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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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Winds of change are in the air in Hungary and at the Vatican. Will they reach as far as Israel?
For the past few days, the world’s oldest and youngest transnational institutions have been riding high. In fact, these institutions — the Roman Catholic Church and the European Union — seem to be riding the winds of a Zeitgeist, or “world spirit,” one that promises better days ahead for our battered and embattled ideals of liberal democracy, common decency and shared humanity. Suddenly, it appears there is reason for hope.
But the hope, held by some on the political center and left in Israel, that this mighty wind will gust as far as Israel may well be a hope misplaced.
Let us first take the youngest transnational institution. On Sunday, an event of seismic proportions rocked the European continent. The prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who gave to the world the model of illiberal democracy and gave to Hungarians deepening immiseration over the past 16 years, was voted out of office.
It was not close: The opposition party Tisza, led by Peter Magyar, won 138 parliamentary seats while Orban’s party, Fidesz, managed to claim only 55. This assures the new government of the 2/3 majority required to change the laws passed under Orban that hobbled the EU, disabled the nation’s political institutions, and enabled him and his cronies to line their pockets. In his victory speech, given by the right bank of the Danube in front of the Parliament building, Magyar declared to a wildly cheering crowd that Hungary is back not only as a European nation, but back fully as a EU member. Hungary, he announced, “will be a solid ally of the European Union.”
On Palm Sunday, a different crowd — holding aloft not the flag of the European Union, but instead olive branches — welcomed Pope Leo XIV at St Peter’s Square. In his homily, he took aim at the moral corruption of the American government, one that launched a reckless military campaign against Iran (as well as a foolish political campaign in Hungary on behalf of Orban). Responding to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s repeated invocations of Jesus Christ to justify his blood lust, Leo cited Isaiah: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood.” He returned to this subject during a peace vigil, praying for a kingdom of “dignity, understanding and forgiveness” to stand as a “bulwark against the delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.”
These remarks did not sit well with Donald Trump, who unleashed a series of bizarre accusations on Truth Social, declaring that “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime,” “terrible for Foreign Policy,” and “WEAK on nuclear weapons.” Leo should “get his act together as Pope,” Trump said, “and stop catering to the Radical Left.” A few days later, after Leo failed to get his act together and instead decried Trump’s threat of carrying out a genocide against the Iranian people, the president declared that “he was not a big fan” of the Pope. When asked about these remarks, Leo replied, “I have no fear of the Trump administration, or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do.”
The Israeli government, one imagines, is not a big fan of the Pope, either. In a recent Sunday Mass, he addressed Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, lamenting the deaths of more than 2,000 Lebanese, including 165 children and 250 women. Political and military leaders, he declared, have the “moral obligation to protect the civilian population from the horrific effects of war.” Nevertheless, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to rule out a cease-fire even as negotiations between Israel and Lebanon are set to begin.
No less predictably, opposition leaders in Israel have embraced the results of the election in Hungary. Writing in Hungarian — the language of his father’s family — Yair Lapid rushed to congratulate Peter Magyar on his victory, while the former defense minister Benny Gantz, also of Hungarian descent, expressed his hope that Hungary will be a “beacon of western values and moral clarity within the European community.”
Gantz’s words lacked the necessary clarity for Yair Golan, the leader of the Democratic Party, who cut to the chase: The election revealed that the “Hungarian public is fed up with corruption, incitement and the shattering of democracy.” Israel, he predicted, will “soon” experience a similar turnabout.
But there’s a rub. If the current zeitgeist does embody a renewal of a democratic and humanistic spirit, how one can insist on the importance of “moral clarity,” as Gantz does, while supporting the military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon? With the notable exception of Golan, most other opposition figures in Israel have expressed few reservations over the criminally inhumane razing of Gaza. As the columnist Iris Leal recently observed, “there is no war that a Zionist politician from the center-left would not support.”
While a majority of the Israeli public is as fed up as Hungarians with their own government’s corruption and shattering of democracy, they nevertheless support the various wars undertaken by that same government. In a recent poll taken by the Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Israel Democracy Institute, more than 90% of respondents support the war against Iran. As for the future of Gaza, a poll published last year by Haaretz revealed that 56% of Israelis support the forcible expulsion of Gaza’s population to other countries, and 54% think this expulsion should extend to the Arab citizens of Israel.
Only a fool would deny that Iran and its Hamas and Hezbollah clients pose serious threats to Israel’s security. But it also takes a fool to declare that never-ending war and military occupation will alone win lasting peace for Israel. The mighty wind of democracy and decency has swept Viktor Orban from office and carried the words of Leo across the world. But it remains to be seen if this same wind, at the moment when Israelis find themselves at a crossroads between fully becoming a Jewish state or a democratic state, is strong enough to lead them to take the right path.
The post Winds of change are in the air in Hungary and at the Vatican. Will they reach as far as Israel? appeared first on The Forward.
