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A Florida bill attacking ‘critical theory’ in higher education has the state’s Jewish academics worried
(JTA) — The University of Florida has more Jewish students than any other public college in the United States — and last week, one of them reached out to a professor, fearing that it would no longer be possible to study Jewish topics there.
Citing a graphic that had been making the rounds on social media, the student asked if it was true that a new bill working its way through the state legislature would remove all “Jewish Studies courses, majors and minors” in the state. The graphic was shared by several people with large online followings, including comedian D.L. Hughley, who has more than 750,000 followers on Twitter.
“I love my major and I can’t imagine switching to anything else,” the student wrote, according to Norman Goda, director of the university’s Center for Jewish Studies.
Goda wasn’t able to console the student. Like other Jewish academics in Florida who spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he doesn’t know whether H.B. 999 would affect Jewish studies on the state’s college campuses. Though the bill’s author — a Republican state representative — says that won’t be the case, the bill’s language is much less clear.
That’s because the bill’s current wording would forbid the state’s public higher education institutions from teaching or offering any major or minor based in “methodology associated with Critical Theory.” That prohibition, say academics and other critics of the bill, would make teaching courses in Jewish studies impossible — and would also outlaw many other fields in higher education.
Exactly what the bill means by “critical theory” is unclear. To academics, the term refers to a tool for analyzing society and culture, created in the 1930s by German Jewish academics, that encourages people to view the world through power structures, and to consider why they fall short. To political conservatives, it’s a relative of “critical race theory,” a watchword for those who want to inhibit classroom instruction about racism. An earlier version of H.B. 999 mentioned only critical race theory, not the umbrella theory.
“These people don’t know what they’re talking about,” said a Jewish faculty member at a Florida university, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation from the state government, regarding the lawmakers behind H.B. 999. “You’re putting people who don’t know what critical theory is, but have heard the words — and now you’re putting them in charge of universities.”
A university that completely purged such ideas from its classrooms, the anonymous faculty member said, “would be non-existent.”
The bill in question is the latest example of conservative-led state efforts to snuff out culture-war modes of thought like critical race theory and gender studies, often referred to euphemistically by lawmakers as “divisive concepts” in education. Such efforts have occasionally ensnared efforts to teach Jewish history and the Holocaust.
Attempts to legislate the classroom are particularly potent in Florida, where Republican governor Ron DeSantis, a likely presidential candidate, has frequently stated his desire to ban “woke” concepts from being taught in the state. (DeSantis has stated he will wait to see H.B. 999’s final form before he decides whether to sign it, but in a discussion with college administrators last week he continued to rail against what he called the “ideological agenda” of campus diversity, equity and inclusion programs.)
The state recently rejected the curriculum for a new Advanced Placement African-American Studies course in high schools, forcing the College Board to rework the class. Florida is also home to several active conservative “parents’ rights” groups that have lobbied to remove objectionable books and clubs from public schools.
While most legislation in this realm to date has targeted what’s taught in K-12 public schools, this bill and other efforts in Florida have gone a step further by seeking to regulate the world of state-funded higher education — creating what critics say are new and dangerous threats to academic freedom, with broad and vague wording that leaves efforts to research and teach a variety of disciplines in doubt.
“This bill would cripple the long-standing freedom universities have to design and teach a curriculum based on the development of academic disciplines,” Cary Nelson, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois and past president of the American Association of University Professors ,who has taught multiple courses on Jewish issues, told JTA.
In a recent subcommittee hearing on the bill, Republican state Rep. Alex Andrade, who co-authored the legislation, said, “I believe that state universities should be focused on teaching students how to think, not what to think.” He said the bill’s banning of “radical” ideologies referred to “a system meant to direct and promote certain activism to achieve a specific viewpoint.”
