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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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Jewish treasures stolen by Nazis 88 years ago come home, thanks to an Arizona synagogue
(JTA) — What could one purchase with boxes of Crisco, bags of coffee and cartons of cigarettes in chaotic postwar Germany?
For Moishe Saksenhaus, a young Holocaust survivor from Belarus, the answer was: two Jewish ritual textiles, hundreds of years old.
The seller said he’d stolen them himself from a burning Berlin synagogue on Nov. 9, 1938 — the November Pogrom, commonly called Kristallnacht.
Moishe brought those two items — a Torah wimple, or sash, and a parochet, or Torah ark curtain — with him to America, taking them out of their suitcase only on special occasions. After Moishe’s death in 1993, his family donated them to his synagogue, Temple Chai in Phoenix, Arizona. They remained on display there until the building was deconsecrated in 2026. The congregation moved to a new location in nearby Scottsdale this spring.
Last week, nearly 88 years after Kristallnacht the two items made their way back to Berlin.
In a ceremony at the site of the New Synagogue Berlin Foundation-Centrum Judaicum museum and archive, on Oranienburger Strasse, Associate Rabbi Bonnie Koppell of Temple Chai handed them over to Berlin Jewish Community president Gideon Joffe.
“There were people who felt individually attached to the items” in Phoenix, Koppell told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a phone interview before her trip. “But ultimately, I think everyone realized that they belonged in their home. If the people from whom they were stolen wanted them back, that was where they belong.”
The handover took place Oct. 22 in the presence of Joffe, Rabbi Gesa Ederberg, historian Rabbi Andreas Nachama, members of the Berlin community and 29 visitors from Arizona.
“It’s been a very moving and touching journey, for both our guests from the United States and for these historical items,” said Nickolai Todorov, a Berlin Jew who accompanied the U.S. visitors as a tour guide. “It was just a special thing to be an eyewitness to.”
Rabbi Bonnie Koppell, left, and Sandy Koppell examine the Torah curtain (parochet) and Torah wimple during the handover ceremony at the New Synagogue Berlin–Centrum Judaicum, Oct. 22, 2026. (Nicolai Froundjian)
The large parochet is embroidered with the text of the Kiddush, the Jewish blessing over wine, in versions for the Sabbath and holidays. Along the lower edge of the text is what might be the signature of the artist, in Hebrew: “This handiwork of mine is not to bring me honor, rather to bring merit for the multitudes in accord [with the biblical verse] ‘And Yitzchak went out to pray at the field’ — Yitzchak Itzik ben C’harad Yehuda Leib z“l [of blessed memory] from Rivnitz,” a town in Moldova whose small Jewish community dated back to at least 1800.
The highly decorated wimple, which would have been used to bind a Torah scroll, bears a blessing for a child named Yitzchak “Itzik” ben Kavod Ha-rav Gistori, likely embroidered in honor of his brit milah, or ritual circumcision.
A spokesperson for the Berlin Jewish community, an umbrella for several congregations of various denominations, told JTA in an email that its experts had been unable to confirm which pre-World War II synagogue the Torah curtain came from, but that it would be added to the Centrum Judaicum collection. There are plans to display the wimple at the community center on the site of the former Fasanenstrasse synagogue.
Sol Saksenhaus, 72, a retired special-ed teacher, is one of those Arizona congregants who felt sad to let the objects go. It was his father who had bought them, protected and carried them across the ocean to his new home in America. Sol and his brother had grown up with these objects, which had taken on an aura of sacredness.
But they are “being given back as a sign of love from our community, to light them up again,” he told JTA in a telephone interview from Phoenix. “I can live with that, and I know my parents in heaven can live with that, too.”
Sol’s parents, Moishe and Rosa Saksenhaus, had escaped the Warsaw Ghetto through the sewers, and joined with partisans to commit acts of sabotage against the Germans. The Soviets eventually deported them to Siberia, where their first child died. After the war, Moishe and Rosa made their way back west, following American army lines and ending up in a Displaced Persons camp in the town of Feldafing, Germany.
Moishe, street-smart and multilingual, got a job translating for the U.S. military in Traunstein, Sol related. His father told him he became involved with black market activities, such as collecting British Army bicycles and having them sent to Palestine.
