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A Florida bill attacking ‘critical theory’ in higher education has the state’s Jewish academics worried
(JTA) — The University of Florida has more Jewish students than any other public college in the United States — and last week, one of them reached out to a professor, fearing that it would no longer be possible to study Jewish topics there.
Citing a graphic that had been making the rounds on social media, the student asked if it was true that a new bill working its way through the state legislature would remove all “Jewish Studies courses, majors and minors” in the state. The graphic was shared by several people with large online followings, including comedian D.L. Hughley, who has more than 750,000 followers on Twitter.
“I love my major and I can’t imagine switching to anything else,” the student wrote, according to Norman Goda, director of the university’s Center for Jewish Studies.
Goda wasn’t able to console the student. Like other Jewish academics in Florida who spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he doesn’t know whether H.B. 999 would affect Jewish studies on the state’s college campuses. Though the bill’s author — a Republican state representative — says that won’t be the case, the bill’s language is much less clear.
That’s because the bill’s current wording would forbid the state’s public higher education institutions from teaching or offering any major or minor based in “methodology associated with Critical Theory.” That prohibition, say academics and other critics of the bill, would make teaching courses in Jewish studies impossible — and would also outlaw many other fields in higher education.
Exactly what the bill means by “critical theory” is unclear. To academics, the term refers to a tool for analyzing society and culture, created in the 1930s by German Jewish academics, that encourages people to view the world through power structures, and to consider why they fall short. To political conservatives, it’s a relative of “critical race theory,” a watchword for those who want to inhibit classroom instruction about racism. An earlier version of H.B. 999 mentioned only critical race theory, not the umbrella theory.
“These people don’t know what they’re talking about,” said a Jewish faculty member at a Florida university, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation from the state government, regarding the lawmakers behind H.B. 999. “You’re putting people who don’t know what critical theory is, but have heard the words — and now you’re putting them in charge of universities.”
A university that completely purged such ideas from its classrooms, the anonymous faculty member said, “would be non-existent.”
The bill in question is the latest example of conservative-led state efforts to snuff out culture-war modes of thought like critical race theory and gender studies, often referred to euphemistically by lawmakers as “divisive concepts” in education. Such efforts have occasionally ensnared efforts to teach Jewish history and the Holocaust.
Attempts to legislate the classroom are particularly potent in Florida, where Republican governor Ron DeSantis, a likely presidential candidate, has frequently stated his desire to ban “woke” concepts from being taught in the state. (DeSantis has stated he will wait to see H.B. 999’s final form before he decides whether to sign it, but in a discussion with college administrators last week he continued to rail against what he called the “ideological agenda” of campus diversity, equity and inclusion programs.)
The state recently rejected the curriculum for a new Advanced Placement African-American Studies course in high schools, forcing the College Board to rework the class. Florida is also home to several active conservative “parents’ rights” groups that have lobbied to remove objectionable books and clubs from public schools.
While most legislation in this realm to date has targeted what’s taught in K-12 public schools, this bill and other efforts in Florida have gone a step further by seeking to regulate the world of state-funded higher education — creating what critics say are new and dangerous threats to academic freedom, with broad and vague wording that leaves efforts to research and teach a variety of disciplines in doubt.
“This bill would cripple the long-standing freedom universities have to design and teach a curriculum based on the development of academic disciplines,” Cary Nelson, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois and past president of the American Association of University Professors ,who has taught multiple courses on Jewish issues, told JTA.
In a recent subcommittee hearing on the bill, Republican state Rep. Alex Andrade, who co-authored the legislation, said, “I believe that state universities should be focused on teaching students how to think, not what to think.” He said the bill’s banning of “radical” ideologies referred to “a system meant to direct and promote certain activism to achieve a specific viewpoint.”
