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A Florida bill attacking ‘critical theory’ in higher education has the state’s Jewish academics worried
(JTA) — The University of Florida has more Jewish students than any other public college in the United States — and last week, one of them reached out to a professor, fearing that it would no longer be possible to study Jewish topics there.
Citing a graphic that had been making the rounds on social media, the student asked if it was true that a new bill working its way through the state legislature would remove all “Jewish Studies courses, majors and minors” in the state. The graphic was shared by several people with large online followings, including comedian D.L. Hughley, who has more than 750,000 followers on Twitter.
“I love my major and I can’t imagine switching to anything else,” the student wrote, according to Norman Goda, director of the university’s Center for Jewish Studies.
Goda wasn’t able to console the student. Like other Jewish academics in Florida who spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he doesn’t know whether H.B. 999 would affect Jewish studies on the state’s college campuses. Though the bill’s author — a Republican state representative — says that won’t be the case, the bill’s language is much less clear.
That’s because the bill’s current wording would forbid the state’s public higher education institutions from teaching or offering any major or minor based in “methodology associated with Critical Theory.” That prohibition, say academics and other critics of the bill, would make teaching courses in Jewish studies impossible — and would also outlaw many other fields in higher education.
Exactly what the bill means by “critical theory” is unclear. To academics, the term refers to a tool for analyzing society and culture, created in the 1930s by German Jewish academics, that encourages people to view the world through power structures, and to consider why they fall short. To political conservatives, it’s a relative of “critical race theory,” a watchword for those who want to inhibit classroom instruction about racism. An earlier version of H.B. 999 mentioned only critical race theory, not the umbrella theory.
“These people don’t know what they’re talking about,” said a Jewish faculty member at a Florida university, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation from the state government, regarding the lawmakers behind H.B. 999. “You’re putting people who don’t know what critical theory is, but have heard the words — and now you’re putting them in charge of universities.”
A university that completely purged such ideas from its classrooms, the anonymous faculty member said, “would be non-existent.”
The bill in question is the latest example of conservative-led state efforts to snuff out culture-war modes of thought like critical race theory and gender studies, often referred to euphemistically by lawmakers as “divisive concepts” in education. Such efforts have occasionally ensnared efforts to teach Jewish history and the Holocaust.
Attempts to legislate the classroom are particularly potent in Florida, where Republican governor Ron DeSantis, a likely presidential candidate, has frequently stated his desire to ban “woke” concepts from being taught in the state. (DeSantis has stated he will wait to see H.B. 999’s final form before he decides whether to sign it, but in a discussion with college administrators last week he continued to rail against what he called the “ideological agenda” of campus diversity, equity and inclusion programs.)
The state recently rejected the curriculum for a new Advanced Placement African-American Studies course in high schools, forcing the College Board to rework the class. Florida is also home to several active conservative “parents’ rights” groups that have lobbied to remove objectionable books and clubs from public schools.
While most legislation in this realm to date has targeted what’s taught in K-12 public schools, this bill and other efforts in Florida have gone a step further by seeking to regulate the world of state-funded higher education — creating what critics say are new and dangerous threats to academic freedom, with broad and vague wording that leaves efforts to research and teach a variety of disciplines in doubt.
“This bill would cripple the long-standing freedom universities have to design and teach a curriculum based on the development of academic disciplines,” Cary Nelson, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois and past president of the American Association of University Professors ,who has taught multiple courses on Jewish issues, told JTA.
In a recent subcommittee hearing on the bill, Republican state Rep. Alex Andrade, who co-authored the legislation, said, “I believe that state universities should be focused on teaching students how to think, not what to think.” He said the bill’s banning of “radical” ideologies referred to “a system meant to direct and promote certain activism to achieve a specific viewpoint.”
Efforts to limit the material taught to children and college students are underway in several states. But Florida has an especially large population of Jewish students. The University of Florida stands atop Hillel International’s ranking of public colleges with the highest proportion of Jewish students, and the University of Central Florida has the third-largest. Florida State University, Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University and the University of South Florida also rank in the top 60.
