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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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After 9/11, Jewish volunteers kept watch over the dead. 25 years later, the grief remains.
In the aftermath of 9/11, New Yorkers found countless ways to help. They lined up in record numbers to donate blood, delivered meals and medical supplies to first responders, and opened their homes to strangers with nowhere else to go.
And then there were the people who sat with the dead.
Starting on Sept. 20, 2001, Jewish volunteers took four-hour shifts at the city medical examiner’s temporary morgue in lower Manhattan, reciting psalms and keeping watch over the remains.
Without fail, a member of the Jewish community was there — 24/7, for more than seven months.
They were sitting shmira, fulfilling the Jewish tradition of staying with the dead from the moment of passing until burial. The volunteers — some of them college students — sat with and prayed for each of the victims, whether or not they were Jewish.
“Right after 9/11, all the way down till the next May, it was never a missed moment,” Rabbi Allen Schwartz of Congregation Ohab Zedek, which organized the shmira, told the Forward. “We never had a problem filling a spot.”
A congregation responds
Like many houses of worship, Congregation Ohab Zedek, an Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side, mobilized after 9/11. Congregants collected masks, filled boxes with clothing, and set up an assembly line to make sandwiches for those in need.
Schwartz also recognized the importance of shmira — determined that the horror of 9/11 would not interrupt the tradition that brings dignity to the dead. He asked a congregant, recently retired shoe salesman Armin Osgood, to coordinate.
“When Rabbi Schwartz asked you to do something, you did it,” Osgood, now 91, told the Forward. “There was not a question at that point.”
Osgood sketched out a schedule on a big yellow legal pad and began filling it in with names. Many Ohab Zedek congregants signed up. Others heard about the effort through word of mouth, sometimes from friends of friends. Some traveled from out of state.
The group included people with different levels of religious observance. All that mattered to Osgood was that they were willing to help.
“People called, and they said, ‘I don’t speak Hebrew. I can’t read Hebrew.’ I said, ‘So read the Psalms in English.’ ‘Well, I’m in a congregation where women wear pants.’ I said, ‘So wear pants,’” Osgood said. “Nobody gets excluded. If they want to do it, I’ll find a way.”
Ely Razin, 35 at the time, was among the Ohab Zedek congregants who volunteered. He took a shmira night shift, reciting tehillim next to the remains and trying to concentrate on the meaning of the ancient words.
“It helped me feel like I was doing something,” Razin told the Forward. “The act of shmira, in and of itself, somewhat gives you a sense of personal peace.”
Rabbi Schwartz took a weekly Friday morning shift, where he found himself providing spiritual comfort to people of all faiths. He befriended a Protestant minister who was often there to pray with bereaved families. Once, a Catholic family, unable to find a priest, asked Schwartz to say the last rites.
Unfamiliar with the Catholic tradition, Schwartz recited the Jewish memorial prayer kel maleh rachamim in English.
“I don’t know what their last rites look like, but I said the [Jewish] prayer we say at the funeral,” Schwartz said. “So it was a kiddush Hashem. That was a very meaningful moment.”
Keeping the chain
Keeping the morgue staffed 24/7 was no easy task. It was even more difficult on Shabbat — partly because Ohab Zedek, on the Upper West Side, was too far from the morgue in lower Manhattan to walk.
An Ohab Zedek congregant reached out to Jessica Russak-Hoffman, then a senior studying English at Stern College, Yeshiva University’s women’s college. Its dormitories were within a few blocks of the morgue.
“My dad always said, ‘If a mitzvah lands on your lap, you’ve got to pick it up,’” Russak-Hoffman said. “So I grabbed a clipboard, and I went outside and started recruiting.”
She ended up enlisting more than a dozen women. One was Judith Kaplan, then a junior at Stern, who often took the midnight-to-4 a.m. shift — spending many Friday nights as a college student at the morgue.
Kaplan’s nearby apartment became a home base for the volunteers. She cooked lunch and dinner for those sitting shmira, many of whom were missing communal Shabbat meals to take their shifts.
“It’s not everybody’s cup of tea to do this kind of thing, so you have to find someone who has the stomach for it, and the emotional capacity for it,” Kaplan said. “This is not an easy mitzvah.”
As the months went on, the group had fewer volunteers. Kaplan began taking eight-hour shifts, sometimes in the dead of winter and in the middle of the night. Stern College security guards accompanied her on the walk to the morgue.
“I felt a very big responsibility,” Kaplan said. “I felt very strongly that if we can’t find someone to sit, then I have to do it. I didn’t want to break the chain.”
Russak-Hoffman also took night shifts. She recalled how, whenever a first responder’s remains were identified, everyone would pause, stand and pay their respects.
For Kaplan, those moments underscored how the Jewish volunteers had become part of the broader recovery effort. Shmira, she emphasized, was never about distinguishing Jewish victims from others.
“They could have told me that every single Jewish body was identified, and I still would have sat there,” Kaplan said. “It did not matter what your faith was or what your culture was — we were all there for the same reason.”
