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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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‘I felt I couldn’t talk about the war’: Jewish and Muslim teens make space for tough conversations
For Jewish student Maxanne Wallace-Segall and Muslim student Nabila Rahman, the months after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel were filled with a tense quiet.
Then freshmen at Stuyvesant High School, a public school on Manhattan’s southern tip, the two girls had only been friends for a few weeks. As their social media feeds became inundated with polarizing content from across the spectrum, neither of them knew how to bring up what had happened.
“I felt like I couldn’t talk about the war with one of my closest friends in the world, just because I was terrified about what I would say and what she would say,” Wallace-Segall said.
That tension ended when Wallace-Segall interviewed Rahman for an article in their high school paper about the pain many students were experiencing in the first months of the Israel Hamas War. Broaching the subject for the first time, they realized that — despite coming from different perspectives — both were primarily concerned that their friends were OK.
“It wasn’t a question of ‘do you support Israel or Palestine?’. It was a question of [if you were] OK; if your family was OK. That was what mattered at the moment; her opinion didn’t matter, even if it differed from mine,” Rahman told Wallace-Segall for the article.
Now rising high school seniors, the duo runs The Together Project, a citywide organization dedicated to dialogue between Muslim and Jewish teens — Zionists and anti-Zionists alike. This summer, that dialogue has deepened and the reach has widened with the launch of a twice-weekly program called the Ohel/Ahl Fellowship, named after Hebrew and Arabic words for friendship. Since June, Jewish and Muslim teens from public, private, religious, and secular schools in the New York area have come together around sacred texts, swapped stories, consulted experts and explored each other’s neighborhoods and perspectives.
Emboldened by their first conversation, Wallace-Segall and Rahman began speaking about the conflict with Muslim and Israeli friends. But, when starting the organization, those friends opted not to participate. The Muslim friend’s family refused to let them talk to people who supported Israel, while the Israeli friend wasn’t allowed to talk to anti-Zionists. The organization continues to face this challenge, with some criticizing its inclusive nature. On one Instagram reel posted by the project, a user commended the concept, but pointed out the number of Palestinian deaths and disagreed with participants working alongside Zionists.
“i was like yessss this is what we need!!” they wrote at first. “only for u to include zionists 💀absolutely not. none of you are truly anti-zionists if you agree to work closely with zionists, especially at this time.”
But that misses the point, Wallace-Segall said. “To exclude the Zionist narrative would be to exclude the issue itself.” That widespread opposition toward dialogue highlights “the necessity and urgency of starting it even more,” she added.
To expand citywide, the girls drew upon their previous connections — someone with whom Wallace-Segall often debated about the subject, another who had written poetry about her religious identity. Currently, the organization has branches at four public high schools in three of the city’s five boroughs.
The Together Project also established a partnership with the New York Society for Ethical Culture, a social activism organization that offers meeting space for several grassroots organizations and hosts all branches of the Together Project, and other interested students, for a citywide conference three times a year in winter, spring and summer.
At those seasonal meetings, students go over historical timelines, read books, articles, sacred texts, and poetry and push themselves to grapple with hard topics. The conversation subjects range from comparisons of the Torah and Quran to what Muslim and Jewish teachings say about queerness, and how being a member of the LGBTQ community informs support for Israel, given its comparatively tolerant culture, and support for Palestinians in Gaza, given the nature of their collective struggle.
Wallace-Segall’s favorite conversations are those that question “why do you believe what you believe?”
“It really gets everyone to think about the specific moments with their families and their friends and reading the news in which different aspects of their opinions have been shaped,” she said.
Last November, members of the group attended a United Nations conference on establishing a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction. As she listened, Wallace-Segall was inspired by those “dedicating their lives to committing to peace.” At the end, four of The Together Project members were given the opportunity to speak about their organization and share their thoughts on the solutions that had been presented.
“So often in the UN, when we see discussions of rebuilding communities … it’s decades or years after the conflict happened,” Wallace-Segall said in her speech. “I think the time to start rebuilding communities is now.”
At Ramaz Upper School, a Jewish day school in Manhattan, now rising senior Gabriel Flatto-Katz found himself in a Jewish bubble. Amidst the tensions of the New York City mayoral election, he realized that he “didn’t have any Muslim person that I could call a friend,” and sought to start an interfaith student organization.