H.B. 999 would affect education at those schools in other ways, too. The bill, which recently advanced to committee, would overhaul the state’s post-tenure review process, so that instead of checking on a faculty member’s research productivity every five years, as is currently the case in the state, tenured professors could face reviews “at any time for cause” including “violation of any applicable law or rule.”
The result, one academic in the state said, would be “open season on faculty,” who could be out of a job if their university’s board — which, in public schools, is beholden to the governor — disagrees with their syllabus.
Andrade rejected the idea that H.B. 999 would undercut Jewish studies in Florida.
“Outsiders are wrong. Ethnic studies are not affected by the bill either by the bill’s intent or the bill’s language,” Andrade wrote in an email to JTA, accusing the bill’s critics of “lying and claiming that Florida’s leaders have tried to ban teaching black history in schools.”
The state’s only Jewish Republican legislator, state Rep. Randy Fine, did not return a JTA request for comment on whether he supports the bill. Fine has promoted similar culture-war legislation in the past, including a bill he co-authored in February that would prohibit all K-12 schools in the state from referring to either students or employees by pronouns that do not correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth.
With a Republican-dominated House and Senate, some form of H.B. 999 seems likely to reach DeSantis’ desk. (A parallel bill in the state Senate does not contain wording on critical theory.) But there is strong opposition from the academic community. Groups including the American Historical Association, the American Association of University Professors and Florida’s statewide faculty union have harshly condemned the bill and urged lawmakers to oppose it.
The American Historical Association’s statement on the bill this month calls it a “blatant and frontal attack on principles of academic freedom and shared governance central to higher education in the United States.” More than 70 academic, historical and activist organizations co-signed the statement.
The executive committee of the Association for Jewish Studies signed a different statement authored by the American Council of Learned Societies, decrying the bill as an “effort to undermine academic freedom in Florida.”
“If it passes, it ends academic freedom in the state’s public colleges and universities, with dire consequences for their teaching, research, and financial well-being,” the statement said of the bill. “Academic freedom means freedom of thought, not the state-mandated production of histories edited to suit one party’s agenda in the current culture wars.”
Asked for comment on the bill, Warren Hoffman, the executive director of the Association for Jewish Studies, pointed to the statement.
Rachel Harris, director and endowed chair at Florida Atlantic University’s Jewish Studies program, is in her first semester at the university, having just arrived from the University of Illinois. “I’m now wondering if that was a terrible mistake,” she joked. (Harris is spending this term in Israel, researching on a Fulbright fellowship.)
Still, Harris said she was “confident” that legislators would “continue to support educational commitments in the state,” noting that Florida has a Holocaust education mandate for K-12 public schools. Her Boca Raton university is currently building an expanded center for Jewish and Holocaust studies, funded by private donors. H.B. 999 in its current form would prohibit universities from teaching critical theory concepts even when such programs are privately funded.
Despite what he described as a few students at the Jewish Studies center who are concerned about the new bill, Goda said he did not think the legislation would change the experience of Jewish students on his campus.
“Jewish kids these days are really choosing universities based on whether or not Jewish kids feel comfortable there,” he said. “And I would argue that [the University of Florida] is a very welcoming campus for Jewish kids overall. There are strong Jewish institutions associated with the campus.”
Instead, he feels the bill’s real effects would be felt in the state’s ability to recruit faculty and staff while its legislators jeopardize academic freedom, tenure and other lodestars of the humanities. He said, “The real question to me is how and in what way it’s going to be enforced.”
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The Jew who put Hitler on trial — and the play that stages his story
An oft-forgotten chapter in Hitler’s life was one the Führer clung to with a vengeance.
In May of 1931, a 27-year-old Jewish lawyer named Hans Litten called the Nazi leader to the stand to answer for the violence of his Brownshirts and the role his rhetoric played in inciting them. Hitler did not like being questioned, and, when he rose to dictator from the ashes of the Reichstag Fire, he wasted no time in retribution.