Efforts to limit the material taught to children and college students are underway in several states. But Florida has an especially large population of Jewish students. The University of Florida stands atop Hillel International’s ranking of public colleges with the highest proportion of Jewish students, and the University of Central Florida has the third-largest. Florida State University, Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University and the University of South Florida also rank in the top 60.
H.B. 999 would affect education at those schools in other ways, too. The bill, which recently advanced to committee, would overhaul the state’s post-tenure review process, so that instead of checking on a faculty member’s research productivity every five years, as is currently the case in the state, tenured professors could face reviews “at any time for cause” including “violation of any applicable law or rule.”
The result, one academic in the state said, would be “open season on faculty,” who could be out of a job if their university’s board — which, in public schools, is beholden to the governor — disagrees with their syllabus.
Andrade rejected the idea that H.B. 999 would undercut Jewish studies in Florida.
“Outsiders are wrong. Ethnic studies are not affected by the bill either by the bill’s intent or the bill’s language,” Andrade wrote in an email to JTA, accusing the bill’s critics of “lying and claiming that Florida’s leaders have tried to ban teaching black history in schools.”
The state’s only Jewish Republican legislator, state Rep. Randy Fine, did not return a JTA request for comment on whether he supports the bill. Fine has promoted similar culture-war legislation in the past, including a bill he co-authored in February that would prohibit all K-12 schools in the state from referring to either students or employees by pronouns that do not correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth.
With a Republican-dominated House and Senate, some form of H.B. 999 seems likely to reach DeSantis’ desk. (A parallel bill in the state Senate does not contain wording on critical theory.) But there is strong opposition from the academic community. Groups including the American Historical Association, the American Association of University Professors and Florida’s statewide faculty union have harshly condemned the bill and urged lawmakers to oppose it.
The American Historical Association’s statement on the bill this month calls it a “blatant and frontal attack on principles of academic freedom and shared governance central to higher education in the United States.” More than 70 academic, historical and activist organizations co-signed the statement.
The executive committee of the Association for Jewish Studies signed a different statement authored by the American Council of Learned Societies, decrying the bill as an “effort to undermine academic freedom in Florida.”
“If it passes, it ends academic freedom in the state’s public colleges and universities, with dire consequences for their teaching, research, and financial well-being,” the statement said of the bill. “Academic freedom means freedom of thought, not the state-mandated production of histories edited to suit one party’s agenda in the current culture wars.”
Asked for comment on the bill, Warren Hoffman, the executive director of the Association for Jewish Studies, pointed to the statement.
Rachel Harris, director and endowed chair at Florida Atlantic University’s Jewish Studies program, is in her first semester at the university, having just arrived from the University of Illinois. “I’m now wondering if that was a terrible mistake,” she joked. (Harris is spending this term in Israel, researching on a Fulbright fellowship.)
Still, Harris said she was “confident” that legislators would “continue to support educational commitments in the state,” noting that Florida has a Holocaust education mandate for K-12 public schools. Her Boca Raton university is currently building an expanded center for Jewish and Holocaust studies, funded by private donors. H.B. 999 in its current form would prohibit universities from teaching critical theory concepts even when such programs are privately funded.
Despite what he described as a few students at the Jewish Studies center who are concerned about the new bill, Goda said he did not think the legislation would change the experience of Jewish students on his campus.
“Jewish kids these days are really choosing universities based on whether or not Jewish kids feel comfortable there,” he said. “And I would argue that [the University of Florida] is a very welcoming campus for Jewish kids overall. There are strong Jewish institutions associated with the campus.”
Instead, he feels the bill’s real effects would be felt in the state’s ability to recruit faculty and staff while its legislators jeopardize academic freedom, tenure and other lodestars of the humanities. He said, “The real question to me is how and in what way it’s going to be enforced.”
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The post A Florida bill attacking ‘critical theory’ in higher education has the state’s Jewish academics worried appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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What the ‘synagogue of Satan’ slur tells us about Christian antisemitism
The man charged with arson in the burning of Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, Miss., called the institution a “synagogue of Satan” in an interview with authorities, according to an FBI affidavit.
