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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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Toronto Jewish Community Shaken After 3 Synagogue Shootings in Less Than a Week
People attend Canada’s Rally for the Jewish People at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, in December 2023. Photo: Shawn Goldberg via Reuters Connect
Two synagogues in Toronto were targeted by gunfire overnight on Friday, marking the third shooting targeting Jewish institutions in less than a week and intensifying fears of a rapidly deteriorating security climate for Jews and Israelis across Canada.
Local police confirmed that the two synagogues — the Shaarei Shomayim synagogue in North York and the Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto (BAYT) synagogue in Thornhill, both in Ontario’s Greater Toronto Area — suffered gunfire attacks, with multiple bullet holes found in their front windows and exterior walls.
The incidents came just four days after another attack in Toronto, in which a Jewish-owned restaurant and a local synagogue were also hit by gunfire.
Canadian authorities assured the public that they are investigating the incidents and examining any potential links, but no suspects have been identified at this time.
On Sunday, the local Jewish community gathered to confront this relentless wave of antisemitic attacks, standing in solidarity, raising awareness of the growing threats, and calling for meaningful protections for their safety and places of worship.
During a news conference outside the Shaarei Shomayim Synagogue, Sara Lefton, chief development officer of the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto, described last week’s attacks as shocking yet not surprising, highlighting the escalating wave of antisemitic violence sweeping Canada.
“We are shaken to our core at this moment,” Lefton said. “It’s beyond anything that we could have imagined.”
She called on “every part of Canadian society” to take action against discrimination toward Jews and Israelis, stressing that government officials must coordinate with concrete commitments and funding to ensure the community feels safe and protected.
“It’s not enough to say our thoughts and prayers are with the Jewish community. This is not a Jewish issue; this is a Canadian issue,” Lefton said.
Toronto-born Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel also condemned the shootings, describing them as “antisemitic terrorism.”
“Anti-Jewish terror is a result of a global failure to confront antisemitism and the hatred directed at the Jewish people,” the Israeli diplomat wrote in a post on X.
Israel’s ambassador to Canada, Iddo Moed, urged Ottawa to take strong action to hold those responsible accountable and to strengthen security measures for Jewish institutions nationwide.
“The safety of Canada’s Jewish community must remain a national priority and a collective responsibility,” Moed said in a statement.
Toronto Deputy Mayor Mike Colle pointed out that he has been pressing both provincial and federal governments over the past three years to establish a task force specifically aimed at fighting antisemitism.
“[Local law enforcement] cannot do this alone. This is not a local police matter,” Colle said. “It’s not good enough to make speeches or propose laws now.”
Yet his initiatives stand in sharp contrast to Mayor Olivia Chow’s history of openly anti-Israel statements and positions. In November, several Canadian Jewish groups called on her to apologize and even resign for publicly calling Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip a “genocide”
Like most countries across the Western world, Canada has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Canadian Jews have been hit by a wave of antisemitic incidents, with at least 32 reported across five provinces in just the first week of January this year, according to data collected by the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith.
“Antisemitism in Canada is now accelerating at an increasing rate, spreading across provinces, platforms, and public spaces. That is a warning signal, and it demands more than piecemeal reactions,” the group wrote in a letter urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to create a Royal Commission that would explore the problem and draft policy proposals for solving it.
In one of the latest antisemitic incidents, a kosher restaurant and a neighboring business in Montreal, the largest city in the province of Quebec, were vandalized last week, with antisemitic graffiti and swastikas spray-painted across their walls.
In another troubling antisemitic incident, a 15-year-old Jewish student in Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, has been forced to continue his education online after his school failed to stop repeated antisemitic harassment and bullying.
According to B’nai Brith’s latest audit released last year, antisemitic incidents in 2024 rose 7.4 percent from 2023, with 6,219 adding up to the highest total recorded since it began tracking such data in 1982.
Seventeen incidents occurred on average every day, while online antisemitism exploded a harrowing 161 percent since 2022. As standalone provinces, Quebec and Alberta saw the largest percentage increases, by 215 percent and 160 percent, respectively.
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Walter Benjamin knew what Timothée Chalamet meant about opera and ballet
When production shots of Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme first graced the internet, one wag, taking note of the glasses, mustache and sweater vest, had an alternate project in mind.
“First look at Timothée Chalamet on SPIRITU MUNDI,” the post went, “a Walter Benjamin biopic focusing on his personal entanglements with other notable figures.”
The resemblance was there, but after an 11th-hour scandal in the leadup to Chalamet’s could-be Oscar win, it could be more than skin deep. The remark that got Chalamet in trouble came during a CNN and Variety-hosted conversation between the Dune star and pensive Lincoln pitchman Matthew McConaughey.
