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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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Who is Gadi Eisenkot, the Israeli politician who could dethrone Netanyahu?
Until recently, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett appeared to be the opposition figure best positioned to challenge Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s election this fall. But a new contender has emerged: Gadi Eisenkot, a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, whose newly formed Yashar! (“Straight!”) party is rapidly gaining popularity.
According to Israel’s public broadcaster KAN, Eisenkot’s party currently projects to win 21 Knesset seats, trailing Netanyahu’s Likud at 23. Bennett and Yair Lapid’s joint slate, Together, the duo that managed to win the 2021 elections, is polling at 17 seats. Several other major Israeli polls reflect a similar or even stronger position for Eisenkot. As of this writing, Eisenkot and Netanyahu are neck and neck on Polymarket as the most likely politician to become the next prime minister.
Amid Trump’s Iran deal, which left Netanyahu in the lurch and has been widely unpopular among Israelis, Netanyahu’s appeal as a prime minister who can ensure Israel’s security is beginning to slip. Only 11% of Israelis feel Israel won the war, and 52% feel Netanyahu’s conduct harmed Israel’s interests in the U.S.-Iran deal. A recent Channel 12 survey found that 58% of Israelis believe the country’s next prime minister should not be Netanyahu.
After Bennett and Lapid joined forces to run together this April, their popularity has been steadily decreasing. Since they announced their joint run, Eisenkot has been gaining roughly one seat per week in Israeli polling.
This reflects an important theme in Israeli politics: combining politicians does not necessarily combine their voters. Bennett, a right-wing Orthodox nationalist who has long opposed a Palestinian state, appeals to a different constituency than Lapid, a secular centrist who has expressed support for a two-state solution.
Some right-wing voters who have supported Bennett now may view him as too left-leaning for their tastes because of his alliance with Lapid. For Bennett, who was seen as someone who could take right-wing voters from Netanyahu, this is a real problem.
Enter Eisenkot: a security-focused centrist with an untraditional background. He grew up in Eilat as the son of Moroccan immigrants. If elected, he would be the first ever Mizrahi Prime Minister in Israeli history.
He did not serve in Sayeret Matkal, the elite special reconnaissance unit in the IDF that cultivated many future Israeli politicians, including Bennett and Netanyahu. Rather, he got his start in Golani, the IDF’s oldest unit. He slowly climbed through the ranks, spending his career within the security establishment before eventually becoming the chief of staff of the IDF in 2015.
His political career is relatively new. Eisenkot entered politics in 2022 as part of Benny Gantz’s National Unity party before breaking away to launch Yashar! in 2025. His time in politics, though short, has been free of scandal or feuds — beyond, of course, his frequent disagreements with Netanyahu.
Service for all
For many Israelis, Eisenkot’s public image is inseparable from personal loss. His son, Gal, was killed fighting in Gaza in 2023, and two of his nephews also died during the war. Their deaths have given Eisenkot a unique standing in a country where military service has profoundly affected many Israeli families in the last few years, especially following the Oct. 7 attacks.
This experience also resonates amid one of the most contentious debates in Israeli politics: whether ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students should continue receiving exemptions from military service. As reservists have been called up repeatedly since Oct. 7 and the IDF has faced manpower shortages, many Israelis have argued that the burden of military service is being shared unequally. Roughly 80,000 men aged 18 to 24 who are currently exempt are eligible to serve in the IDF.
According to the Israel Democracy Institute, only 9% of the Israeli public supports exempting the ultra-Orthodox from mandatory military service. Netanyahu’s coalition, which depends on ultra-Orthodox parties, has sought to preserve some form of exemption system.
Eisenkot not only faced profound personal sacrifice for his family’s military service, but he also runs on the platform “service for all,” which hopes to reform broad military exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox.
In May 2025, he shared his thoughts for the first time on a two-state solution, telling Channel 12, “I always speak in favor of a Jewish, democratic, strong, and powerful state, and from that, we should derive our decisions. I think a Palestinian state is not relevant after October 7.” He added, “We need to be very measured, build it from the bottom up, and certainly not talk about a state and a prize after this murderous event,” he said, referring to the Oct. 7 attacks. “Instead, we should make our considerations from a position of strength, take our time, and not decide from one moment to the next, certainly not talk about it now.”
One of the most visible criticisms of Eisenkot has been his lack of command of the English language. Eisenkot speaks English, though certainly not to the level of fluent proficiency of MIT-educated Benjamin Netanyahu or Naftali Bennett. Last week, a top Netanyahu aide, Jonatan Urich, posted a viral video on X splicing clips of Einsenkot speaking heavily accented English with Nethayahu’s major speeches at the UN and Congress.
Eisenkot responded to the video on a popular Israeli podcast, stating, “Where was Netanyahu’s excellent English on October 7?” he asked. “Where is his excellent English in strengthening the relationship between Israel and the United States, which this morning is at rock bottom?”