Litten has seen something of a revival in recent years, with a 2011 BBC TV film, The Man Who Crossed Hitler, and, in a more fanciful vein, as a character in the Weimar noir series Babylon Berlin. Douglas P. Lackey’s play, Hans Litten: The Jew Who Cross-Examined Hitler, now playing Off-Broadway at Theater Row, is both more holistic, and hollower, than previous efforts.
Despite the title, the play, directed by Alexander Harrington, is not a courtroom drama. It begins in 1924 in Königsberg, with Litten’s law professor father, Friedrich (Stan Buturla), discussing his son’s career prospects and handily alluding to the family’s Protestant conversion. Hans (Daniel Yaiullo) is convinced to pursue law, not as a calling, but as a kind of default — tempted, perhaps, by Friedrich’s sunny view of the profession.
“We can change the rules of law to make the law better,” Herr Litten says.
The action jumps forward in fits and starts, finding Litten in his new Berlin practice, where he defends Communists with his party member partner Ludwig Barbasch (Dave Stishan).
One day, Barbasch arrives with news, asking Litten if he’d heard about the case of the Eden Dance Palace, where members of the Nazi SA attacked Communists and claimed self-defense. (Because the play demands this event be explained, Litten, who it is established in the prior scene “reads everything,” hadn’t yet heard of the incident even though it occurred months earlier.)
Litten decides that he will subpoena Hitler, but not before checking out The Three Penny Opera and getting soused afterwards with Bertolt Brecht (Marco Torriani) and Kurt Weill (Whit K. Lee.)
Lackey, a philosophy professor at Baruch College who’s written plays about Wittgenstein, Arendt and Heidegger, is at his best when Hitler is in the dock, within the formal rhythms of a trial. His dialogue has a dialectic quality that lays out characters’ ideas, historical context and a fair amount of musings on Kant with no real room for subtext. Zack Calhoon as Hitler, pretending to disavow violence but barely concealing his rage, sidesteps caricature.
Yaiullo does dependable work as Litten. He plays him as a pedant but as events conspire to haul him off to a series of concentration camps, he develops the aura of a martyr.
“He was a saint,” Benjamin Carter Hett, a Litten biographer said in a 2011 interview with the BBC. “But I have a feeling that, if I sat down to have a beer with him, I wouldn’t like him.”
His prickliness with people, and a doctrinaire commitment to his own personal, unclassifiable politics are hinted at, but soon dissipate as he endures torture, first at Sonnenberg and finally at Dachau. His devoted mother, Irmgard (Barbara McCulloh) visits him in jail, remarking often how people back home regard him as already canonized.
It is documented that while interned Litten would give lectures to his fellow inmates and recite poetry from Rilke. He also, as is shown in the play, defiantly sang Die Gedanken sind frei (“Thoughts Are Free”) when asked to sing the Horst-Wessel-Lied for a Nazi occasion.
That Litten once spoke truth to a rising power, exposing Hitler’s supposed moderation as a farce, will always make him a compelling character. But his example is ultimately dispiriting, showing that changes of law — for the better, at least — are often fruitless against the headwinds of nationalism and cults of personality.
In 1938, Litten ended his life with a noose in a latrine at Dachau. That we now commemorate him in dramas speaks to a sort of victory. That war is what got us there — and judgment at Nuremberg followed — is regrettable evidence of the law’s delay.
Douglas P. Lackey’s play, Hans Litten: The Jew Who Cross-Examined Hitler is playing at Theatre Row until Feb. 22, 2026. Tickets and more information can be found here.
The post The Jew who put Hitler on trial — and the play that stages his story appeared first on The Forward.
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French Court Rejects Antisemitism Charge in Murder of 89-Year-Old Jewish Man
Tens of thousands of French people march in Paris to protest against antisemitism. Photo: Screenshot
A French court on Thursday tossed out antisemitic-motivated charges against a 55-year-old man convicted of murdering his 89-year-old Jewish neighbor in 2022, in what appears to be yet another instance of France’s legal system brushing aside antisemitism.