“My dad may have had a little bit of a reputation as one of the go-to guys, that if you wanted something, my dad knew how to get it,” Sol said.
Which may be why this particular German man approached him one day.
“He said he was a medical doctor. He kept approaching my dad with pictures” of the Jewish objects, Sol recounted. His father recalled the man’s name as “Ahgar.” He’d complained about conditions under American occupation: “’We don’t get anything; we’re on limited rations,’” the man told Sol’s father. “My dad said he was arrogant, and that he wanted the stuff he used to have from before.”
“He threatened my dad: He says, ‘I was part of the patrol that went into the temple’” on Fasanenstrasse in Berlin. He claimed to have taken the two items during the raid, and threatened to destroy them if Moishe did not procure Crisco, coffee, flour, cigarettes and cigars.
“My dad pretty much told him to ‘get the f–k away. I can’t look at you.’ But the guy was persistent. And the trade happened.”
Moishe Saksenhaus brought the objects to the U.S. when he and Rosa emigrated. “He cherished them, but he didn’t know what he was going to do with them,” said Sol. On rare occasions his father would show them to the family. “When that thing came out, it was like opening the holy ark… I kind of like froze, and just watched the emotions” on the family’s faces.
Sol’s father died in late 1993. There was a rise in Holocaust denial at the same time, Sol recalled; Deborah Lipstadt’s book, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,” was published that June. It was also the year that Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film “Schindler’s List” came out, sparking new interest in the Holocaust and its legacy. His mother and aunt decided to donate the tapestry and wimple to Temple Chai, to help with Holocaust education. Before handing the tapestry over to Rabbi William Berk, then the temple’s spiritual leader, Rosa Saksenhaus tore the swastika off an old tag on the tapestry. “This is not going into a temple like this,” she told her son.
The centuries-old Jewish ritual textiles, stolen during Kristallnacht in 1938 and traded after the war to a survivor for coffee and tobacco, are returned to the Berlin Jewish community during a ceremony at the New Synagogue Berlin–Centrum Judaicum, Oct. 22, 2026. (Nicolai Freundjian)
Sol recalled that Berk sent the items to an expert at the University of California in Los Angeles, who determined they were from the 16th century. Berk, who moved to Israel with his family in 2007 after more than two decades with the congregation, could not be reached for comment.
And so the tapestry remained hanging on the synagogue’s north wall. Rosa died in 1999. In 2006, Bonnie Koppell was installed as associate rabbi. In 2022, Rabbi Emily Segal took on the role of senior rabbi.
Two years ago, Sol brought a friend to see the wimple and the tapestry.
“I had seen these objects in our sanctuary for 30 years, knowing only that they had been ‘rescued’ during Kristallnacht,” recalled Joan Neer, assistant to Koppell, who heard Sol’s story for the first time that day. “In reality they were brutally taken,” she said.
The encounter “ignited my curiosity and set me on a journey to uncover their story,” Neer told JTA in an email. The more she learned, the more she became convinced: “It would be great if we could return them to the Jewish community in Berlin,” she wrote to Koppell and synagogue president Debbie Berkowitz.
“What began as a simple conversation in my office has become a journey of discovery, connection, and restoration,” she said.
Once the Berlin community said yes, the task of packing and transporting the objects began. The large tapestry was wrapped in artisanal paper and shipped.
“We had an AirTag on it, so we watched it sitting in the Cologne airport,” said Koppell. “And then it got moved to the customs building.”
“Then we got word that they wanted €5,000 [$5,567] in [customs] tax. And that if we didn’t pay it, they were sending it back in five days.”
The German Jewish community stepped in and used its tax-exempt status to get the package released, she said, adding that she carried the wimple in her hand luggage.
“We have come to remember, to learn and to return something that has traveled a very long road,” she told the Berlin Jewish community on Oct. 22. “This time, they are going home.”
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Israel revokes travel permissions for Brad Lander, American rabbis
(JTA) — Israel revoked travel authorizations for several American rabbis, activists and Jewish New York politician Brad Lander following their work last week with Palestinians harvesting olives in the West Bank.