Efforts to limit the material taught to children and college students are underway in several states. But Florida has an especially large population of Jewish students. The University of Florida stands atop Hillel International’s ranking of public colleges with the highest proportion of Jewish students, and the University of Central Florida has the third-largest. Florida State University, Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University and the University of South Florida also rank in the top 60.
H.B. 999 would affect education at those schools in other ways, too. The bill, which recently advanced to committee, would overhaul the state’s post-tenure review process, so that instead of checking on a faculty member’s research productivity every five years, as is currently the case in the state, tenured professors could face reviews “at any time for cause” including “violation of any applicable law or rule.”
The result, one academic in the state said, would be “open season on faculty,” who could be out of a job if their university’s board — which, in public schools, is beholden to the governor — disagrees with their syllabus.
Andrade rejected the idea that H.B. 999 would undercut Jewish studies in Florida.
“Outsiders are wrong. Ethnic studies are not affected by the bill either by the bill’s intent or the bill’s language,” Andrade wrote in an email to JTA, accusing the bill’s critics of “lying and claiming that Florida’s leaders have tried to ban teaching black history in schools.”
The state’s only Jewish Republican legislator, state Rep. Randy Fine, did not return a JTA request for comment on whether he supports the bill. Fine has promoted similar culture-war legislation in the past, including a bill he co-authored in February that would prohibit all K-12 schools in the state from referring to either students or employees by pronouns that do not correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth.
With a Republican-dominated House and Senate, some form of H.B. 999 seems likely to reach DeSantis’ desk. (A parallel bill in the state Senate does not contain wording on critical theory.) But there is strong opposition from the academic community. Groups including the American Historical Association, the American Association of University Professors and Florida’s statewide faculty union have harshly condemned the bill and urged lawmakers to oppose it.
The American Historical Association’s statement on the bill this month calls it a “blatant and frontal attack on principles of academic freedom and shared governance central to higher education in the United States.” More than 70 academic, historical and activist organizations co-signed the statement.
The executive committee of the Association for Jewish Studies signed a different statement authored by the American Council of Learned Societies, decrying the bill as an “effort to undermine academic freedom in Florida.”
“If it passes, it ends academic freedom in the state’s public colleges and universities, with dire consequences for their teaching, research, and financial well-being,” the statement said of the bill. “Academic freedom means freedom of thought, not the state-mandated production of histories edited to suit one party’s agenda in the current culture wars.”
Asked for comment on the bill, Warren Hoffman, the executive director of the Association for Jewish Studies, pointed to the statement.
Rachel Harris, director and endowed chair at Florida Atlantic University’s Jewish Studies program, is in her first semester at the university, having just arrived from the University of Illinois. “I’m now wondering if that was a terrible mistake,” she joked. (Harris is spending this term in Israel, researching on a Fulbright fellowship.)
Still, Harris said she was “confident” that legislators would “continue to support educational commitments in the state,” noting that Florida has a Holocaust education mandate for K-12 public schools. Her Boca Raton university is currently building an expanded center for Jewish and Holocaust studies, funded by private donors. H.B. 999 in its current form would prohibit universities from teaching critical theory concepts even when such programs are privately funded.
Despite what he described as a few students at the Jewish Studies center who are concerned about the new bill, Goda said he did not think the legislation would change the experience of Jewish students on his campus.
“Jewish kids these days are really choosing universities based on whether or not Jewish kids feel comfortable there,” he said. “And I would argue that [the University of Florida] is a very welcoming campus for Jewish kids overall. There are strong Jewish institutions associated with the campus.”
Instead, he feels the bill’s real effects would be felt in the state’s ability to recruit faculty and staff while its legislators jeopardize academic freedom, tenure and other lodestars of the humanities. He said, “The real question to me is how and in what way it’s going to be enforced.”
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The post A Florida bill attacking ‘critical theory’ in higher education has the state’s Jewish academics worried appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In ‘Nuremberg,’ a potent warning about our current politics of denial
“You want to know why it happened here?” asks Howie Triest — a German Jew serving as a U.S. military translator — in the new film Nuremberg. “Because people let it happen. They didn’t stand up until it was too late.”