French authorities in Lyon, in southeastern France, acquitted defendant Rachid Kheniche of aggravated murder charges on antisemitic grounds, rejecting the claim that the killing was committed on account of the victim’s religion.
According to French media, the magistrate of the public prosecutor’s office refused to consider the defendant’s prior antisemitic behavior, including online posts spreading hateful content and promoting conspiracy theories about Jews and Israelis, arguing that it was not directly related to the incident itself. The jurors ultimately agreed and dismissed the presence of an antisemitic motive.
In May 2022, Kheniche threw his neighbor, René Hadjadj, from the 17th floor of his building, an act to which he later admitted.
According to the police investigation, Kheniche and his neighbor were having a discussion when the conflict escalated.
At the time, he told investigators that he had tried to strangle Hadjadj but did not realize what he was doing, as he was experiencing a paranoid episode caused by prior drug use.
After several psychiatric evaluations, the court concluded that the defendant was mentally impaired at the time of the crime, reducing his criminal responsibility and lowering the maximum sentence for murder to 20 years.
Due to the defendant’s age and assessed risk, the magistrate also asked for 10 years of supervision after his release in addition to the maximum prison time.
Kheniche was ultimately sentenced on Thursday to 18 years in prison and six years of “socio-judicial monitoring.”
The three-day trail, which began on Monday, focused specifically on the alleged antisemitic motive being contested to determine the sentence, as Kheniche’s guilt for the murder was already determined. He has denied that antisemitism played any role in his actions.
However, Alain Jakubowicz, counsel for the League Against Racism and Antisemitism (Licra) and the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), both civil parties in the proceedings, argued that the defendant was “obsessed” with the Jewish religion.
Kheniche previously referred on social media to “sayanim,” a conspiracy term used to refer to a sleeper agent for Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. He also reportedly took passport photos and a text in Hebrew found in his victim’s jacket and cut them out. But the magistrate argued that the law required the court only to consider the facts “at the same time as the crime committed,” thereby dismissing past antisemitic and conspiratorial comments.
The court’s decision “is a reflection of our society,” Muriel Ouaknine-Melki, counsel for members of the victim’s family, told AFP. “It is simply a reflection of the way France deals with the scourge of antisemitism.”
This is far from the first case in France to spark such alarm, as courts have repeatedly overturned or reduced sentences for individuals accused of antisemitic crimes, fueling public outrage over what many see as excessive leniency.
Last year, the public prosecutor’s office in Nanterre, just west of Paris, appealed a criminal court ruling that cleared a nanny of antisemitism-aggravated charges after she poisoned the food and drinks of the Jewish family she worked for.
Residing illegally in France, the nanny had worked as a live-in caregiver for the family and their three children — aged two, five, and seven — since November 2023.
The 42-year-old Algerian woman was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “administering a harmful substance that caused incapacitation for more than eight days.”
First reported by Le Parisien, the shocking incident occurred in January 2024, just two months after the caregiver was hired, when the mother discovered cleaning products in the wine she drank and suffered severe eye pain from using makeup remover contaminated with a toxic substance, prompting her to call the police.
After a series of forensic tests, investigators detected polyethylene glycol — a chemical commonly used in industrial and pharmaceutical products — along with other toxic substances in the food consumed by the family and their three children.
Even though the nanny initially denied the charges against her, she later confessed to police that she had poured a soapy lotion into the family’s food as a warning because “they were disrespecting her.”
“They have money and power, so I should never have worked for a Jewish woman — it only brought me trouble,” the nanny told the police. “I knew I could hurt them, but not enough to kill them.”
The French court declined to uphold any antisemitism charges against the defendant, noting that her incriminating statements were made several weeks after the incident and recorded by a police officer without a lawyer present
The nanny, who has been living in France in violation of a deportation order issued in February 2024, was also convicted of using a forged document — a Belgian national identity card — and barred from entering France for five years.
In another shocking case last year, a local court in France dramatically reduced the sentence of one of the two teenagers convicted of the brutal gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, citing his “need to prepare for future reintegration.”