Emails from Israel’s immigration authority, shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, told the recipients that their electronic travel authorizations had been “revoked” following “a change in circumstances in your case.” No further reason was given.
A spokesperson for Lander, a Democratic congressional candidate whose detention by Israel last week sparked an international uproar, confirmed to JTA that his ETA was revoked following his detention.
The spokesperson added that Lander “intends to try to get it back” in order to join a planned congressional delegation with the liberal Zionist lobby J Street in February 2027. Lander is widely expected to win his race next week given that his district is heavily Democratic.
In a longer comment to the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents on Tuesday, Lander said Israel’s actions were “petty” and “one small step in this much larger infrastructure of occupation and ethnic cleansing.”
The travelers had been working at a Palestinian olive farm near an Israeli settlement when they were detained by Israeli authorities. T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights group, and the other participating Jewish groups said they were there to help Palestinian farmers harvest olives that the farmers had been unable to access for three years.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah, told JTA that she estimated “more than half” of the approximately 60 Jews detained last week have had their ETAs revoked over a span of several days. Some received notice while still in Israel, though they were allowed to leave without incident.
“It feels pretty random,” she said.
Jacobs said that number includes Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist rabbis, as well as progressive Jewish activists. Also joining the olive harvest group were Israelis who had grown up in settlements and others who had lost family in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, according to a fellow participant.
Foreign visitors are required to hold ETAs to enter Israel. They are typically acquired by tourists, volunteers and business travelers for short-term stays. The process to apply for one is usually quick, involving the payment of a small fee online, and applicants tend to be approved within hours.
It is highly unusual for Israel, which allows almost anyone who can demonstrate Jewish heritage to become a citizen, to take steps to restrict the travel of diaspora Jews. The government has been cracking down more in the last year on ETAs for visitors who protest in the West Bank, Jacobs said. Israel over the weekend denied entry to Rabbi Alissa Wise, an American who leads the left-wing group Rabbis For Ceasefire, Wise told the Religion News Service.
Jacobs said Israel’s actions toward the American Jewish clergy in the group were especially troublesome to her in light of right-wing targeting of liberal Jewish movements in the country.
“They’re saying, ‘Actually we only want Jews who have certain political positions. This is not going to be a safe place for all Jews,’” Jacobs said. “They’re saying, ‘We actually don’t care about the mainstream of American Jewry.’”
Representatives for Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority, which processes ETAs, did not return a JTA request for comment. The country is holding elections Tuesday.
Rabbi Marisa James of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York was among the clergy to have their ETAs revoked following their detention. James told JTA that she received the notification while at the airport on Sunday preparing to leave Israel.
“It’s just so sad to me,” James said. Her ETA had been valid through March 2027. For Jews traveling to Israel in the past, she said, “there’s never really been a political litmus test.”
James lived in Jerusalem for five years, working for part of that time with Encounter, a progressive group that arranges tours of the West Bank for American Jews. In her many times crossing into the territory, she said, she had never before encountered resistance from the Israeli military, until last week’s harvest.
She said the military had shown up at the harvest site to turn the activists away. They held James and her fellow international activists for several hours, though Lander was released quickly.
A statement earlier this week from the government office said Israel had deported 11 visa holders, including Americans, from the country following clashes with the Israel Defense Forces during a different protest in Hebron.
The Jews who had their ETAs revoked are allowed to reapply for new authorizations but are unsure of what would happen if they did. Jacobs said she was “hopeful” that a new Israeli government would grant authorizations to the group if they were to reapply.
“I hope there will be a government that actually cares about its relationship with diaspora Jews,” she said.
Just prior to her ETA being revoked, James had been cheering on Israelis arriving at the airport to cast election ballots. Israel does not have absentee voting, and many Israelis assume that the tens of thousands of citizens who have arrived there in recent days are motivated by opposition to the current government.
James, too, is hopeful that a new Israeli government would be friendlier to progressive Jewish visitors whom she says are trying to fight for a better future for the country.
“We feel deeply connected to the place and deeply invested in its future,” she said. “I always grew up thinking, well, that’s what they want, right?”