Despite reaching out to many Muslim organizations, however, he wasn’t able to find any interested partners. Then he discovered the Together Project and helped Wallace-Segall and Rahman develop this summer’s Ohel/Ahl Fellowship.
The fellowship has enabled students who were already involved, along with many new ones like Flatto-Katz, to engage more deeply with meetings twice a week. So far, the fellows have hosted speakers from the Rose Castle Foundation, which helps equip leaders to navigate conflict; explored the Islamic wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and analyzed poetry by Israeli and Palestinian writers.
Rather than jump right into sensitive political discussions, students explored each other’s religious identities and established trust in initial meetings, so they have felt more comfortable sharing sensitive opinions in the latter half of the fellowship.
According to Gershon Rozenberg, a rising senior at SAR High School, a co-ed modern Orthodox yeshiva in Manhattan, that turning point arrived during a recent discussion the students had about war. Participants shared conflicts that felt most personal to them and their families and how this might impact their thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some mentioned the Vietnam War, the Bangladesh Civil War and the Holocaust.
Rozenberg called it “the most vulnerable conversation we’ve had among fellows.”
For Rahman, this conversation helped her realize just how personal the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for Jews. “For people like Gabi who literally have family in Israel, there was so much more at stake,” said Rahman, who doesn’t know anyone who is Palestinian.
Along with speakers, the fellowship has a board of mentors from Jewish and Muslim organizations, including Rose Castle, the Tannenbaum Foundation, Jewish Theological Seminary, and a Palestinian representative from Debate for Peace.
“We’re still kids running a kids’ program,” Flatto-Katz said. Mentors provide necessary guidance on how to run an interfaith organization, advise on ground rules during sessions and recommend texts to study. To build a consistent base of students at each meeting, mentors also have helped recruit teenagers they had worked with previously.
Flatto-Katz recruited Rozenberg after reading Rozenberg’s piece in SAR’s campus newspaper arguing that the school “should do a better job of understanding the Palestinian perspective.”
To complement the students from private Jewish day schools, leaders have been reaching out to private Muslim schools. But they’ve encountered difficulty.
“A lot of the kids have never met a Jewish person before, so it’s hard for them to make that first step,” Rahman said.
Many of the students from private Jewish schools say they have been moved by the contributions of Muslim participants, including rituals like chanting from the Qur’an or talking about their religion. “People have enjoyed the ability to hear something so different than what they’re used to,” Flatto-Katz said.
Within Jewish youth spaces, Flatto-Katz said students strongly support Zionism, but also crave hearing new perspectives. It’s not always easy for Flatto-Katz to “have really hard conversations,” as he has family in the region, but he senses and shares a “hunger for understanding.” Agreement or consensus is not required, he said.
“This is my friend Nabila who doesn’t agree with me on 99% of things, and I think it’s really cool that we get frozen yogurt together,” Flatto-Katz said.
To Rahman, the diversity of high school environments and the formative teenage years are what makes the work they are doing now so significant.
“Making sure younger people are involved in this kind of things is so important,” she said, “because they are the ones who are going to be shaping the future.”
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In the history of a family’s pianos, a glimpse of a disappearing New York history
Not that long ago, many homes had pianos. Few do now, and a sad sight is a piano left out on the street. Two years ago we moved a Steinway into our home, and until recently, we had two grands in our living room, the Steinway and the Chickering, which I grew up with. There is also a mini Schoenhut, along with a full-size Casio keyboard upstairs.
The Chickering first resided at my grandparents’ apartment on Central Park West. Under it sat a Schroederesque Schoenhut grand. I would sit on the bench in front of the Schoenhut and tinkle the keys while my grandmother Anna played above. The Chickering, a five-foot, seven-inch quarter grand, came to my childhood home in Forest Hills after she died in 1966. There my brother David and I took lessons from our teacher Fred Kahn. Mr. Kahn was easily in his 70s, and a former student of the concert virtuoso Arthur Friedheim who had studied with Franz Liszt. He performed at Carnegie Hall when he was just eight, and later Steinway Hall had him play at their showroom across 57th St. as a way to attract customers. I fondly recall my lessons with him, especially his improvisations, how he effortlessly switched tempo and rhythm so a piece by Bach morphed into a country & western or klezmer tune.
