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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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As The New York Times turns 175, the fight over its Israel coverage heats up again
(JTA) — For generations of American Jews, The New York Times has been more than a newspaper.
It has been the hometown paper of the largest Jewish community outside Israel, a daily guide to the city that became the cultural center of American Jewish life and, more broadly, a reflection of the aspirations of Jews who saw themselves as educated, cosmopolitan, culturally engaged and interested in the wider world.
And in the 175 years since the paper’s founding on Sept. 18, 1851, no issue has inflamed its Jewish readers like its coverage of Israel. This month, as the Times celebrities its 175th birthday with a series of special features, that argument has gotten new fuel.
On Sept. 23, the Florida state pension fund and a conservative think tank that includes shareholders in the Times sued the company, seeking internal records that they say could show whether its board has adequately overseen the newspaper’s coverage of Israel. The plaintiffs allege that repeated errors and other evidence point to a failure to enforce the paper’s own journalistic standards and reflect an anti-Israel bias in its coverage.
The Times called the suit meritless and politically motivated, saying it amounted to an attempt to pressure an independent news organization.
The lawsuit came days after the publication of a study by Edieal Pinker, a professor at Yale’s School of Management, which is also cited in the lawsuit. Pinker’s study attempts to put numbers behind a complaint made by supporters of Israel: that the Times’ coverage of the war that began with Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks has minimized Israeli suffering and Hamas’ role in the conflict.
Pinker examined 1,559 Times articles published between Oct. 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024. He found what he described as a dominant narrative in which Israel was assigned “near-exclusive agency and responsibility” after the Hamas attack. Meanwhile, Israeli casualties after Oct. 7, Hamas fighter casualties and Palestinian violence received much less attention, he asserted. Personal accounts of Palestinian suffering, he assessed, appeared far more frequently than comparable accounts of Israeli trauma.
Pinker told me that he understands the enormous disparity in the number of Palestinians and Israelis killed in the war. But that, he argues, does not absolve the newspaper for a framing of the war that focuses on Palestinian suffering and downplays Israeli motivations for carrying on the fight.
The Times has rejected Pinker’s conclusions. In response to the study, a spokesperson said the newspaper had covered the war “with more rigor than virtually any other U.S. news organization” and that editors make “careful and deliberate choices” about language, framing, prominence and tone in pursuit of independent journalism.
The discourse around Pinker’s study and the lawsuit reflects the American Jewish community’s longtime obsession with the Times’ Israel coverage, as well as splits within American Jewry itself. A cottage industry of media watchdog groups, including CAMERA and HonestReporting, seeks to expose errors in Israel coverage by the Times and other outlets. They focus on stories or headlines that show Israel in a bad light — press criticism mixed with pro-Israel advocacy.
Left-leaning academics and journalists often accuse the critics of having their own biases and dismiss their methodology, suggesting they seek to hold Israel above scrutiny and fail to understand the role of an independent press.
Eric Alterman, an author and historian who has written extensively about the American media, wrote in his 2022 history of American Jews and Israel, “We Are Not One,” that if anything, the Times has taken a “consistent, if sometimes, subtle, pro-Israel slant.”
He cited frequent protests by pro-Palestinian media critics, who think the Times is biased toward Israel, as well as a series of Jewish editors and Jerusalem bureau chiefs who, while often critical of Israel, used terminology and framing that reflect Israel’s perspective. (The word “nakba,” the Palestinian term for Israel’s creation meaning “catastrophe,” did not appear in the paper until 1998.)
But Alterman makes a larger point that is about the audience as much as the newspaper. He believes many American Jews have grown up on the “myth” of Israeli infallibility and see criticism or bad news about Israel as inherently suspect and evidence of hostility toward Israel or Jews.
“People who grow up on this myth and who define their Jewish identities by their fealty to this myth … find it very painful, very hard to deal with negative coverage of Israel,” Alterman, a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College, said in an interview. “And so, as I report in my book, attacking the media for its coverage of Israel became a manifestation of many a Jewish identity.”
