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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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Iran’s Rulers Seek to Die for God as Jews Aspire to Live for Him
Emergency personnel work at the site of an Iranian strike, after Iran launched missile barrages following attacks by the US and Israel on Saturday, in Beit Shemesh, Israel, March 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Iran’s increasingly reckless attacks across the Middle East have reached a new level. This week, debris from an Iranian missile struck the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City, just yards from the Al-Aqsa Mosque — Islam’s third holiest site.
The assumption was that this proximity would protect Christianity’s holiest site. Instead, the incident highlights a disturbing shift: Iran’s hostility toward Israel now seems to include a disregard for the holy sites of other faiths, and even Islamic holy sites.
The same disregard is evident elsewhere. In the Arab town of Beit Awwa near Hebron, a makeshift beauty parlor — a converted caravan — was filled with women preparing to celebrate the end of Ramadan. It was reduced to rubble by an Iranian missile, and three women were killed. So much for solidarity with the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, missiles continue to streak across the Gulf, slamming into energy infrastructure in Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Gas fields are burning, refineries are ablaze, and the Strait of Hormuz is effectively impassable.
Oil prices are surging, sending shockwaves through the global economy. And behind it all, the Iranian regime — now increasingly opaque, guided by shadowy figures claiming to act in the name of both nation and God — promises “zero restraint.”
This, despite the fact that Iran itself is already teetering on the brink. Its economy is shattered, its infrastructure is battered, and its leadership has been irreparably weakened by targeted assassinations and sustained military pressure from the United States and Israel.
And yet, they fight on. At a certain point, this all stops looking like strategy and looks like something else entirely. Wars are usually fought for territory, security, economic gains, or – pointedly – for survival.
Even brutal wars tend to follow a basic logic: Preserve what you have, weaken your enemy, and live to fight another day. Even when nations act ruthlessly, they are still, at some level, trying to ensure that there is a tomorrow. But what we are witnessing now feels different.
When a government targets global energy infrastructure, knowing it could cripple entire economies — including its own — when it risks sacred sites and civilian lives while claiming religious legitimacy, you have to ask: What is the endgame? What if survival is no longer the primary goal? What if the objective is something else entirely — something closer to sacrifice than strategy?
Not all Iranians share this trajectory. Voices like Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi — along with many Iranians inside and outside the country — have long argued for a future defined by stability and openness, the very opposite of the path the current regime seems determined to pursue.
There is a dangerous idea that surfaces from time to time in human history — often cloaked in religious language — that elevates destruction, even self-destruction, into an act of devotion. Not everywhere, and not in every interpretation.
But in certain ideological strands, including within the worldview of Iran’s ruling elite, conflict and chaos are more than political tools. They are seen as redemptive — even apocalyptic. And once you start thinking that way, the line between serving God and sacrificing everything — your people, your future — begins to blur.
We’ve seen this before. Such movements stop trying to build anything lasting; instead, they become intoxicated by their own vision: an idealized world that must either be realized in full or swept away entirely. The present moment becomes everything. The aftermath is an afterthought.
All this makes the third book of the Torah, Sefer Vayikra, all the more striking. On the surface, Vayikra reads like a manual of ritual sacrifice. Animals and birds are brought to the altar, slaughtered, their blood sprinkled, their lives offered back to God.
It is easy — almost instinctive — to see it as a theology of death. But that is a profound misunderstanding. The sacrificial system was never meant to glorify death. Quite the opposite. As Maimonides explains, its purpose was to transform the living.
A sacrifice is not about annihilation — it is about encounter. The Torah’s word for it is korban, from the root meaning to “draw close.” It is about proximity — kirvah — about narrowing the distance between human beings and God.
The ritual sacrifice experience was meant to be unsettling — to shake a person out of complacency and force a confrontation with the fragility of life and the weight of existence. After that, a person would walk away changed. The animal remains behind, but the human being surges ahead.
Yes, there are moments in Jewish history when one is called to give up life for Kiddush Hashem. Those moments are real and sacred. But Judaism never built its identity around dying for God — or destroying in His name. Instead, the Jewish people built a civilization around living for Him.
Dying for God is a single, dramatic act. Living for God is relentless. It means waking up every day and choosing discipline over impulse, responsibility over instinct, and purpose over comfort. It means biting your tongue instead of lashing out, acting with integrity when no one is watching, and showing up — again and again — long after inspiration fades.
It means sustaining a relationship not through intensity but through the quiet consistency of daily life. And that, as anyone who has tried it knows, is far harder. Grand gestures are easy. Consistency is exhausting.