While Eisenkot’s party continues to soar in the polls, he has a long way to go before he will be able to dethrone Netanyahu, who has won six Israeli elections since 1996.
Israel’s next prime minister will not simply be the person who secures the most votes for their party. To govern, a coalition must command at least 61 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. To do this, political parties – though often ideologically different – must come together in the hopes of securing a majority number of seats in the Knesset.
Eisenkot’s principal rival for leadership of the anti-Netanyahu camp is Bennett. Still, both Bennett and Eisenkot have emphasized that their primary goal is to take down Netanyahu. When asked whether he would step aside for Eisenkot if that were necessary to form a government, Bennett replied: “I will do anything in the world to replace this very bad government. I will not let ego be a factor.”
The post Who is Gadi Eisenkot, the Israeli politician who could dethrone Netanyahu? appeared first on The Forward.
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My father was my hero and, when he was dying, I wrote this song for him
I was 18 when my dad discovered a lump on his neck. He’d been doing sit-ups with my mom in their bedroom.
He was 49 years old.
First, a word about my dad. It’s sad when anyone’s parent dies, more so when they are still young. Tragic when your dad is your hero.
If I had to describe my dad in one word, I’d say he was strong. Not only was he an Eagle Scout, a United States Marine, not only was he once a deputy sheriff at Medicine Lake with his own rifle, and not only did he have huge arms and could rip a phone book in half; my dad was strong enough to be self-effacing and terrifically kind. He was not didactic in the least. He taught his curricula in one way only, by example. The lessons I learned from him about the nature of strength, real strength, are ones I try to carry with me each and every day.
At the conclusion of every marital spat he’d have with my mother I used to hear him say, “Ok, Bevy, you’re right and I’m wrong.” I never knew what that meant. Was he folding, caving in? Where was his spine? His balls? I was never quite sure if there was just a trace of contempt or anger in that statement of his, or was it, as I’d learned much later, really a pure recognition that he’d seen things her way and that her way was just better?
It strikes me now that the essence of his strength, his manliness if you will, was a sense of self-effacement and humor that bordered on genius.
At 17, I took the liberty of hosting my girlfriend in my parents’ bed while they were away on a trip to Chicago. They’d come home a day earlier than expected and caught the two of us, just moments… afterwards. My dad was standing behind my mom, trying to bottle up his laughter. It was especially difficult for him to keep from laughing after my mother said in her serious voice, “Peter, I would hope that in the future you’d entertain your guests in your own room.” In my defense, my own room did not have a color TV set.
All of my cousins, even the ones that weren’t my dad’s blood relatives, were crazy about him. They sought his counsel like he was a tribal sheik. I remember many nights where one cousin or another would be huddled around our kitchen table with him. He wasn’t doling out advice. Advice is overrated anyway. Any asshole can give good advice. It’s the way my dad made you feel that made him so special.
At the time, I was playing in a calypso and reggae band with five grown men, and one woman, Cheryl, who played the Hammond organ. She’d come from Jamaica, the others from Trinidad. But that’s for another story.
I was also writing pop songs with my band Sussman Lawrence, supposedly having the time of my life. But I was in deep emotional pain.
My dad discovered a lump in the back of his neck in the autumn of 1979. It took the doctors a week to determine that he had stage-four lymphoma. They figured he had six months, tops. They were wrong by almost three years.
At the time I barely reacted to the news. I told myself it was strength, composure. I understood later it was something else entirely — a tendency to go inside myself, to stay as far away from my feelings as possible. It was as if I’d been playing a sort of double role. In some moments I was hypersensitive and deeply connected to the grief. In others, I was completely divorced from it. Some four years later, toward the end of my dad’s life, those two halves would finally collide.
It was 1983 and our band was in Amery Wisconsin, finishing our last set at a bar called The Country Dam. It was late and the crowd was so drunk they were falling over one another, screaming for one more chorus of “I’m Your Fireman.” At four in the morning I pulled up to my parents’ house behind my dad’s white ’83 Chrysler LeBaron. He’d gone all the way to Mankato with my mother to buy it.
Tired as I was, I couldn’t stop looking at that car, wondering how I’d feel about it when he died.
It was Father’s Day, and my mom had planned a big brunch for him in just a few hours. Cousins, aunts, and uncles — everybody wanted to be there to cheer him up. Even though my dad had outlived the doctors’ dire predictions by four years, we knew that the disease had progressed to the point where this was very likely his last Father’s Day.
I was pretty wound up from the performance the night before and since the sun was coming up anyway, I couldn’t see any reason to try and sleep. I picked up a guitar. It was an old acoustic that hardly played in tune. I started picking through some chords in a half-trance and singing softly to myself, just thinking about that LeBaron and how my dad really liked that car. The words came fast and the melody started to take on a shape. Each new line generated more melody, and the melody inspired more words.