I first heard my wife Lillie play on the Chickering. It was Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 10. Lillie studied at Queens College’s Aaron Copland School of Music when we lived in Kew Gardens, and we had her Sargent grand in our apartment. She also had a Baldwin spinet at her mom’s in Manhattan. We moved the Sargent to Lillie’s sister Yuri’s apartment when I had a fellowship at Northwestern in 1994. Then when my mom and dad sold the house the following year, Lillie and I had the Chickering hauled up a steep stoop in Park Slope. I remember it being so heavy that it cracked one of the brownstone risers, though the piano was thankfully not damaged. Even better, our landlord had been planning to restore the stoop, so we didn’t have to chip in for the chip.
Soon after, Lillie took a teacher-training program at the School for Strings in Manhattan to learn the Suzuki Method. In 2001, we moved to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and in 2006 spent a summer in Chicago. One of the first things we did was buy the Casio. Early one morning we were awakened by the sound of Chopin coming from the front room. Lillie and I rushed out to find our four-year-old Emma at the keyboard. Alas, we quickly realized that she was not the reincarnation of Clara Schumann after whom her older sister was named. Instead she had somehow pressed the right series of keys, and it played the programed piece.
Back home, Emma had cello lessons in nearby Montclair, and while Lillie taught in our living room, Clara, Emma and I would drive to Manhattan where Clara would spend up to two hours with her piano teacher, Barbara Herman. During Clara’s lesson, Emma and I would roam the halls of the nearby Natural History Museum. We all would then go to Ottomanelli and have chicken pot pies and then ice cream next door at Emack & Bolio’s.
The Chickering filled our home with much music. Clara practiced on it, and Lillie would go over music with her. I enjoyed it when they played together, especially a duet from Schubert’s “Trout Quintet.”Lillie would also help Emma prepare for her cello recitals, and later went over pieces with her when she took up the clarinet and joined the high school marching band.
Since the early ‘90s, Lillie has been studying on the Upper West Side with her teacher Denise Kahn. She and Denise’s other students regularly gather at their various Manhattan apartments to perform their pieces for each other, and as Lillie practices at home she is always amazed that I can soundly nap on the couch just a few feet away during her most fortissimo playing.
The Steinway made it to our home from the country house of one of those pianist friends. In 2024, Lillie and I spent a cool spring afternoon at her place in Stockbridge, Mass. so Lillie could test out the piano; while there she Zoomed her piano technician back in New Jersey to ask questions. The Steinway is a rebuilt six-foot, model O from 1910. Until it arrived, it was on the Chickering that Lillie’s students had their lessons for the past two decades.
Four days a week, our home is filled with the sounds of a wide variety of pieces, from “Frog on Logs” to sonatinas by Friedrich Kuhlau, rags by Scott Joplin, even the “Linus and Lucy” Peanuts tune by Vince Guaraldi. Some of the younger ones can’t sit still, but it is always satisfying to see those who stick with it and then one day start to see their lesson as more than a chore imposed on them by their parents, and come to love playing music. Each June, they all perform in a recital at the Congregational Church up the street.
Hundreds of piano makers once thrived in New York and Boston. Chickering started in Boston in 1823, became one of the nation’s finest manufacturers, and had a hall on 57th St. that rivaled Steinway’s just a block to the west. The firm moved to East Rochester, NY in 1927 and stopped producing instruments in 1983. Sadly, most American piano makers are now gone. On bulk days in our town, we have seen a few pianos sitting on the curb, and Lillie has alerted others of their presence in the hope that someone would rescue them.
Two years ago, I was out for a walk. Along the curb sat a diminutive Schoenhut upright. I have no idea what happened to my grandmother’s Schoenhut grand, and happily hoisted and adopted this homeless one. Not surprisingly, Lillie’s students have embraced the mini-me piano, and during their lessons, some of the younger ones like to hop over and play on it, with the instrument offering up its chime-like, glockenspiel sounding versions of their pieces while Lillie accompanies them on the piano.
We only need one main piano, though, and the last thing we were going to do was toss out the Chickering. I do realize that the piano is but an object, one fashioned from mahogany, rosewood, ebony, ivory, metal wires, and felt. But the Chickering had a real presence and voice in our home, one that brought joy. Quite simply, it was part of our family. I am therefore not surprised that I got teary eyed as we said goodbye to it on June 15. I am glad to say that movers ferried it to a new home up the road. And while the spot where it stood, one filled with much meaning, seems quite empty now, we do hope that the Chickering will create fond memories for another family.