For the petitioners in the recent lawsuit — the National Center for Public Policy Research think tank and the State Board of Administration of Florida, who as Times shareholders say they are entitled to inspect company books and records — the question isn’t the Jewish identity of the critics, but what they see as the Times’ board’s failure to enforce the newspaper’s own journalistic standards.
The suit includes numerous examples. They point to the Times’ initial coverage of the October 2023 explosion at Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital, which attributed the blast to an Israeli airstrike before the paper acknowledged that it had relied too heavily on claims by Hamas. The suit also cites an October 2023 account of a Hamas attack on the Israeli city of Ofakim in which, according to the plaintiffs, editors twice changed references to the attackers from “terrorists” to “men,” which they say reflected a reluctance to use language that cast Hamas negatively.
And in one of the highest-profile accusations of media bias during the war, the plaintiffs point to a July 2025 story about a severely malnourished Palestinian boy. While the paper said the subject was “born a healthy child,” the suit argues that Times staff had access before publication to information indicating that the boy had a pre-existing medical condition. (The Times later issued a correction.)
“In the absence of any Board-level oversight,” according to the filing, “journalistic standards have been weaponized within the Company to serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors.”
At the center of this debate is not only what may be the most important single news source in the world, but one with complicated Jewish roots. Adolph Ochs, a Jewish newspaper publisher from Tennessee who was born to German immigrants, bought the struggling paper in 1896. His descendants have controlled it ever since. Och’s father-in-law was Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a founder of Reform Judaism in America, and for decades the newspaper’s editorial line reflected Reform’s vocal anti-Zionism.
Ochs’ son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, would become the paper’s publisher from 1935 to 1961. Any discussion of the Times’ relationship with the Jewish community is haunted by the paper’s failure, under Sulzberger’s watch, to rigorously cover the Holocaust as it happened.
When the paper did publish reports on the annihilation of the Jews, former Executive Editor Max Frankel wrote in an extraordinary, overdue mea culpa on the Times’ 150th anniversary, “they were mostly buried inside its gray and stolid pages, never featured, analyzed or rendered truly comprehensible.”
While Alterman describes Sulzberger as “an antisemite in his hiring practices and an anti-Zionist in his politics,” Laurel Leff, who wrote about the Times’ Holocaust history in her 2005 book “Buried by the Times,” is slightly more measured.
While the Times reported extensively on Nazi persecution and mass murder, it often failed to make clear that Jews were the principal targets of the Nazi genocide. Leff, professor emeritus of journalism at Northeastern University, believes Sulzberger was worried about accusations that the Times would engage in special pleading on behalf of the Jews.
“He had a particular sensitivity about the Jewish issue because of his background,” Leff said in an interview. “Because he so much wanted the Times to not be viewed as a Jewish newspaper, and his editors and reporters knew that.”
That sensitivity didn’t only manifest in what stories were and weren’t put on the front page. When Abraham Rosenthal joined the paper as a cub reporter in 1941, his bosses assigned him the byline “A.M. Rosenthal” because the paper’s management felt his first name sounded too Jewish.
Still, whether chastened by the extent of the Holocaust or just swept up by the prevailing narrative of the day, the Times for many years treated the new state of Israel “as a struggling nation trying to thrive while surrounded by implacably hostile Arab Neighbors,” as former Times reporter Neil A. Lewis wrote in a 2012 paper for the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
“But, over various points beginning in the late 1960’s through the next dozen years, the narrative began to change to a second, more equivocal phase,” Lewis continues. “The template of the small nation as a David battling a Goliath composed of its enemies no longer fit after Israel prevailed handily in the 1967 War. And gradually, the situation of the Palestinian refugees began to emerge.”
After Rosenthal rose to executive editor in 1977, the first of five Jews to hold the post over the next four decades, he aligned the paper more closely with the majority of its Jewish readers: still secular, although more open to Jewish stories and Jewish hires. Rosenthal himself, after his mandatory retirement in 1986, transitioned to the opinion pages and wrote pugnacious columns defending Israel’s right-wing Likud Party leaders.