“When no one is forgotten and nothing goes to waste, when sadness turns to laughter, when anger is defaced, you’ll start to know the way I feel about you.”
When a song comes to you like that, it’s best to get out of your own way — to be as detached as possible — and yet I couldn’t help feeling excited that this was a song for my dad. I thought, “At least now I won’t be the only fool at the brunch without a Father’s Day present.”
“And if I could, I’d run out into the world and tell every boy and girl to love before love takes itself away… just like I’m loving you this Father’s Day.”
I made a quick recording of the song, and I was so tired and so emotional that I started crying in the last chorus. I didn’t want to let everyone hear me blubbering on tape, so I reached over to erase it and sing it again, but at the last second I decided to leave it as was, tears and all.
The next morning I brought the cassette upstairs. The brunch was in full swing: The lox and the smoked whitefish had been taken out of the refrigerator and arranged on platters. The scrambled eggs and onions were warming on the stove. The cinnamon rolls and the cartons of Minute Maid were on the table, and the brunch-goers were trying their best to slap on their happiest faces.
I put the cassette in the stereo, and I swear it took no more than ten seconds for everyone to break down in tears and exit the room.
Now it was just my dad and me — both of us staring out the big picture window of our den, listening as the song played.
As it ended, we held each other and cried. Whatever façade of normalcy we’d been putting up over the last few years washed away in the emotion of that song. I’d wanted to say so many things to him, and for so long. Somehow the song expressed everything so well.
From that morning on, my dad carried the cassette around with him in his breast pocket.
He died a few months later on Thanksgiving night. We got a call from the hospital as we were sitting at the table; the turkey had never even been carved.
As tragic and sad as his death was, I’ve never felt remiss for not expressing how I felt.
This, I think, is not only the utility of music (a harsh word, I know), but its spiritual power — to say what cannot otherwise be said, and to leave nothing essential unspoken.
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Trump nominee defends college cartoon of Jewish student with devil horns at Senate hearing
(JTA) — President Donald Trump’s pick for general counsel of the agency that oversees federal workers’ labor rights testified in Congress on Wednesday that he does not believe a cartoon he published in college that depicted a Jewish student with devil horns was antisemitic.
Charlton Allen appeared at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for his confirmation hearing Wednesday afternoon. There, Sen. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona Democrat, pressed him about the cartoon.
“If you look behind me, you’ll see the front cover of an edition of the Carolina Review depicting Aaron Nelson, a Jewish candidate for student body president. Your magazine altered Nelson’s photo depicting him with the horns and a pitchfork. Inside the article says, ‘The difference between Aaron Nelson is simple. He’s Jewish.’” Gallego said. “Yes or no, Mr. Nelson. Do you stand by this depiction?”
The cartoon ignited a firestorm when it was published in the Carolina Review, a campus conservative magazine that Allen founded as an undergraduate at UNC. The magazine’s faculty advisor said he resigned after it went to print against his advice, and nearly two dozen Jewish faculty members pressed UNC’s chancellor to denounce the cartoon and censure the magazine, which he did.
Allen fended off allegations of antisemitism at the time and again during a 2014 hearing to confirm him for a position in North Carolina. He did so again on Tuesday.
“I would not say that it’s antisemitic,” he said. “We were the group that was calling for the equal treatment of all student religions.”
“If I were 30 years ago advocating for The Review, I would say, ‘don’t run that cover,’” he testified. “I think it was a mistake.”
According to reports from the time, Nelson had been accused by the Carolina Review of discriminating against a Christian campus group by voting not to fund it. He had voted in favor of funding a “majority” of other campus Christian groups while he was a representative in the student congress.
Facing backlash, Allen denied at the time that the depiction of Nelson with horns was meant to channel longstanding antisemitic stereotypes.
“Our cartoonist lampooned [Nelson] as such because her perception was that Aaron was evil,” Allen told the Duke Chronicle in April 1996. “Newspapers in the past few weeks have run cartoons lampooning public figures such as Gingrich, Pat Buchanan and even myself as ‘devils’ with horns and pitchforks. Where’s the public outcry over these cartoons?”
On Wednesday, Allen offered a slightly different explanation. He said the picture was meant to channel UNC’s historic and enduring rivalry with nearby Duke University, whose mascot is the “Blue Devil.”
“The cartoonist’s intention was to make an analogy to that,” he said.
In 2014, during his confirmation hearing ahead of his appointment for commissioner of the state Industrial Commission of North Carolina, Allen addressed criticisms of the cartoon by saying his grandfather had helped to liberate Jews in Europe from concentration camps during World War II, the Indy Week reported at the time.
Trump nominated Allen to the Office of the Special Council — the agency that protects whistleblowers from unlawful conduct — in May 2025 but withdrew the nomination less than a week later. In September, he nominated Allen to the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
Nelson, meanwhile, won the election handily to become UNC’s student body president. Now president of The Chamber, Chapel Hill’s chamber of commerce, Nelson did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment.
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