Talmudic Academy had admitted involvement in multiple fraudulent schemes involving government programs.
The school agreed to pay $5 million in penalties and had previously made more than $3 million in repayments, bringing the financial consequences associated with the case above $8 million.
The case should not be generalized to Hasidic schools or the Hasidic population as a whole. It nevertheless became an important part of a wider New York debate over public funding, religious schools and government oversight.
American media investigations have also examined hundreds of millions of dollars in public spending connected to special-education services provided to students attending Hasidic and Orthodox religious schools.
A Turkish YouTuber has revived an old American debate
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the controversy is that a documentary produced by a Turkish YouTuber has brought a long-running American policy debate before an international audience of millions.
Supporters of the current system argue that low-income American citizens who satisfy the eligibility requirements have the same right to Medicaid, SNAP and other assistance regardless of their religious beliefs or lifestyle.
Critics, however, question whether taxpayers should effectively absorb a substantial portion of the costs when very large households with relatively low incomes make extensive use of those programs.
Çenet’s documentary does not provide a definitive answer.
What it has done is put new attention on the numbers behind one of New York’s most insular communities — and revive a politically sensitive question in the United States:
How much of the economic cost of the Hasidic community’s traditional way of life is borne by the community itself, and how much is ultimately borne by American taxpayers?