Triest’s words, as uttered by actor Leo Woodhall, serve as an implicit plea to the film’s contemporary audience: We must stand up against the advancing collapse of our own democracy, before it is too late. Dark resonances appear between scenes in the film and scenes unfolding in today’s United States.
As Hermann Göring, the highest-ranking Nazi not to commit suicide at the war’s end — that is, until after his sentencing — Russell Crowe gives us a deposed and vainglorious charmer still able to exert something of his vanished power, even from his specially constructed prison. And, as in life, the Reichmarschall has a remarkable ability to evade and deflect: He is proud of the work he did for the German people and would do it again, but claims that once the war started, he knew nothing about what went on in the concentration camps — and nor did Adolf Hitler.
Today, Göring’s various lines of defense are striking as the ur-text for Holocaust deniers, as well as for contemporary leaders who strive everyday to re-write reality by lying about it. It is impossible to hear his arguments and not be struck by parallels to the rhetorical devices we see all around us now.
Göring’s arguments relied heavily on “what-aboutism”: He argued many other countries, including the U.S., had also committed crimes against civilian populations. The Nazis were no different. Likewise, President Donald Trump and his defenders have turned to “what-aboutism” over and over. Did Trump refuse to return classified documents upon leaving office after his first term? What about Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails? Insurrection on January 6 ? What about the Black Lives Matter protests? Family-separation policy? Well, Barack Obama’s administration built the cages.
Such comparisons serve to obfuscate vast differences in intent and magnitude. They also erode the very idea that justice exists, or should exist.
The Nuremberg trials marked the first time that individuals — not states — were held criminally responsible for war crimes under international law. They shaped the development of modern international criminal law and institutions such as the International Criminal Court in the Hague — a court that Trump has repeatedly described as illegitimate. They uphold the idea that nothing, including extreme nationalism, is a defense for orchestrated violence against civilians.
But the Nuremberg trials also marked the first time that, under oath, leaders adopted the excuse that they had no concept of, or power over, the injustice executed on their watch. The Nazi leaders in the dock at Nuremberg all claimed, in some way or another, that they did not know of and were not responsible for the fate of the Jews, or anyone else who fell victim to their pitiless brutality. In the film as in life, those claims caused chief prosecutor Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) to summarize their testimony this way: “While there have been enormous crimes, there are no criminals.”
A similar phenomenon was on display earlier this year in the Oval Office, when Trump hosted Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele. Trump’s administration had just deported more than 200 chained and shackled immigrants, many with no criminal record, to an El Salvador prison made infamous by sadistic videos produced by Bukele and copied by Homeland Security head Kristi Noem.
One prisoner, Kilmar Armando Ábrego Garcia, gained particular attention after it was revealed he had mistakenly been deported in violation of a federal immigration judge’s order barring his removal to his native country. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller argued, without evidence, that two judges had declared Ábrego Garcia a member of the MS-13 gang.
And when Bukele visited for an Oval Office meeting, the administration’s line was clear: they did not have the power to return Ábrego Garcia. His fate, in the words of Miller, was at the “sole discretion of El Salvador.”
Heads turned to the Salvadorean president, who smiled enigmatically. “How could I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Bukele asked. “Of course, I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.”
And the situation was indeed preposterous. No one, it seemed, was responsible for Ábrego Garcia’s fate. (Ábrego Garcia was eventually returned to the U.S. in June; the Trump administration is still trying to deport him.)
There have been many previous comparisons between Trump’s government and Hitler’s. Many have focused, including in the Forward, on Hitler’s first year in power, when Hitler hollowed out the civil service and re-stocked its ranks with loyalists; cracked down on the media, the universities, the judiciary, and the military; and began a campaign of horror in which Germans began to see their neighbors brutally arrested and imprisoned.