The phrase, originating in the New Testament book of Revelation, has been used in recent years to attack Jews, making its way into graffiti on Jewish institutions, antisemitic conspiracy theories and in far-right commentator Candace Owens’ criticism of Jewish figures.
But its meaning is not necessarily consistent: “Synagogue of Satan” has been used to refer to a supposed Jewish conspiracy to control the U.S. government, as a broad indictment of Jewish people as Satanic and as a narrow critique against Jewish people perceived as behaving badly. It has been used by Christian nationalists and by Nation of Islam leaders.
It remains unclear how the term made its way into the vocabulary of Stephen Spencer Pittman, who was arrested the day of the attack. Pittman, 19, followed dozens of Instagram accounts that share motivational Bible quotes and created a website promoting “scripture-backed fitness.” But his public social media activity apparently only turned antisemitic on Jan. 10, when he shared an antisemitic cartoon and confessed to setting fire to Beth Israel.
Origin of a slur
The book of Revelations, the last book of the New Testament, uses the phrase twice in a message of comfort to Jesus’ followers facing persecution, castigating “the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are not.” The implication is that the early Christians’ persecutors are perverting the meaning of Judaism to further their ends.
Christian scholars note that the author of Revelations was likely Jewish. Nevertheless, the phrase has come to serve as a catch-all to justify antisemitism by claiming that Jews are inherently Satanic, or out of favor with God’s plans for the world.
Its popularization as an antisemitic term may originate in the Christian Identity movement, a group of white evangelical extremists who believe that the true descendants of Adam are the white race, and the Jews are descendants of Cain — who in their view, is the offspring of Eve and Satan. The Christian Identity movement, which dates back to the early 20th century, peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, but it left a lasting impression on far-right theology.
The influential Evangelical leader Rev. Billy Graham — known as “America’s pastor” for his ubiquitous TV presence — infamously used the phrase in a 1973 conversation with then-President Richard Nixon, who at the time was complaining about Jews purportedly controlling the US media. (Graham apologized for his comments nearly 30 years later, after a recording of the conversation became public.)
Graham’s use of the term underscored a key connection between Christian Zionism and antisemitism. He told Nixon in that recorded conversation that while he supported Israel, Jewish people didn’t understand his real feelings about them, which is that there were two types of Jews: conservative ones who supported Graham and his ministry, and the “synagogue of Satan” — liberal-minded ones and especially Jews who worked in media.
Fuel on the fire
In recent years, the term has come to be applied more creatively. Controversial rapper Jay Electronica used it in a song in 2014. Nation of Islam leader Abdul Haleem Muhammad blamed the synagogue of Satan in 2016 for a supposed plot to de-masculinize American black men through marijuana. A group of neo-Nazi agitators that has flyered neighborhoods around the country with propaganda draped a banner over a Los Angeles freeway with the phrase in Oct. 2022.
If the term can be said to have a “power user” today, it would be Owens, the far-right commentator who has promoted a range of antisemitic conspiracy theories, including Frankism and the notion that Israel was behind Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Owens has accused Jewish conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and “radical Zionists” of being members of the synagogue of Satan.
But Owens is merely one of a slew of right-wing agitators who have accelerated use of the term in recent months.
Andrew Torba, the chief executive officer of the far-right social media hotbed Gab, posted an entire essay last fall — titled “Naming the Synagogue of Satan” — saying Christendom was under threat because the US had been captured “with AIPAC donations” and “Hollywood propaganda.”
As recently as Dec. 2025, a far-right podcaster in Colorado called for the execution of Gov. Jared Polis and other Jewish state democrats, referring to them as “Synagogue of Satan Jews.”
Just a few weeks later, Beth Israel Congregation, the oldest synagogue in Mississippi, was slapped with the moniker the day it went up in flames.