“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like ‘keep this thing alive’ when nobody cares about this anymore,” Chalamet said before kinda (sorta) backtracking.
The reprisals from the fine arts were swift. The Seattle Opera introduced the promo code “TIMOTHEE” for discounted seats to their production of Carmen. Ballet dancers called him out on the gram. But Chalamet’s comments, even without accounting for his own family’s connection to the New York City Ballet, are more nuanced in context. And that brings us back to Benjamin.
Chalamet was discussing the need to keep the cinema experience alive, and offered that Generation Z may be the future, citing an article that they now outnumber millennial moviegoers. What he may have meant to convey, though he couldn’t quite articulate it, was the utility of film as a populist art form, as opposed to the mediums of ballet and opera, which have a higher barrier to entry.
In Benjamin’s 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he makes the argument that film in particular excels at something works like paintings can’t do: “Meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation.”
With film being accessible, not ephemeral or reduced to a singular, rarefied artifact with a cult-like “aura,” the result is a “tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.”
Benjamin thought that when the ritualistic was stripped from a work of art, it could be used for political ends. Filmgoing was part of a progressive mass movement and led to “apperception,” synthesizing new ideas and experiences into existing ones, via distraction (zerstreuung in the German). It was, to him, with its reliance on montage, an ideal vehicle for a fractured age.
It’s interesting to consider this theory in an era of smartphones and at-home streaming. These are the newest incarnations of mass availability. In a sense, Chalamet’s argument is retrograde, wanting to preserve something outmoded and at risk of the same obsolescence as ballet and opera (recall how the Met Opera, just east of Chalamet’s old stomping grounds at LaGuardia High, has proposed selling its Chagalls to stay liquid; meanwhile they beam their offerings to movie theaters).
The nature of cinema has shifted, and the present cultic significance of an IMAX 70 mm run of something like Oppenheimer would seem to capture a new aura Benjamin didn’t anticipate. But then, Benjamin was a man of contradictions himself. He was sad at the loss of aura even as he celebrated the possibility of photography and film and had his own widest reach on the radio.
The Zoomers Chalamet is speaking of include the kids who dressed up in suits in a phenomenon called “Gentleminions” to see a screening of a Despicable Me spinoff film. They and the legions who came to The Minecraft Movie to scream at the phrase “chicken jockey” could rightly be said to be acting ritualistically, but it is of course collective, and the beleaguered movie theater employees who had to sweep up the deluge of popcorn could tell you these audiences were almost certainly distracted.
“The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention,” Benjamin wrote.
I should note that Chalamet got onto his opera and ballet tangent to begin with after McConaughey asked him if audiences today have a more limited attention span.
Chalamet seemed to bring up the surge in Gen Z attendance as a counterpoint, but the two are hardly mutually exclusive. You can still go to the movies and be, what Benjamin called, “an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”
Certainly this absent-mindedness is possible at the ballet and the opera — I direct you to the program origami from Citizen Kane. Benjamin was discussing static paintings like Picassos, and nothing so Dionysian as those live mediums. But they are not mass-produced and are more inaccessible now than in 1935, when they were still popular entertainment.
Film continues to have the ultimate edge in an age of distraction, both for creating something communal and prompting movement forward. It’s by now no means the most popular way to get a message out into the world, but the very uproar at Chalamet’s comments are a proof that film still matters.
As The New York Times’ dance critic Gia Kourlas acknowledged, “If a dancer said that a film didn’t matter, it would be like a tree falling in the woods.”
But enough of all this fuss. Give us the Chalamet Benjamin biopic, and let that angel of history be the new “chicken jockey.”
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For the ‘Jazz Rabbi’ of Connecticut, music and Judaism are both about tradition and improvisation
Greg Wall, who has juggled a career as a professional jazz musician while holding down a day job as a pulpit rabbi, has long been known as The Jazz Rabbi. Though he has retired from his job at the Beit Chaverim Synagogue in Westport, Conn., where he served as full-time rabbi for 10 years, he’s still at the synagogue seven days a week.
“Jazz is really a model of how to put your own spin on an inherited tradition,” Wall told me. “And that’s what the practice of Judaism has been for me. I’m part of the tradition, yet I’m trying to come to my own understanding and make certain connections myself, rather than just dial it in by rote.”
The Jazz Rabbi prays three times a day and studies Talmud study daily. But Wall is also devoted to another congregation: Every Thursday night the jazz faithful gathers at a VFW Post in Westport. The shows, known as Jazz at the Post, are organized by the Jazz Society of Fairfield County, a non-profit organization Wall co-founded. He’s the organization’s artistic director.
“This is a really nice chapter of my life,” Wall told me just he as he was getting ready to perform at a sold-out show in late February. “I have people calling me all the time to come play here. A lot of them are Grammy Award-winning jazz artists.”