Crucially, the seeds of Göring’s Nuremberg defense were present at that time as well. Hitler and his top men characterized all reports of their barbarity as false, exaggerations spread by foreign enemies and a hostile media. Such evasions, too, are in abundant supply today.
After only two months in power, the Nazis made it illegal to protest or oppose them in any way. The Trump administration has taken frightening steps in the same direction. After several lawmakers who served in the military or the intelligence community this week posted a video in which they spoke directly to U.S. service members, urging them to uphold the Constitution and to defy “illegal orders” amid the Trump administration’s promise to send the National Guard “and more” into democratic-leaning cities, Trump posted on social media that the video constituted “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH.”
Miller added that the video represented “insurrection — plainly, directly, without question.”
Nuremberg is based on the life of psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), whose encounters with Göring form the core of the film. After the trials, Kelley wrote that he found the Nazi leaders to be by and large “commonplace people whose personalities could be duplicated in any country of the world today.” They were responding, as people always will, to the opportunities presented by serving a corrupt leader, one whose only demand is fealty.
The post In ‘Nuremberg,’ a potent warning about our current politics of denial appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump says he and Mamdani ‘didn’t discuss’ NYC mayor-elect’s vow to arrest Netanyahu during congenial meeting
(JTA) — Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani covered a lot of ground in their highly anticipated meeting at the White House Friday afternoon, discussing agenda items such as housing and affordability.
One topic that apparently did not come up, however, was Mamdani’s vow to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he step foot in New York City once Mamdani takes over as mayor on January 1.
“We didn’t discuss the second part of your question,” Trump told a reporter following the private meeting, referring to a question about whether he would stop Mamdani from arresting Netanyahu.
Mamdani’s promise to arrest Netanyahu is on the basis of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, to which the United States is not a party. Later, when asked about Mamdani’s frequent references to following international law, Trump deflected the question, saying, “I don’t know what you’re referring to in terms of, it could be covered by international law, local laws, it’s covered by a lot laws, it’s covered by U.S. law,” and ultimately allowed Mamdani to answer.
“I think what I’ve shared with the president is our desire to not only follow the laws of our own city, laws that protect New Yorkers, but also desire for consistency in our politics across the board,” Mamdani said.
The mayor-elect’s promise to arrest Netanyahu is seen as an area that could lead to conflict between the president, who considers Netanyahu an ally, and the New York City mayor-elect, who accuses Netanyahu of committing a genocide.
But there was little conflict Friday afternoon during a meeting that was viewed as crucial in ensuring that New York City retains federal funding that Trump has threatened to cut and that Mamdani can get the security clearance typically afforded to mayors.
Trump was effusive in his praise of Mamdani, who like him rose to power on populist sentiment and after overcoming traditionalists in their party. He called Mamdani “hopefully a really great mayor,” and the overall dynamic between the two leaders was chummy despite their political differences and name-calling in the lead-up to the mayoral election.
Trump has referred to Mamdani as “my little communist,” while Mamdani has called Trump a “despot” — a position he was asked about again Friday, and which Trump brushed aside.
Mamdani was asked multiple times about his accusations that Trump is a “fascist,” initially answering that “President Trump and I, we are very clear about our positions and our views.” When asked again, Mamdani began answering the question indirectly, before Trump let him off the hook with an easy out.
“That’s OK, you can just say yes,” Trump said, patting Mamdani on the arm and laughing. “It’s easier than explaining.”
“I’ve been called a lot worse than despot,” Trump also said.
Trump and Mamdani addressed questions on issues including Israel’s war in Gaza and Jewish safety in the city, following a half-hour meeting closed to the press.
“I think you feel very, very strongly about peace in the Middle East,” Trump said to Mamdani, answering a question about the region.
Mamdani replied that he’d asked Trump voters in New York why they voted for the president, and one answer he’d hear repeatedly was: “They wanted an end to forever wars. They wanted an end to the taxpayer dollars we have funding violations of human rights.”