The post What the ‘synagogue of Satan’ slur tells us about Christian antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump Admin Designates Muslim Brotherhood Branches in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon as Terrorist Groups
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a US-Paraguay Status of Forces agreement signing ceremony at the State Department in Washington, DC, US, Dec. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt
The Trump administration has designated branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan as terrorist groups, the US State and Treasury departments announced on Tuesday.
“Today, as a first step in support of President Trump’s commitment to eliminate the capabilities and operations of Muslim Brotherhood chapters that pose a threat to the United States as described in Executive Order 14362, the United States is imposing terrorist designations against the Lebanese, Jordanian, and Egyptian chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Rubio said in a statement.
The announcement came nearly two months after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to determine whether to designate certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
Rubio explained on Tuesday that the State Department was “designating the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT), and the group’s leader Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh as an SDGT. Concurrently, the Department of the Treasury is designating the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood as SDGTs for providing material support to Hamas.”
The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has long been affiliated with the Brotherhood, drawing both ideological inspiration and even personnel from its ranks.
“These designations reflect the opening actions of an ongoing, sustained effort to thwart Muslim Brotherhood chapters’ violence and destabilization wherever it occurs,” Rubio added. “The United States will use all available tools to deprive these Muslim Brotherhood chapters of the resources to engage in or support terrorism.”
US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent similarly vowed to continue targeting the Islamist network.
“The Treasury Department is taking action pursuant to President Trump’s leadership by designating Muslim Brotherhood Branches as Terrorist Organizations,” he said in a statement. “The Muslim Brotherhood has a longstanding record of perpetrating acts of terror, and we are working aggressively to cut them off from the financial system. This administration will deploy the full scope of its authorities to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat terrorist networks wherever they operate in order to keep Americans safe.”
The State Department released a summary of the recent history behind the Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliate in Lebanon — described as “LMB (also known as al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah)” — since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
“Following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, LMB (also known as al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah) reactivated its al-Fajr Forces and launched rockets, in coordination with Hezbollah and Hamas, from Lebanon into northern Israel,” the State Department said. “In March 2024, the Israel Defense Forces launched an attack against al-Fajr Forces operatives who were preparing to carry out terrorist attacks against Israel. In July 2025, the Lebanese Army dismantled a covert military training camp that included LMB and Hamas militants.”
The State Department revealed that “under LMB secretary general Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh’s leadership, the group has pushed for a more formal alignment with the Hezbollah-Hamas axis.”
John Hurley, treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement that the Muslim Brotherhood “has inspired, nurtured, and funded terrorist groups like Hamas, that are direct threats to the safety and security of the American people and our allies.”
In November, Texas announced the designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, with its Attorney General Ken Paxton taking legal action in December to defend Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision. Last week, Paxton joined Texas to an alliance of states led by Virginia and Iowa challenging the nonprofit group American Muslims for Palestine, in an effort to “to combat Hamas terrorism.”
The State Department outlined the history of the Muslim Brotherhood’s associations with terrorist activity.
“In its 1988 founding charter, Hamas described itself as a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine,” the department said. “Hamas conducted the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that killed nearly 1,200 people, including hundreds of Israeli civilians and at least 31 US citizens, and resulted in more than 240 people being kidnapped, including US citizens. Hamas has been designated as an FTO since 1997 and an SDGT since 2001.”
The Muslim Brotherhood branches responded to the designations in statements.
“The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood categorically rejects this designation and will pursue all legal avenues to challenge this decision which harms millions of Muslims worldwide,” the Egyptian branch said.
The LMB called itself “a licensed Lebanese political and social entity that operates openly and within the bounds of the law.”
The Trump administration has not taken action against Turkey or Qatar, two other Middle East countries with long histories of steadfast support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
In December, Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, was interviewed about the increase in terrorist violence last year and noted the role of the Muslim Brotherhood as a key factor.