“Rosenthal had done more than any one individual to reconcile the Times to its Jewish identity,” Times alum Samuel Freedman wrote in an appreciation when Rosenthal died in 2006. Among other things, Rosenthal ended an “unspoken” policy blocking Jews from reporting on Israel.
Not that that shielded the Times from criticism: Thomas L. Friedman, who served as Jerusalem bureau chief from 1984 to 1988, would earn three Pulitzer Prizes for his Mideast coverage but still remained (and remains) a lightning rod for criticism of the paper’s coverage of Israel. (In 1989, a panel discussion featuring Friedman at the 92nd Street Y was interrupted by pro-Israel hecklers who scuffled with security guards. “I spent five years in Beirut. Who thought I’d meet my end at the 92nd Street Y?” Friedman, now a columnist, said from the stage.)
Coverage of the controversial first Lebanon War, by Friedman and others, kickstarted efforts by pro-Israel groups to monitor and criticize the media’s coverage of the region. CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, was founded in 1982 by Winifred Meyer in response to what she and other founders perceived as highly distorted, anti-Israel reporting on Israel’s military incursion. In his 1989 book, “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” Friedman himself criticized the foreign press corps in Lebanon for treating the Palestine Liberation Organization more charitably than it did Israel, the United States or their Lebanese allies.
At the same time, the newspaper increasingly came to embody another kind of American Jewish identity: intellectual, urbane, secular-minded, prosperous and engaged with the broader American and international culture. And as the rise of the internet took its toll on other daily newspapers, the Times’ influence only grew.
Daniel Okrent, who refereed readers’ complaints as the Times’ public editor from December 2003 to May 2005, said coverage of Israel and the Palestinians is perhaps the most scrutinized topic in the newspaper, with both sides convinced the Times favors the other side. He and his colleagues would brace for a flood of letters after every mention of Israel, however benign.
“I think that the feelings on that issue are so intense that people can’t see beyond their own feelings,” Okrent said in an interview.
Ari Goldman, a religion reporter who spent 20 years at The New York Times starting in 1975, often bore the brunt of those feelings. An observant Jew, he said he was frequently approached in synagogue by someone asking, “How can you work for that antisemitic newspaper?”
“They’d come to shul and wave a piece of paper in my face, and I’d say, ‘where’s the rest of the paper?’” Goldman, a professor emeritus at the Columbia Journalism School, said in an interview. “If you look at the coverage in general, yes, you’ll find mistakes, and stories that seem like they have a negative bent. But there are many stories that balance that, and many stories that are favorable toward Israel and tell the story more sympathetically.”
Goldman insists that Times journalists work hard to get a story right, and that the paper will offer corrections when they don’t. He also sees the recent hire of Yair Rosenberg to a new religion beat focused on Jewish American life as a sign that management recognized a “gap in their coverage.”
Critics and defenders agree that the Times often sets the agenda for other news outlets — and for its readers. In her 2005 book “Stars of David,” journalist Abigail Pogrebin asked the Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim about his feelings for Israel. “My attitude toward Israel is the New York Times’ attitude toward Israel,” he replied. “Whatever they tell me is what I believe.”
It is this sort of influence that motivates the Times’ critics. While Pinker does not accuse the Times of bias, his study does raise the specter of an “agenda” on the paper’s part to sway public opinion. “I document several imbalances in the reporting of the war that could plausibly influence the opinions of a reader in a direction that is at odds with reality,” he writes in the study.
In an interview, Pinker said he sought to move the argument away from individual headlines and toward patterns.
“What I find is that there is very little coverage of what you might call suffering or the cost of war on the Israeli side, whereas there is an enormous amount of coverage of that on the Palestinian side,” he said.
Those newsroom choices, he said, diminish Hamas’ responsibility for the extent and continuation of the war. Although he didn’t compare the Times’ coverage of the war to that of other news outlets, he did suggest what an alternative “framing” of the conflict might be: “Oct. 7 demonstrated to the Israelis that they have an unacceptable threat in Gaza, and they cannot rest until they’ve eliminated this threat.”