That is why Vayikra is not just a book about sacrifices. It is the Torah’s handbook for sustained holiness. As it tells us, clearly (Lev. 19:2): “You shall be holy.” Not just once, for show, or to make a point. Not only in a moment of crisis. And certainly not in a surge of religious passion.
Holiness, in the Torah’s vision, is continuous. Like the Shema, recited quietly every morning and every night, it is about keeping the connection alive. Like acts of charity, given not as a one-off gesture but whenever they are needed.
Relationships — real ones — are not built on intensity or bursts of devotion that fade quickly. They are built on constancy. Anyone can make a grand gesture. Maintaining a relationship — with another person or with God — demands something far more difficult: presence, patience, and persistence.
That is what makes the current moment so unsettling. When a regime that claims to represent God’s will begins to romanticize destruction — even self-destruction — and escalation becomes an end in itself, chaos is embraced rather than avoided. It reveals a worldview in which dying for God has eclipsed living for Him.
Judaism rejects that idea at its core. God does not ask us to destroy the world in His name. He asks us to build it, and to build within it. In particular, He asks us to build in a way that will endure beyond us. To create families and nurture them. To form communities and care for them. To pursue justice, even for those with whom we disagree. Above all, He asks us to take a flawed, imperfect world and elevate it — not to burn it down, but to engage with it.
The altar in Vayikra was never meant to be a destination. It is a starting point. It is a place where a person confronts what could be lost — and then recommits to what must be lived. It reminds us that what God truly wants is not the life that ends in sacrifice, but the life that continues — day after day — in relationship, in responsibility, and in quiet, stubborn faithfulness.
The real test of faith is not whether you are willing to die for God. It is whether you are willing to live for Him.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Joe Kent’s Resignation Isn’t Actually About the War
Then-National Counterterrorism Center Director Joseph Kent attends a House Homeland Security hearing entitled “Worldwide Threats to the Homeland,” on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, Dec. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.”
That’s what Joe Kent, now the former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, wrote in his resignation letter this week.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Read that without context — exactly how much of the media prefers to present it — and you might start to think that perhaps the United States is inserting itself into a conflict it has no business being part of. And frankly, I wouldn’t blame you. The clickbait headlines of the past week have incited and invited these conclusions.
But look just beneath the surface, and it becomes clear: This resignation has very little to do with the US military campaign and everything to do with a conspiratorial, antisemitic narrative dressed up as dissent. One that might resonate with figures like Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson but has no grounding in reality.
Let’s start with facts.
Iran has spent over four decades funding, training, and directing terrorist organizations responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians — including Americans — worldwide. Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and militias across Iraq and Syria are all backed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, collectively receiving at least (and likely more than) hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
At the same time, Iran has aggressively pursued nuclear capabilities while openly signaling how it intends to use them. In Tehran’s Palestine Square, a literal “doomsday clock” counts down to 2040, marking the regime’s stated goal of Israel’s destruction, an outcome it fully intends to be responsible for.
Given that reality, it is hardly irrational for a country, or its allies, to act before those capabilities are fully realized, or before Iran further entrenches itself as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
Which is why Kent’s framing matters.
When the director of counterterrorism resigns, claims opposition to military intervention, and then blames that intervention on the Jewish state, it begins to look less like principle and more like narrative-building. A deliberate contribution to the growing wave of anti-Israel sentiment in the United States.
Because the idea that Israel “forced” the United States into war is not just wrong; it’s absurd.
It requires believing that a small Middle Eastern country somehow coerced the world’s most powerful military superpower into spending billions of dollars, mobilizing naval fleets, deploying troops, risking strategic alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and disrupting global energy markets, all against its will.
It also requires believing that US President Donald Trump, known for being both unpredictable and strategic, was somehow pressured into a war he did not want to fight.
That simply does not pass the most basic test of logic.
Kent’s resignation letter is his ticket to fame. His introductory essay into conspiracy college, where his classmates and apparent mentors include none other than the likes of Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly.
It also could be his ticket out of legal trouble — at least in his mind. Multiple media outlets reported that before Kent’s departure, the FBI opened an investigation into the counterterrorism chief for allegedly leaking classified information. Many observers have speculated his resignation could have been an effort to get ahead of the story and obscure the situation with as much conspiratorial nonsense as possible.
It’s worth noting that, according to a former Trump administration official, Kent frequently clashed with senior leadership, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and FBI Director Kash Patel. Former White House staffer Taylor Budowich went even further, taking to social media to call him “a crazed egomaniac who was often at the center of national security leaks, while rarely (never?) producing any actual work.”