The venue, which has a capacity of about 80, is usually sold out. Admission is $20 and there is no drink minimum, making it much more affordable than the typical night out at a commercial jazz venue, where admission is often $50 with a two-drink minimum. Because the Jazz at the Post shows take place at a VFW hall, veterans are admitted for $15, as are students.
Wall said that the fact that there’s no adversarial relationship with a restaurant trying to sell food and drink makes for a much better listening experience for jazz lovers.
“People come here to listen to the music,” he told me. “The people that I would go out and listen to in New York now come to Westport. I feel a little guilty that this place is two minutes from my house, but so be it.”
Back in 2009 when Wall got his first pulpit, a part-time gig at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue in Manhattan’s East Village, his group Later Prophets was touring regularly. During his time at the Sixth Street shul, Wall created the Center for Jewish Arts and Literacy, which brought klezmer, jazz and big-band music to the synagogue’s basement social hall, along with Yiddish language and Torah classes. The music series lives on at the Hudson Yards Synagogue in Manhattan, thanks to the efforts of the percussionist Aaron Alexander.
Later Prophets has been inactive in recent years but Wall still plays freelance gigs with various artists and occasionally performs with the guitarist Jon Madoff’s horn-heavy Afrobeat ensemble Zion 80, as well as The Elders, a jazz group led by Frank London, his friend and collaborator of nearly 50 years.
At the VFW hall in Westport, The Jazz Rabbi joins the visiting artists on the bandstand every week. Wall said the experience of playing with different acts, many of whom perform original compositions, has been good for his musical chops. One of the regulars at the Westport shows remarked that when Wall really gets into a groove, he rocks back and forth like he’s davening.
The Jazz at the Post shows have been happening since April 2022 but Wall has been performing locally since 2015. He started playing in the back room of a local eatery known as Restaurant 323. That gig came about after Wall’s impromptu performance at a fundraiser for the Bridgeport community radio station WPKN-FM.
“After he played a couple of bars of music at the WPKN benefit, I was just blown away by his talent,” recalled Richard Epstein, a Bridgeport dentist who serves as vice-president of the Jazz Society. Epstein’s wife Ina Chadwick, a former Forward editor, was running a spoken word performance series at Restaurant 323 and suggested Wall start a jazz night there.
Eric Bilber, a co-founder of the Jazz Society and a board member, said he discovered the Restaurant 323 scene when his wife went to pick up their daughter one night at the Metro-North station in Westport and didn’t come home right away. Their daughter Zina noticed someone playing a stand-up bass and decided they should check it out. They had such a great time that they stayed until the last set.
“And that was it,” Bilber told me. “I went back with them the following week and we’ve been going ever since. We started bringing our friends and everybody that we could think of to try to support this.”
Bilber realized there was a need to start a non-profit after the Westport jazz lovers had collected thousands of dollars by passing around a cigar box at performances to purchase a piano.
“One day he asked Wall, “Who owns the piano?’” Bilber recalled. “And we decided maybe we should start a non-profit.”
The newly created Jazz Society paid $11,000 for a Steinway Model M that was built in 1937. It had served as one of the house pianos at the Village Gate, the iconic Greenwich Village nightclub that closed in 1988.
If a piano can be said to have yichus, the Gate’s Steinway would certainly fit the bill. Thelonius Monk and Nina Simone are among several jazz greats who played it on live albums recorded at the Gate. Mose Allison, Count Basie, Bill Evans, Eddie Palmieri, Sun Ra and McCoy Tyner have banged on its keys too.
Wall had been tipped off to the Model M’s availability by his piano tuner. But all that wear and wear had taken its toll on the instrument, so in 2018 the Jazz Society came up with $15,000 to refurbish it.
Paul Haller, a Stanford-based piano restorer, recalled with a chuckle that Wall brought down a few local pianists to his shop when the repairs were completed. They put the piano through its paces for a couple of hours before declaring they were pleased with the restoration.
Ted Rosenthal, a pianist who teaches at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, performed at the Post with a quintet that included Wall in late February. During the intermission, he reminded me that being a jazz musician means that one night you could be playing at Carnegie Hall and the next night your gig might be at the Carnegie Deli.
“They’ve created a jazz club in a place that wasn’t designed to be a jazz club,” he said. “I think that’s what we need to do because obviously rents in New York are so high that some clubs don’t succeed because of the expenses involved. If you can find a place and build an audience, I think that’s a perfect way to go.”.
“This place is like being in Greenwich Village,” said Alan Phillips, a Westport resident who comes to the Jazz at the Post performances almost every week. “The world-class jazz that we get right here — it’s the best kept secret.”
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