Alterman rejects Pinker’s analysis as “almost comical,” saying it didn’t take into account the disparity between the 1,200 Israelis killed on Oct. 7 and the tens of thousands Palestinians killed in Gaza in the subsequent war. No news outlet, he said, is obliged to note the persistent trauma and anger felt by Israelis amid the near daily bombardment of Gaza and critical food shortages seen during the height of a war.
“There’s been an enormous amount of reporting on the emotional cost to Israelis and the financial cost to Israelis of the reaction to Oct. 7, but it’s just ridiculous to say that there should be as much reporting on the incident of one day as there have been” of daily military operations during a war that lasted for two years, said Alterman.
Alterman also said that the newspaper’s critics fail to account for the separation between the Times’ news departments and its opinion pages.
On the opinion side, regular critics of Israel far outnumber its consistent defenders. The former include Friedman, Ezra Klein and Michelle Goldberg, whose criticism often appears to be written from a place of sympathy with a former, more liberal Israel, and contributing opinion writers M. Gessen and Peter Beinart, who have both accused Israel of genocide. All five are Jews.
Meanwhile, Bret Stephens follows in a tradition of right-leaning columnists, also Jewish, who consistently defended Israel, including Rosenthal, William Safire and David Brooks. David French and Russ Douthat, two conservative columnists, also tend to defend Israel when they write about the conflict.
Earlier this year, when Nicholas Kristof wrote a column alleging sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees by Israeli security forces, critics suggested it hadn’t been put to the same journalistic scrutiny as a news story. Nonetheless, the Times defended the reporting, saying that details were fact-checked and corroborated where possible with witnesses and confidants.
Stephens, who rarely criticizes his employer in public, didn’t respond to Kristof’s column. But just nine days later, in a column cataloguing 25 years of what he described as inflammatory or unverified media narratives targeting Israel, he wrote what could be a manifesto for American Jewish critics of Israel coverage.
“The common thread in these and many other stories is that they all involve strenuous, if ultimately embarrassed, efforts to prove that Israelis deliberately seek to kill the innocent and maim the vulnerable, apparently for no other reason than gratuitous cruelty,” wrote Stephens. “This isn’t a matter of reporters’ impartially trying to expose wrongdoing wherever they find it — if that were the case, the errors wouldn’t invariably lean in the same ideological direction. It isn’t speaking truth to power. It’s feeding narratives to the credulous.”
For some Jews, the Times’ coverage of Israel, negative or not, is evidence of the newspaper doing precisely what a great journalism outlet ought to do: scrutinizing the powerful, including a government supported by the United States and deeply connected to American Jewish life.
For others, the same coverage is evidence that the paper has once again failed to understand the Jewish historical experience — particularly the experience of Jews who see Israel’s security as inseparable from their own.
What both sides share is a relationship with The New York Times that can feel both familial and obsessive.
“I think it’s a sense of ownership,” said Goldman, imagining the perception of so many of its Jewish readers: ”’I’m a New York Jew. This is my newspaper, and it should reflect me and my ideas.’”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post As The New York Times turns 175, the fight over its Israel coverage heats up again appeared first on The Forward.
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Texas wins case forcing Galveston school district to display Ten Commandments posters in classrooms
(JTA) — A Texas judge has ordered a Gulf Coast school district to display posters of the Ten Commandments in all classrooms, marking a victory for the state in a protracted series of legal battles over religious freedom in public education systems.
District Judge Jeth Jones ruled on Thursday that the Galveston Independent School District must comply within 10 days, while also scheduling a non-jury trial to resolve the case next June.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, had sued the school district last November after the school board voted against exhibiting the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments. Paxton’s petition argued that the board violated a June 2025 state law, SB10, which required the “conspicuous” display of Ten Commandment posters in all public school classrooms.
That law is at the heart of multiple lawsuits across the state, including one effort led by two rabbis who are seeking to bring a case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Along with non-Jewish clergy and parents, they are arguing that the mandatory inclusion of these texts in classrooms is unconstitutional and infringes upon religious freedom. Their case is separate from the Galveston case.