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The real winner in Israel’s elections may be the haters
The world has been fixated on Israel since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, Jerusalem’s defensive, retaliatory wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and the tsunami of global antisemitism that has resulted from them all. And now, more than three years on, arrives a referendum not merely of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — but of Israelis themselves, and the nation they believe they are today and still hope to become.
This week’s election takes place as Israel has never been more prosperous or secure. Just last week, the Bank of Israel announced that the nation’s economy is predicted to grow a robust 5.4 percent this year — surging to 7.5 percent in 2027. That puts Israel in the same league as vastly-larger — and still modernizing — countries like Vietnam and India. Meanwhile, Israel has withstood round after round of ballistic missile attacks from Iran — and to a lesser extent, the Houthis in Yemen — while effectively defanging the Iran-backed terror networks operating along its borders. Israel, in other words, is doing just fine.
But none of that really matters to the legions of global politicians, commentators, columnists and diplomats now opining over what they’re endlessly describing as the most important general election in Israel’s 78-year history. “Seismic,” is how the Australian Broadcast Company termed the campaign recently; “An Election Like no Other,” declared The New York Times.
Because what matters is not the defeat of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the potential accompanying regime change that many believe would deliver a much needed political reset after nearly three decades of his hawkish, right-leaning, confrontation- and allegedly-corruption filled rule.
Nor would it matter if Netanyahu’s chief rival, Yashar Party-leader Gadi Eisenkot, were to triumph this week, riding a wave of anti-Netanyahu sentiment that has thrust the former IDF Chief of Staff — whose son and a pair of nephews perished in Gaza — into the current front-runner position. (The two were deadlocked, based on exit polls, when this article was published.)
Described as a gruff and unpolished political newcomer, a victory for Yashar — which means “straight” or “honest” in Hebrew — would mean an end to Bibi-ism, which would matter greatly within Israel. But, ultimately, an Eisenkot win would be of little consequence beyond Israel’s borders.
Because even if Eisenkot were crowned Prime Minister, a big if, Israel’s public face might change, but its core fundamentals would remain relatively the same. Make no mistake, Eisenkot is no dove — he opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state and supports some West Bank settlement expansion. He’s committed to maintaining Israel as a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. And as part of Netanyahu’s government during much of the first year of the Gaza war, he’s determined to defeat Hamas just as forcefully as Bibi. Eisenkot even defended Netanyahu this summer after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani branded the Prime Minister a “war criminal,” calling such accusations “pure antisemitism.”
In fact, for Israeli Jews, security and foreign affairs are their chief concerns this election cycle, according to a September report from the Israel Democracy Institute. And whether Bibi or Eisenkot manages to form a coalition in the coming days (or even weeks, if it takes that long), neither will ever allow their nation’s safety to be so near-fatally compromised again.
And this is ultimately what the globally Israel-obsessed really care about: the legitimacy and inviolability of the nation itself — and the desire to see both as fatally compromised as possible. For Israel’s adversaries — whether on TikTok or in the UN — the goal has never been merely an end to Bibi, but an end to Israel and Zionism. Mamdani has repeatedly said so himself; he will never support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation – and no Israeli leader will ever let that happen.
Which is why, just as the coordinated effort to “dismantle” Israel and Zionism kicked into gear even before the first Hamas madman crossed into Israel three Octobers ago, the campaigns to dismiss the results of this week’s election by Israel’s enemies are already hard at work long before the first vote has been cast.
“Israel’s Elections Can’t Fix What Netanyahu Broke,” read a headline from the far-left Nation late last month. If this is what the anti-Zionists are saying in public, just imagine what they’re saying behind closed doors.
The coming weeks will, of course, see voters determining Israel’s future, but they’ll be in America not Tel Aviv. There, most crucially in places like Michigan — where the openly anti-Zionist Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed may triumph — the midterm elections on Nov. 3 could deliver a Democratic win that could compromise the ongoing arms shipments that are keeping Israel so prosperous and secure.
This would end the “complicity” that fuels anti-Zionist rage and deliver the “accountability” the anti-Zionists have long insisted is a first step toward quelling that furor. And whether it’s Netanyahu’s night or Eisenkot’s morning this week, ending American weapons transfers could also mean an end to Israel — which is what the anti-Zionists have always really wanted.
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