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A View From Inside Iran: Silencing a Generation — Voices Lost to the Gallows
Iranian demonstrators gather in a street during anti-regime protests in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
“Don’t tell Mom.”
It is a sentence that has echoed through Iran’s prisons for decades. A sentence carried through monitored phone lines in the final minutes granted to the political prisoners before execution.
It’s a closing plea made just before the state carries out a sentence from which there is no appeal in practice, regardless of what the law suggests in theory.
Political prisoners are typically permitted one final phone call. The call is brief and the tone measured. A father or a sibling answers. There is no explicit reference to what awaits. The word execution is rarely spoken aloud. Surveillance renders such candor both futile and dangerous.
Instead, there is a restraint.
“Dad … please don’t tell Mom.”
He once imagined a different future. He is a teenager with dreams. Employment. Stability. The ordinary dignity of contributing to his household. A simple life with shared meals, familiar arguments, the slow accumulation of years.
He did not anticipate becoming an example.
In the final hours, time takes on a different texture. Memory becomes intrusive. Childhood surfaces with disorienting clarity. The mind hangs between improbable hope and quiet comprehension. There may be a reprieve. Perhaps international pressure will intervene. Perhaps the sentence will be suspended. Hope flickers irrationally. But the machinery of execution is efficient. The last image is not of ideology. Not of slogans. It is of home.
And then, silence.
Executions function not only as punishment, but as communication. A message sent through prison walls into society: dissent has consequences. Protest has a cost. Silence is safer.
Within Iran’s Revolutionary Courts, outcomes in political cases are determined long before the hearing begins. Access to a lawyer is restricted. Trials may last minutes; in some cases, there are no trials. Charges such as “enmity against God” or “corruption on earth” are applied, enabling capital punishment under a broadly interpreted definition of dissent.
By the time the final call is made, the legal process has typically run its course.
What follows is administrative efficiency.
Hours later, families are notified. The burial conditions are controlled and restricted. Public mourning is not permitted. Grief itself becomes regulated.
The executions of political prisoners in Iran emerge from a judicial architecture that has long blurred the boundary between adjudication and enforcement.
Political cases are typically adjudicated in Revolutionary Courts, institutions established in the aftermath of the 1979 coup d’état to address actions perceived as threats to the state. Over time, their jurisdiction has significantly expanded. Proceedings are conducted behind closed doors. Defendants in national security cases, as defined by the regime, may not be allowed to consult their preferred attorney during the investigative stage, which is a crucial time when coerced confessions are frequently obtained.
Claims of forced confessions, brief trials, and a lack of evidentiary transparency have all been documented by human rights organizations on numerous occasions. The way charges like “enmity against God” (moharebeh) and “corruption on earth” (efsad fel-arz) are phrased leaves room for interpretation. These offenses are punishable by death under Iran’s Islamic Penal Code.
In politically sensitive cases, appeals are reviewed in minutes and without public scrutiny. The interval between sentencing and execution is usually brief, especially during nationwide protests.
The outcome is a system in which capital punishment transcends its role as a criminal penalty and instead operates as a deliberate instrument of state control and intimidation.
The right to a fair and public hearing, access to independent legal counsel, and the exclusion of evidence obtained under duress are guaranteed under international legal standards, notably those set out in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a member. International Law limits the use of capital punishment, where it has not been abolished, to the most serious crimes, understood to involve deliberate killing. Significant concerns arise regarding proportionality and due process when the death penalty is applied in cases related to protests. In such conditions, the legitimacy of the sentence itself is called into question, and fundamental legal protections are undermined.
Executions in this context serve a dual function: they eliminate the individual and communicate a warning to the broader public. Particularly in the aftermath of protest movements, they operate as instruments of deterrence, reinforcing the cost of dissent.
This is not merely a domestic judicial matter; it is a question of whether procedural form can substitute for substantive justice and whether the language of law can obscure the absence of its protections.
The cases differ in detail, but the structural concerns remain consistent: restricted legal representation, opaque trials, and the rapid advancement of capital sentences.
Time, in such cases, is measured not in months but in days, sometimes hours.
The international community has mechanisms at its disposal. Governments engaged in diplomatic relations with Tehran possess channels through which urgent appeals have been raised, yet these efforts have too often failed to elicit meaning response. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran has repeatedly called for transparency and adherence to international fair trial standards, but such appeals lack effective means to hold authorities inside Iran accountable.
Public pressure matters. Diplomatic engagement matters. Clear and coordinated messaging matters. Silence, too, carries consequences.
In the context of war and ceasefire, the Islamic Republic of Iran has intensified its repressive measures, imprisoning and executing young individuals for the simple act of sharing images and videos with international media. The Internet blackout has severely restricted access to information about detainees and ordinary Iranians.