At its core, Kent’s argument falls into something quite familiar, a narrative as old as it is dangerous: Just blame the Jews. Even if they have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Alma Bengio is Chief Growth Officer at The Algemeiner and founder and writer for @lets.talk.conflict.
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Are American Universities the Next Front in a Gulf Rivalry?
Pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University in New York City, US, April 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
A recent report by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce on antisemitism in higher education delivers a stark conclusion: In the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, many US campuses have shifted from being sites of debate to environments where hostility toward Jewish students is increasingly normalized. The report documents rising harassment, rhetoric that blurs into justification of violence, and a growing reluctance by university leaders to enforce their own rules when speech is framed as political activism.
That warning points to a broader institutional problem. Universities are not only struggling to respond to ideological extremism; they are also increasingly embedded in global networks of funding, influence, and political engagement. In this environment, they risk becoming more than passive hosts of debate, emerging as spaces where external conflicts are projected inward, including the strategic rivalry between Gulf states now playing out on Western campuses.
Earlier this year, the United Arab Emirates suspended government scholarships for students planning to attend British universities, citing concerns about Islamist radicalization on UK campuses. For decades, Western institutions were viewed across the Arab world as gateways to modernity — exporters of science and pluralism. Now an Arab state is signaling that those campuses may no longer be ideologically neutral.
Britain’s situation reflects long-standing policy choices. The United Kingdom does not formally designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and has long served as a hub for Brotherhood-linked activism. British academia enrolls significant numbers of Qatari students and maintains financial and institutional ties with Doha, placing campuses within a broader ecosystem of Qatari engagement and soft power. That matters because Qatar and the UAE sit on opposing sides of a wider Gulf competition over political Islam.
Since the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, the UAE has positioned itself as a regional actor seeking stability, economic integration, and the containment of Islamist influence. Qatar, by contrast, continues to host Muslim Brotherhood figures and Hamas political leaders while expanding its global reach through media and partnerships with research institutions and universities.
The United Kingdom may have presented the most immediate concern for Emirati policymakers. But the broader question of ideological influence within Western institutions extends beyond Britain. Nowhere is that dynamic more consequential than in the United States.
Disclosures filed with the US Department of Education show that American universities have reported receiving more than $4 billion from Qatar over the past two decades, placing the Gulf state among the largest foreign funders of US higher education. Institutions such as Cornell University, Georgetown University, Northwestern University, and Texas A&M University have reported substantial Qatari funding supporting research programs, faculty, and academic centers.
Foreign partnerships and international funding are common in global higher education and do not automatically translate into political influence. The concern arises not from these relationships themselves, but from the political environment in which they operate — particularly when ideological movements tied to geopolitical actors become increasingly visible in campus activism.
Recent events on American campuses help explain why this matters. After the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, universities including Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, and NYU witnessed demonstrations that in some cases moved beyond criticism of Israeli policy into justification of violence, calls for a “global intifada,” and rhetoric widely understood by Jewish students as eliminationist. Congressional hearings later exposed how difficult it had become for some university leaders to state clearly that calls for genocide violate campus rules when framed as political expression.
The issue is not protest itself, which is intrinsic to academic life, but ideological activism that normalizes movements rejecting liberal democratic principles. In such an environment, Gulf rivalry intersects with Western institutional hesitation, and campuses risk becoming arenas not merely of debate but of strategic signaling.
If Abu Dhabi concludes that British universities are incubating ideologies it considers destabilizing, the same logic could extend to the United States. American universities are even more globally influential than their British counterparts, educating future ministers, financiers, and opinion leaders from across the Middle East — making them higher-value terrain in any competition over ideas.
Whether the UAE would take similar measures regarding US institutions remains uncertain. The strategic partnership between Washington and Abu Dhabi is deeper than the UAE’s educational ties with Britain. And while the United States does not designate the entire Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, it does designate Hamas — which originated as a Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood — as a terrorist group.
The UAE’s decision regarding British scholarships should therefore be seen as part of a broader regional struggle over political Islam and the future direction of the Middle East. If that struggle is increasingly playing out on Western campuses, Americans should ask a sober question: Are their universities merely observers of this rivalry — or are they becoming its next front?
Nira Broner Worcman is a Brazilian journalist, CEO of Art Presse Communications, and author of A Sisyphean Task (translated from the Brazilian edition, Enxugando Gelo), on media coverage of the war between Israel and terrorist groups. She was a Knight Science Fellow at MIT and earned her master’s degree at NYU’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program.