More than a year after the attack, the Versailles Court of Appeal retried one of the convicted boys — the only one to challenge his sentence — behind closed doors, ultimately reducing his term from nine to seven years and imposing an educational measure.
The original sentences, handed down in June, gave the two boys — who were 13 years old at the time of the incident — seven and nine years in prison, respectively, after they were convicted on charges of group rape, physical violence, and death threats aggravated by antisemitic hatred.
The third boy involved in the attack, the girl’s ex-boyfriend, was accused of threatening her and orchestrating the attack, also motivated by racist prejudice. Because he was under 13 at the time of the attack, he did not face prison and was instead sentenced to five years in an educational facility.
Just this week, a court in Paris denied a Jewish family from Baghdad compensation for their former home, which was seized from them and now serves as the French embassy in Iraq.
The plaintiffs, descendants of two Jewish Iraqi brothers, filed a lawsuit last year seeking $22 million in back rent and an additional $11 million in damages from the French government.
According to their account, the French government leased the house as its embassy starting in 1964 and paid their family through 1974, but has made no payments for more than 50 years.
In the 1950s, the Iraqi government seized Jewish property and stripped Jews of their citizenship, yet the family retained legal ownership of their Baghdad home even after being forced to leave in 1951.
Last year, Philip Khazzam, grandson of Ezra Lawee, told The Globe and Mail that, under pressure from Saddam Hussein’s government, the French government stopped paying rent to the Lawee family and appears to have diverted the funds to the Iraqi treasury.
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Vance Defends Trump’s Iran Approach, Says Tehran ‘Can’t Have a Nuclear Weapon’
US Vice President JD Vance delivers remarks at the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles, California, US, June 20, 2025. Phone: REUTERS/Daniel Cole
US Vice President JD Vance defended President Donald Trump’s approach to reining in Iranian aggression during an interview with podcaster Megyn Kelly, arguing that Tehran’s acquiring a nuclear weapon would prove disastrous for American interests.
“Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. That is the stated policy goal of the president of the United States,” Vance said.
Vance pushed back against critics who have suggested that the president shouldn’t engage in “diplomacy” or “negotiate” with Iran, explaining that Trump will “keep his options open” while trying to advance American security interests “through non-military means.” However, Vance stressed that the president would be willing to engage militarily if left with no other options to dismantle Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
“I am very cognizant that the Middle East leads to quagmires,” he said. “Trust me, so does the president of the United States.”
Trump has discussed targeted strikes on Iranian security forces and leadership, partly as a way to pressure the regime over its violent suppression of demonstrators while also seeking to expand talks to address nuclear and missile issues. The protests, which began on Dec. 28 amid deep economic distress and mounting public frustration with Tehran’s theocratic leadership, quickly spread across the country. Security forces have met demonstrators with lethal force, mass arrests, and a near-total internet blackout that has hampered independent reporting and documentation of abuses. Some reports indicate that up to 30,000 protesters may have been killed by Iranian forces in just two days. Regime officials put the death toll at 2,000-3,000.
Vance also highlighted the importance of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, explaining that Tehran is the “world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.”
“What happens when the same people who are shooting up a mall or driving airplanes into buildings have a nuclear weapon? That is unacceptable,” Vance said.
The vice president added that in the event that Iran obtains nuclear arms, other states such as Saudi Arabia will rapidly seek to secure their regimes though acquiring nuclear weapons themselves, triggering a new era of “nuclear proliferation on a global scale.”
“The biggest threat to security in the world is a lot of people having nuclear weapons,” he said.
Vance suggested that decreasing the overall number of nuclear arms in the world would help secure long-term peace for the global community.
Vance also pushed back on the chorus of critics within the Republican Party who claim the president has expended too much energy and time on foreign affairs, arguing Trump has “gotten a lot done” for the American people and most of his accomplishments are within the realm of domestic policy.
The vice president has come under scrutiny in recent months over his chummy relationship with controversial podcaster Tucker Carlson, a pundit who has repeatedly argued that the US should not attempt to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program.