Looking back
There would never be a moment when all the victims’ remains were identified. But at some point, identifications slowed. Schwartz decided to end the shmira on Lag B’Omer — a Jewish holiday that marks the end of a mourning period.
But for so many of the volunteers, the shmira’s conclusion was not the end of mourning.
“I definitely spent the next 20 years looking at open sky and expecting planes to go by and hit things,” said Russak-Hoffman, who now lives in Seattle. “Every time a proper commercial plane went by without context, it flashed me back.”
Razin, who now lives in Israel, said similar emotions resurfaced for him after the Oct. 7 attacks. Sitting shmira is considered chesed shel emet, the highest level of mitzvah because it is truly selfless, as the dead cannot repay the act. But Razin came to understand that the ritual also serves the living.
“They’re there to help not only the person who’s departed, but the people who are left behind,” Razin said. “It put a frame around something that otherwise was incomprehensible and monstrous.”
For Kaplan, who now lives in Jerusalem, the experience was formative. The tehillim — its pages now held together with a hairband — became a keepsake of that time. She has since brought the prayer book to her wedding and to the birth of her child.
“That’s how meaningful the experience was for me,” she said.
Schwartz plans to reflect on 9/11 and its aftermath in his Rosh Hashanah sermon this year, which falls on Sept. 11. Twenty-five years later, he said, the volunteers’ mitzvot offer a reason for hope.
“This was barbaric evil on the part of some people, but it really brought out the most incredible goodness in many more people,” Schwartz said. “We shouldn’t give up hope in mankind.”
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The Disappearance of the “Reel”: Why Online Slots No Longer Look Like Slot Machines
For more than a century, a slot machine was easy to recognize. Three reels. A lever. A row of fruit, bells or lucky sevens. Pull, spin, stop. Even someone who had never played one knew exactly what the machine was supposed to do.
Open a modern online slot today and things can look rather different. Symbols fall from the sky. Winning icons explode. Grids change size. Multipliers appear from nowhere. Sometimes there is barely anything that looks like a reel at all.
So, when exactly did slots stop behaving like slot machines?
The reel survived its own disappearance
The change did not happen overnight. Mechanical reels began losing their practical importance decades ago.
In 1976, Fortune Coin Company developed an early video slot using a modified 19-inch Sony television. Instead of watching actual wheels rotate behind glass, players watched electronic representations of reels. The physical reel was gone, but designers kept its visual language. It made sense. Players already understood it.
Digital technology eventually made that imitation unnecessary. A screen does not have to obey the laws of a spinning cylinder. Once developers embraced that fairly obvious fact, slot design became much stranger — and more creative.
A good milestone is NetEnt’s **Gonzo’s Quest**, released in 2010. Its Avalanche mechanic made winning symbols disappear before new ones dropped into their places. One wager could therefore produce a sequence of cascading results rather than the familiar spin-stop-spin rhythm. The game still had a 5×3 layout, but the screen was beginning to behave more like a dynamic puzzle board.
Then the grid started fighting back
The next step was to make the reels themselves unstable. Big Time Gaming’s Megaways feature was a big sample. The launch of Bonanza in 2016 helped to build a system with the number of symbols on the reels being variable, creating up to 117,649 winning combinations. It was then licensed to many other developers, and Megaways was the result.
It’s a significant design change. With the old machines, players would need to watch the set paylines. Current games can have them grasp clusters, varying reel heights, tumbling sequences or symbols wherever on a grid. The similarity, but the old machine is a distant cousin.
One such sweet bonanza is Sweet Bonanza 1000. In Pragmatic Play’s 2024 title, players earn prizes for getting 8 or more matching fruit or candy symbols with a 6×5 grid. Symbols are removed and other symbols drop and when you get a multiplier in the bonus round they can be worth 1000x. It remains a slot game, but in terms of graphics, it has much more in common with a cascading mobile puzzle game than a traditional three-reel game. The reel has not exactly died. It has been chopped up, covered in candy and taught new tricks.
Why designers abandoned the old machine
There is a simple reason: screens offer freedom.
A mechanical reel has physical limits. A digital grid does not. Developers can make symbols disappear, expand, split or trigger another sequence without asking players to press spin again. Themes can also become part of the mechanics rather than decoration pasted around three rotating wheels.
Recent releases show how normal this language has become. Pragmatic Play now openly describes games using terms such as “cluster-pays,” “tumbling reels” and “multiplier spots.” Big Time Gaming continues producing Megaways titles built around changing symbol configurations and cascades.
And perhaps that answers the original question. A slot stops *looking* like a traditional slot when the reel is no longer the main visual event.
But it does not necessarily stop being one.
The reel has become less a piece of machinery than a design ancestor. You can still see its DNA in columns, symbols and randomized outcomes. What changed is the canvas around it.
The funny part is that the slot machine escaped its physical cabinet only to discover it never really needed the reel in the first place.