“These are religious documents,” Mara Nathan, the lead petitioner and senior rabbi at Temple Beth-El in San Antonio, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“They do not belong in a secular public school space,” she continued. “If people want to be in a school space where religious instruction is part of that, then they can choose to send their kids to parochial school.”
In their case, Nathan and more than two dozen parties are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on the controversial Ten Commandments law. Their petition, filed in August, asks the court to protect the religious freedom of students by ensuring that families, rather than politicians, are able to determine what role religion plays in their children’s lives.
Joining Nathan in the case is Joshua Fixler, associate rabbi at Congregation Emanu El in Houston, as well as Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Baha’i, Unitarian Universalist and nonreligious families statewide. The defendants include a long list of school districts, such as the Alamo Heights Independent School District and the Houston Independent School District, where Nathan and Fixler send their children, respectively.
Their decision to petition the Supreme Court is the culmination of a lengthy legal process that began after Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the SB10 bill into law in June 2025.
“When I heard about this law, I was really uncomfortable and outraged,” Nathan said. “When I found out there was an opportunity to speak up and be part of litigation to oppose it, I was like, ‘Please sign me up.’”
Fixler echoed these sentiments, with hopes of protecting children from “seeing this Protestant Christian text every day in every classroom, and having it shape their understanding of what religious freedom should look like in America.”
The Jewish and Protestant versions of the commandments differ in wording, order and emphasis, with the Jewish commandments beginning with God’s declaration that he brought the Israelites out of Egypt.
Nathan, Fixler and the other plaintiffs filed a federal lawsuit in July 2025 seeking to block the display at their children’s schools. The next month, they secured a brief victory in district court, when they won a preliminary injunction to block the displays.
Last October, Paxton issued a formal legal advisory to all Texas school districts, reiterating their obligation to exhibit the display. He warned that Texas would vigorously enforce the law, while acknowledging temporary exceptions for 11 school districts that were party to the litigation at the time.
The attorney general described the commandments as “a cornerstone of America’s moral and legal heritage,” stressing a need for “these timeless principles” in schools “now more than ever.”
The pendulum swung in Paxton’s favor in April 2026, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th District reversed the district court’s ruling. The judges, who sit on one of the most conservative federal appellate courts nationwide, determined that the law does not violate the First Amendment’s free exercise clause, which prohibits government from regulating religious beliefs.
They maintained that the SB 10 law “looks nothing like a historical religious establishment,” a bar that the judges said was set in a 2022 lawsuit. The Texas legislation, they wrote in the ruling, doesn’t “tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship or whom to employ as priests, rabbis, or imams.”
“It punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason,” they added.
Unwilling to concede defeat, Nathan and her colleagues in August asked the high court to review the case. Whether the Supreme Court will decide to take on the case is still uncertain, as four of its nine justices must agree to do so.
Fixler noted that the law requires posters of the commandments to be big enough to be read anywhere in the classroom and contain no other texts or context.
“I’m hearing from parents all over the state that their kids know that the state is elevating literally one religious tradition over all others,” he said, relating that although he prepared his kids for the displays, they “expressed a lot of anxiety” about needing “to see these words posted on the wall of their classroom.”
Fixler also expressed concern that the prominence of these posters could lead kids to ask “questions that some teachers aren’t going to want to answer,” such as, “What is adultery, and what does it mean to covet your neighbor’s wife?”
The families are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the national ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, with pro bono counsel from the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett law firm.
In their Supreme Court petition, the families accused the appeals court of defying a 1980 Supreme Court decision, Stone v. Graham, which they said “struck down a nearly identical Kentucky statute almost 50 years ago.” While the Texas appellate court had claimed that precedents set in a later case had superseded the Stone ruling, the families argued that the core principles of the Stone judgment were untouched by that later suit.
The forced display of the Protestant Ten Commandments in public school classrooms is not unique to Texas, although the Lone Star State case has emerged as one of the most prominent battlefields for the issue in recent months.
Other states that have required public schools to exhibit the Ten Commandments include Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama, while Tennessee and North Dakota allow optional displays.