Before it left our home, Lillie played on it that Beethoven sonata that she first performed for me.
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Lively Yiddish Forward columnist Miriam Hoffman has died
The Yiddish writer, Forverts columnist, playwright and Yiddish lecturer Miriam Hoffman passed away July 29 in Coral Springs, Florida. She was 90 years old.
Hoffman was a talented storyteller, as seen in the 2017 Forverts video about her, one of ten episodes in its documentary series, Yiddish Writers Monologues. In the 55-minute clip, she describes in dramatic detail her family’s journey from Siberia to a forced labor camp to a displaced persons camp and finally, to New York. The video is in Yiddish with English subtitles.
In a book, also published in 2017, A Breed Apart: A Miraculous Escape from Russia, she tells her life story again, this time in English.
For many years, Hoffman penned a lively column for the Forverts, where she commented, often with biting humor, on certain character types in Jewish society she disapproved of — like American-born Jews snubbing their noses at fellow Jews who had recently arrived from Europe, something she experienced first-hand.
She also wrote about the blatant sexism she encountered in the 1960s and ’70s among the leadership of Yiddish organizations like the Workmen’s Circle and the Congress for Jewish Culture.
But other essays had a serious, softer voice, like the one she told about her decision as a young teen to suddenly cut off her curly locks in order to look more “American” — and how her mother reacted to her daughter’s “rebellion.”
She also hosted a popular Yiddish radio program on the Forward station WEVD.
Hoffman loved the Yiddish theater and began writing plays herself. She and fellow playwright Rena Borow wrote the book for the musical, Songs of Paradise, based on the biblical poetry of Yiddish troubadour Itzik Manger. The show ran at NYC’s Public Theater and the Shakespeare Festival in 1989, drawing a rave review from The New York Times. Her plays were also staged in Montreal and in several European countries.
For 23 years, Hoffman was a popular Yiddish lecturer at Columbia University. In 2011, she published a Yiddish textbook, Key to Yiddish, that included not only lessons in grammar, but also passages on Eastern European Jewish history, customs, songs and holiday content.
I was personally most impressed with her dogged determination to preserve Yiddish as a spoken language with younger generations. In the 1960s, while teaching at the Sholem Aleichem Shul 21, an afternoon Yiddish school in the Bronx, she and three fellow Yiddish cultural activists — educator Gella Schweid Fishman, pianist-composer Malka Gottlieb and artist Tsirl Waletzky — published a series of Yiddish children’s books through a publishing house they created themselves, called Oyfgang (Sunrise).
As Hoffman and Schweid Fishman told me years later, the mood in the Yiddish world then was so pessimistic, and the attitude towards women so dismissive, that none of the Yiddish cultural organizations — including the Workers Circle and the Congress for Jewish Culture — showed any interest in publishing the books.
But Hoffman and her colleagues didn’t give up. An example of this concerned a musical Purim play they wrote and published in 1968, “Purim iz a shpil aza” (“Purim is a time to play”). On the book cover it gives the male name Gavriel Tolyes as the author. But this was a pseudonym; the real author was Hoffman.
“We understood that no one would take our book seriously if they found out that four women published it,” Hoffman told me. “So we took my mother’s name Tolye, and came up with the name Gavriel Tolyes.”
Years later, Hoffman translated the Purim play into English where it was performed and made into a video. This time, the author’s name was her own.
Hoffman was born Miriam Shmulevitsh in Tobolsk, Siberia in 1936. In 1950, her family immigrated to the United States where she studied Yiddish pedagogy at the Jewish Teachers Seminary until 1957. Years later, she finished her bachelor’s at the University of Miami and received a master’s from Columbia University in 1983.
During the 1970s she and her husband Mendl and two young sons, Avrom (Avi) and Binyomin, lived in Israel for several years where she hosted the first Yiddish television program in the Jewish state, together with the popular comedian Shimon Dzigan.
Hoffman often said that one of her main goals in life was to help instill Jewish pride among Jews of all ages in order to stem the tide of assimilation. In 2015 she, along with her son — the renowned Yiddish actor, director and producer, Avi Hoffman — launched the Yiddishkayt Initiative, an organization dedicated to bringing Jews back to their roots through lectures and performances that portray Jewish values and cultural traditions. For Hoffman, this was exactly what she had been waiting for.
Miriam Hoffman is survived by her two sons, Avi and Benjamin, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
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