Mamdani was later asked about his accusations that the U.S. government was committing genocide. The mayor-elect corrected the reporter, saying, “I’ve spoken about the Israeli government committing genocide, and I’ve spoken about our government funding it.”
He continued, “And I shared with the president in our meeting about the concern that many New Yorkers have of wanting their tax dollars to go to the benefit of New Yorkers, and their ability to afford basic dignity.”
The meeting came one day after a protest outside an Upper East Side synagogue that was holding an event promoting immigration to Israel drew condemnations; Mamdani’s spokesperson said he “discouraged” the language used in the protest, but suggested the event was a misuse of the “sacred space.”
A question about Jewish safety was asked immediately after the press conference concluded, which Mamdani stuck around to answer, though he did not address Thursday’s protest.
“I care very deeply about Jewish safety and I look forward to rooting out antisemitism across the five boroughs and protecting Jewish New Yorkers and every New Yorker who calls the city home,” Mamdani said.
Trump praised Mamdani’s decision to keep Jessica Tisch, who comes from a prominent Jewish family, as his police commissioner.
“He just retained a great police commissioner,” Trump said. “He retained I think somebody that is a friend of some people in my family, Ivanka, and they say she’s really good, really competent.”
While Mamdani’s appointment of Tisch has reassured some Jewish New Yorkers concerned about the community’s safety, others more critical of Mamdani were not swayed.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, who is running for governor as a Republican, has positioned herself as a bulwark against antisemitism who will prevent Mamdani from achieving the state legislative wins necessary for his democratic socialist agenda.
But Trump appeared to undercut Stefanik, disagreeing with her claim that Mamdani is a “jihadist.”
“No, I don’t,” Trump said, when asked if he believed he was seated next to a jihadist on Friday. “But she’s out there campaigning. You say things sometimes in a campaign.”
Praising Stefanik, he said, “She’s a very capable person.” Then he said about Mamdani, “I met with a very rational person. I met with a man who really wants to see New York be great again.”
The post Trump says he and Mamdani ‘didn’t discuss’ NYC mayor-elect’s vow to arrest Netanyahu during congenial meeting appeared first on The Forward.
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NELLA MARGRITHE ESKIN NOVEMBER 14, 1946 – AUGUST 27, 2025
It is with great sorrow that the Eskin family reports the passing of Nella Margrithe Eskin, beloved wife and devoted partner of Michael Eskin, on August 27, 2025.
Nella, the only child of the late Kasiel and Rosa Kessler, Holocaust survivors, was born in a displaced persons camp in Fohrenwald, Germany, in 1946. The family first moved to Baltimore as refugees in 1949 before settling in Chicago, where Nella graduated from Roosevelt University with Bachelor of Science degree.
In 1969, she met Michael, and three months later they were married in Chicago in March 1970. They shared a wonderful marriage of over 55 years, during which they raised a family of four boys and created a home that was always full of song, food, guests and Yiddishkeit. Sadly, their eldest son, Katriel, passed away in 2015. Nella is survived by her other three sons, Josh, Ezra and Daniel, and their families as well as Katriel’s wife and family. She was a devoted wife, mother, and grandmother to her husband, sons, and ten grandchildren, and a loving daughter to her mother, Rosa, who passed away in 2020.
A lifelong scholar, she earned an MBA from the University of Manitoba in 1995. Nella was a very pious and learned woman who was also a wonderful artist, music lover, gardener and cook. She passed her love of music, art, storytelling and learning to her children, teaching each of them piano and instilling in them an enduring appreciation for the arts that continues to this day. She was an incredibly warm woman and made every gathering feel special, every guest feel valued, and every meal feel like a celebration of love and friendship.
She will be sorely missed by her husband, children, grandchildren, relatives in the UK, USA, Australia, and Israel, and many dear friends. Her kindness, curiosity, and love will live on in the many lives she touched. May her memory be
a blessing.