A group of complainants in Arkansas, including one Jewish family, is urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to block school districts from implementing a state law on the subject. Meanwhile, in Tennessee, the ACLU and other groups have sent letters seeking records relating to school district plans to begin displaying the Ten Commandments.
In Galveston, the school board president told local media on Thursday that the school district would comply with the order, as demanded in the November lawsuit. Alongside the filing, Paxton had declared that “there is no valid legal basis” to prevent schools from complying with the law, claiming that their refusal was rooted in “the misconception that a ‘separation of church and state’ phrase appears in the Constitution.”
“It does not,” Paxton stated.
While Galveston is not party to Fixler and Nathan’s Supreme Court petition, the plaintiffs cited the year-long saga as evidence. The situation in Galveston, the petition argues, demonstrates that “injuries” to families who oppose the Ten Commandments displays “are actual or imminent,” a requirement to hear a case in federal courts.
The attorney general accused Galveston’s school board of voting “to flout SB 10” in its refusal “to display the Ten Commandments in accordance with State law.” At the time, he alleged that Galveston decided to “blatantly ignore the legislature,” while emphasizing that “America is a Christian nation.”
Notably, Fixler and Nathan’s Supreme Court petition flags the Galveston case in its appendix, even though the district is not party to the case. The situation in Galveston, the petition argues, shows that “injuries” to families “are actual or imminent.”
“I hope that the Supreme Court will take our case and rule in our favor,” Nathan said, affirming that any decision made here could set a precedent for similar cases nationwide.
“It would be really exciting to be written into history in a positive way, as part of a movement to really protect our religious freedom and separation between public school spaces and the private religious lives of people,” she added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Texas wins case forcing Galveston school district to display Ten Commandments posters in classrooms appeared first on The Forward.
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David Ellison appoints Israeli to lead merged Paramount-Warner studios
(JTA) — Jewish entertainment mogul David Ellison has appointed an Israeli businessman to help lead operations at the new company being created by his controversial merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. The move came days after a settlement cleared the way for the combined mega-studio’s formation.
Ynon Kreiz, the Israeli-American former CEO of Mattel, is joining the company as Ellison’s co-CEO. The merged entity will be known simply as Skydance – the name of Ellison’s production company – which previously merged with Paramount, Ellison announced Friday.
“We have big goals for Skydance, and we intend to pursue them with passion, imagination and a willingness to take smart risks,” Ellison announced Friday in his inaugural post on the social network X.
The mogul’s entertainment and media ambitions have attracted considerable negative attention over the last few years — attention that, in some instances, has been directed at his pro-Israel beliefs and connections as the entertainment industry writ large has also weathered growing accusations of anti-Jewish bias.
Most recently, the actor Mark Ruffalo has drawn accusations of antisemitism – and some support – for suggesting that Ellison’s planned $110 billion merger would be a boon to Israel’s “apartheid system of oppression” via Oracle, the tech surveillance company owned by Ellison’s father Larry that does business in Israel.
Paramount under Ellison’s leadership has long shown signs of pro-Israel leanings. Last year the company was the only major American studio to issue a public rebuke of a petition to boycott Israeli film institutions, circulated by many big-name actors, while distributing multiple documentaries about Israelis in the shadow of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. Ellison also attracted scrutiny for appointing Bari Weiss, the Jewish and pro-Israel media innovator and pundit, as editor in chief of CBS News.
Weiss’s tenure at CBS has been marked by controversy, with mass walkouts of top talent and a ratings nosedive. Initial industry speculation that Ellison would ask her to also take the reins at Warner-owned CNN has been tamped down in recent days, with the Wall Street Journal and other outlets now reporting that Ellison has asked the news network’s CEO Mark Thompson to stay put for at least the next year.
Kreiz, the former Mattel CEO behind the smash-hit “Barbie” movie, has been known to support pro-Israel causes as well. In 2023, he attended a screening of footage of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks organized by Israeli actress Gal Gadot at Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance. Outside, brawls broke out between pro- and anti-Israel demonstrators.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post David Ellison appoints Israeli to lead merged Paramount-Warner studios appeared first on The Forward.