“I don’t think there’s any one factor, but a complicity of factors, primarily one being the rise, or the resurrection, of the Muslim brotherhood,” Emerson said. He described how the Brotherhood has “been around since 1928, but in this country, since 1964, obviously they have become very big in the United States, the Muslim Brotherhood, not in its form as the MB, as it’s called, but rather in front groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR] and about 150 other front groups operating in the United States.”
In its designation of the Muslin Brotherhood last year, Texas also proscribed CAIR as a terrorist group, describing it as a “successor organization” to the Brotherhood and noting the FBI called it a “front group” for “Hamas and its support network.”
“Around the world, there are probably more than 500 Muslim Brotherhood front groups or aid organizations that operate as ‘charities,’ but in fact, proselytize or commit acts of terrorism or funnel money to terrorism,” Emerson explained. “The rise of oil prices or the proliferation of oil money, especially by Qatar, which is the primary sponsor of Islamic fundamentalism around the world and brotherhood basically continues the operations of terrorists as full-time employees.”
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Israel Announces Departure From Several UN Agencies It Accuses of Bias Against Jewish State
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks at the UN headquarters in New York City, US, before a meeting about the conflict in Gaza, Nov. 6, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
Israel will immediately sever ties with several United Nations agencies and international organizations, the Foreign Ministry announced on Tuesday, accusing the bodies of exhibiting systemic bias against the Jewish state within the UN system.
In a statement posted on social media, the foreign ministry said that the decision was made following an internal examination after the United States last week withdrew from dozens of international bodies which, according to the White House, “no longer serve American interests.”
The move was approved by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who instructed officials to conduct a broader review to determine whether Israel should continue cooperating with additional international organizations, potentially leading to further shakeups.
The seven organizations that Israel will remove itself from right away are: the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children in Armed Conflict, UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UNWOMEN), UN Conference for Trade and Development, (UNCTAD), UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), UN Alliance of Civilizations, UN Energy, and Global Forum on Migration and Development.
The foreign ministry argued that each body targeted Israel unfairly.
After an examination and discussion conducted following the US withdrawal from dozens of international organizations, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs @gidonsaar has decided that Israel will immediately sever all contact with the following UN agencies and international…
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) January 13, 2026
Israeli officials said the decision to sever ties with these specific organizations was the result of a broader conclusion that parts of the UN system have been politicized and openly hostile to Israel. According to the foreign ministry, several of the bodies either singled out Israel for disproportionate condemnation, ignored or minimized Israeli civilian suffering, produced one-sided and ideologically driven reports, or provided platforms for critics while excluding Israeli participation altogether.
Other organizations were accused of undermining core principles of state sovereignty or exemplifying an unaccountable and inefficient UN bureaucracy. Collectively, the ministry argued, this repeated behavior led Israel with little justification for continued engagement and necessitated a reassessment of participation in forums it believes no longer operate in good faith.
Israeli officials framed the move as both corrective and overdue, arguing that a number of UN-affiliated bodies have abandoned neutrality and instead become platforms for political attacks against the Jewish state.
Several of the organizations cited in the US withdrawal announcement had already been cut off by Israel in recent years.
Israel ended cooperation with UN Women in July 2024, after the agency declined to address or investigate sexual violence committed against Israeli women during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel. The foreign ministry said the organization’s silence on the issue was unacceptable, adding that the former local head of UN Women concluded her tenure at Israel’s request.
Officials signaled that additional organizations could face similar decisions as Israel reevaluates the costs of participation in international forums it believes have become politicized.
The move comes on the heels of the US removing itself from 66 international organizations which, the Trump administration argued, behave “contrary to US national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty” and promote “ideological programs that conflict with US sovereignty and economic strength.”
“These withdrawals will end American taxpayer funding and involvement in entities that advance globalist agendas over US priorities, or that address important issues inefficiently or ineffectively such that US taxpayer dollars are best allocated in other ways to support the relevant missions,” the White House said in a Jan. 7 statement.