As the United States and Islamic Republic of Iran prepare to engage in more high-stakes talks in Islamabad, aimed at stabilizing a fragile ceasefire following weeks of conflict, concerns are intensifying that those at risk of execution and ordinary Iranians may face heightened risk under an increasingly vengeful policy of the regime.
For Iranians, the future remains uncertain and unsettling. Rather than offering reassurance, these negotiations are met with anxiety and distrust, as many fear that diplomatic engagement may come at the cost of further repression at home.
Amid pervasive fear and danger, the fate of millions of Iranians remains unknown.
The men and women awaiting execution today are not abstractions. They are sons and daughters who once ended a phone call with the same plea:
“Don’t tell Mom.”
The question now is not only what will happen inside prison walls, but also what will happen outside of them — in foreign ministries, in multilateral institutions, in the public conscience. Because once the sentence is carried out, there is no correction. What Iranians might face now is the aftermath of an unfinished war.
Maddie Ali is based in Iran. In addition to her academic work, she has been involved in civic activity in her hometown, including participating in and helping organize local protests alongside friends and family. Her name has been changed to protect her identity.
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Haftarat Shabbat Rosh Chodesh: All Who Mourn for Jerusalem
An aerial view of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
This year, as Parshat Tazria-Metzora coincides with Shabbat Rosh Chodesh, and the weekly haftara gives way to the closing chapter of the Book of Isaiah, it is impossible to hear Yeshayahu’s stirring words of consolation this season without feeling their weight.
Almost three years have passed since the horrors of October 7th. We have lived through war fought on multiple fronts — in Gaza and Lebanon, Syria and Iran. Homes destroyed across the north, south, and center of Israel. Families cycling through bomb shelters and reserve duty. Non-stop shiva calls. And, as this haftara falls just before Yom Hazikaron, military cemeteries that have grown far too large.
Yeshayahu’s vision of comfort is addressed precisely to this kind of grief — and it places a profound and demanding condition on that comfort.
The prophet paints a future of joy and renewal: Jerusalem rebuilt, her streets once again filled with laughter and light. “Bring Jerusalem joy, exult in her, all of you who love her; celebrate her joy with her, all of you who mourned her” (Isaiah 66:10). The Gemara (Taanit 30b) reads this verse with care and draws out a powerful principle: Only those who have genuinely mourned for Jerusalem will merit sharing in her future joy. The invitation to rejoice in redemption is conditional upon having grieved.
This teaching about who truly “mourns for Jerusalem” carries urgent contemporary weight. A Pew Research Center study released last month found that American favorability toward Israel has dropped eight percentage points in a single year, with 60% of Americans now holding an unfavorable view. More troubling is the trend within the Jewish community: just last year, 73% of American Jewish respondents held a favorable view of Israel. That figure has fallen to 64% — a decline of nearly 10 points in 12 months. For those who love Zion, these are not merely political data points. They are a challenge to the very solidarity that Yeshayahu’s vision demands.
What lies behind this shift? Part of the answer is a well-funded, coordinated campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel and Zionism — visible in American higher education, in the media, and in political lobbying. This must be named and addressed.
But it would be a mistake to look only outward. We in Israel must honestly ask whether the policies and public statements of top Israeli officials have not made it easier to misrepresent Israel as a state unconcerned with minorities, insensitive to other faiths (including Jewish denominations which are not Orthodox), and willing to flatten Gaza and repopulate it with Jewish settlements. The obligation to protect the state is sacred; so too is the obligation to ensure that the vision of an independent, flourishing Jewish State remains one that Jews in Israel and the diaspora can embrace together.
“As a man is consoled by his mother, just so shall I comfort you, and in Jerusalem, you shall be consoled” (v. 13). Yeshayahu’s image of consolation is strikingly intimate — the warmth of a mother, the certainty of belonging. This comfort is not meant to be experienced alone. It is promised to a people that returns to Jerusalem together, whose grief has been communal and whose joy will be shared. Since October 7th, so many Jews worldwide have indeed mourned, prayed, donated, advocated, and made aliyah. That solidarity is real, and must not be taken for granted.
Generations ago, a visitor to the Kotel etched into its ancient stones a verse from this very haftara: “You shall look on, your heart rejoicing, while your bones grow vigorous, like grass, and the hand of the Lord becomes known to His servants” (v. 14). An anonymous hand carved those words of hope into the wall — a private prayer left for all who would come after. This person understood Yeshayahu’s meaning precisely: Our hope is not merely personal. The rejoicing, the vigorous renewal, the recognition of God’s hand in history — all of it belongs to all our people, as one.
As we approach Yom Hazikaron, mourning our fallen with aching hearts, may we recommit to the work of shared solidarity that Yeshayahu demands. May we grieve together, hold one another, and confront with honesty and courage whatever stands between us and the vision of Jerusalem restored. And may we all merit, as a nation, and not merely as individuals, to see that day of consolation soon.
Rabbi Dr. Kenneth Brander is President and Rosh Yeshiva, Ohr Torah Stone.