It surely must have come as news to many voters that Ms. Nixon attends a synagogue and has a rabbi, Sharon Kleinbaum, and that the rabbi happens to be married to Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Although Ms. Weingarten, one of the most powerful labor leaders in the country, had remained neutral in the race for governor, the ugly accusations contained in the mailer coaxed a de facto endorsement from her in the form of a statement she made, with Rabbi Kleinbaum, over the weekend, calling the charge of Ms. Nixon’s anti-Semitism a “baseless lie” and criticizing her own party for invoking the politics of fear and division.

Beyond that, the first charge leveled in the mailer resurrects an issue that remains troublesome for the governor. The flier tries to foment worry among ultra-Orthodox Jews that Ms. Nixon would not back taxpayer support of yeshivas. She has not said that. The governor, though, as well as Mayor Bill de Blasio, have long been criticized for not doing nearly enough to ensure that yeshivas meet the standards for sound secular education imposed by law.

Over the summer, a group known as the Young Advocates for Fair Education filed a lawsuit in federal court naming Mr. Cuomo, the chancellor of the state’s Board of Regents and the state’s commissioner of education and arguing that a state law passed in April that allowed a kind of special treatment for yeshivas was unconstitutional. The advocates’ concern is that these religious schools provide so little in the way of a traditional academic curriculum that students often leave ignorant and illiterate.

Five years ago UJA-Federation of New York issued a report citing increases in rates of Jewish poverty that those fighting for more rigorous educational standards in religious schools have attributed to the unwillingness of local government to exercise more authority. Politicians have coddled the ultra-Orthodox community because of the powerful voting bloc it provides, and yet the social damage that minimal regulation of these yeshivas creates is virtually never called out as an anti-Semitism of its own.