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With Jewish New Yorkers on edge, Julie Menin says new protections will help keep them safe over High Holidays
As Jewish New Yorkers prepare for the High Holidays amid continued worries about rising antisemitism, City Council Speaker Julie Menin says her historic role as the chamber’s first Jewish leader has become even more important than she expected when elected in January.
In an exclusive interview with the Forward earlier this week, Menin pointed to her synagogue-protection law and successful fight against the Met’s John Galliano exhibition as proof that having a Jewish leader with a powerful bully pulpit matters.
“It’s incredibly important at this pivotal time,” Menin said. “We need to be standing up loudly, clearly, unequivocally in the fight against antisemitism.”
Many Jewish leaders see Menin, 58, as a check on Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose rhetoric on Israel and handling of antisemitism have strained relations with parts of the Jewish community.
Mamdani has met in recent weeks with Jewish leaders and visited the Orthodox-populated neighborhood of Borough Park. The administration was expected to release a comprehensive citywide strategy to combat antisemitism before the High Holidays. Mamdani’s spokesperson did not respond to an inquiry about the rollout timetable. Menin said that City Hall has not briefed her on its plan.
Services at synagogues across the city this year come against a backdrop of rising antisemitism. Synagogues already spend millions of dollars a year on security, a reality her children have noticed, Menin said. Recent NYPD statistics showed that in the first seven months of 2026, anti-Jewish incidents rose 8.5%, and 57% of the reported hate crimes in the city involved Jewish victims. “This has now become the new normal,” she said. “It’s terrible. It is just shameful that we have entered this new era.”
Menin is scheduled to speak at Central Synagogue, the site of an antisemitic attack last month, at its evening services before heading to a friend’s home, where she and her eight-year-old daughter will bring an apple pie they bake together as an annual tradition.
A High Holidays test
Menin said she hopes the Council’s recent efforts to combat antisemitism will help Jewish New Yorkers feel safer and more protected as they head to synagogues for the High Holidays.
One of Menin’s first legislative priorities after taking over the Council was a package of bills that included protest protections for houses of worship, a hate-crime reporting hotline, Holocaust education initiatives and additional security assistance. “I do see that we have made some real progress,” Menin said.
The most controversial part of Menin’s agenda focused on limiting protests outside synagogues. The Council ultimately passed legislation requiring the NYPD to develop a plan for establishing a buffer zone when demonstrations involve harassment, intimidation or physical threats. Mamdani, who had raised concerns about restricting protests, allowed the synagogue measure to become law without his signature.
The law now faces its first big test. The High Holidays coincide with the annual United Nations General Assembly, which is expected to draw protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, encouraged by Mamdani.
Menin said the new law should help protect people entering and leaving synagogues if tensions rise around Netanyahu’s visit, and demonstrations cross the line into intimidation. “I think that bill is really important in terms of making a difference to assure congregants of their safety and security as they enter and leave,” she said.
Asked directly what she would say to Jewish New Yorkers who remain worried about Mamdani, Menin avoided criticizing the mayor by name. But she also offered a pointed message about the political climate. “It is incumbent to ensure that the rhetoric is turned down,” Menin said, because there remains a “heightened sense of fear within the Jewish community.”
On Wednesday, Mamdani and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a lifelong member of Central Synagogue who spoke at services after the attack, announced increased NYPD security outside synagogues and other Jewish institutions for the High Holidays. Mamdani acknowledged that some Jews are “understandably afraid to come together and celebrate openly,” and said their safety “during these sacred days is of the utmost importance to our administration.”
The power to speak out
Menin has also used her position to speak out beyond the Council chamber, pointing to her recent fight over a Metropolitan Museum of Art planned exhibition as an example of the power of her bully pulpit.
Menin scored a significant victory as fashion designer John Galliano — who has a history of antisemitic remarks — bowed out following mounting criticism. Menin said she privately warned museum officials before the exhibition was announced that she would oppose it. She later went public after realizing that others who objected were reluctant to speak out.
“They might have been upset by the decision, but they weren’t comfortable speaking out,” Menin said. “We can’t shy away from speaking out. We have to be loud.” Menin called the development “a huge victory in the fight against antisemitism.”
A wish for unity
When Menin became speaker in January, she told the Forward that she hoped to use the position to help bridge some of the deep divisions in the city. Nearly a year later, she said that mission has only become more urgent.
Menin traced her own path into public service to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when her Lower Manhattan business was devastated. She later chaired Community Board 1 and became involved in efforts to rebuild the neighborhood. What she remembers most from that period, she said, was a sense of unity that she believes New York has lost.
“Right now, it just feels very divided and very divisive,” Menin said.
As she approaches her first Rosh Hashanah as speaker, her wish for the new year is for some of those divisions to ease.
“As we really focus on the issue of atonement, we need to figure out how we can ensure the safety and security of the Jewish community at this very, very difficult time,” Menin said. “It’s my fervent hope and wish that we can try to galvanize the community together, and that we can bring along many of our allies who are not Jewish as well.”
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