Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post A Florida bill attacking ‘critical theory’ in higher education has the state’s Jewish academics worried appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
When a country has gone insane, a ‘psychotic’ Israeli play like this makes total sense
What happens when individuals — and societies — lose their grip on reality, sanity, truth, or all three at once?
Af Mila L’Ima, or “Not a Word to Mother,” a play, running now at Beit Lessin in Tel Aviv, is a window into the mental state of the State of Israel right now. Like much of great Jewish literature, it combines comedy with tragedy.
Written by Noam Gil, and directed by Udi Gottschalk, the play opens with an air-conditioner repairman who finds himself summoned to the home of a woman he does not know. But she hasn’t called him there to fix her air conditioner.
After a few awkward — and very funny — minutes, the lady spits it out: Four days ago, she found out that her husband is having an affair with the air conditioner repairman’s wife.
“No,” he says. “Not my Galya.”
The woman can prove it to him, she says. She asks the repairman to hide, lie in wait for the two philanderers —and then attack her cheating husband with a rolling pin.
“No,” the repairman says, but soon a car is in the driveway, and the woman and the repairman dive behind the curtains.
It’s not who they think it is. Corinne, the woman’s teenage daughter, arrives with her crush, Nadav. The girl proceeds to discuss her mother in uncharitable terms. “I would kill myself if I turned out like her,” the girl says.
After a few minutes, another car arrives in the driveway.
This time it is the woman’s husband and the repairman’s wife, and they’re all over each other.
Just as they rip each other’s clothes off on the coffee table, the teenage daughter, dressed in her Scouts uniform, opens a door, and sees it all.
The repairman and the woman from the first scene emerge from their hiding places.
The horrified and traumatized teenage daughter has filmed the coffeetable make-out scene on her phone. And worse, she recognizes her father’s mistress; it’s her high school teacher.
The teenage daughter threatens to put the video up on TikTok. The adults panic. The situation spirals out of control; after catching his wife in the act, the seemingly peaceful repairman bloodies the nose of the woman’s husband. And Nadav, who can’t leave the apartment because no one will give him the keys — in Israel you need keys to leave the house —loses it.
“P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi, ” he yells. Psichi means “psychotic” or “crazy” in contemporary Israeli slang.
But this play is not just about one family’s petty, “psychotic” mess; these characters are each a type of mess in which the audience might recognize themselves: a philandering bal t’shuvah husband, talking big to his mistress about opening up new restaurants when he’s really bankrupt; a woman who has convinced herself she deserves a man with gigantic ambitions; a self-sacrificing, middle-aged mother who has given up on her own dream of writing a play to care for her husband and children; a teenage girl who claims to hate her own mother. Each character is trying to find a way of surviving this mess.
“When you live in a place that is psychotic, everything is normal,” one character observes. The entire audience laughed knowingly.
This line gains resonance as the play zooms out from the “psychotic” behavior of the four adults and the two teenagers to take a look at the place they are all living in: Israel.
In a chaotic household in a chaotic country, the characters look to Jewish tradition to try to stabilize themselves. “Ridfu shalom,” the air conditioner repairman keeps telling the screaming spouses around him, riffing off Psalms 34:15. “Pursue peace.”
But can you always pursue peace?
This play acknowledges that in some situations, that’s not possible. In that way, it looks straight at the belief of many Israelis that now, after everything — the Oslo Accords, the Second Intifada, the withdrawal from Gaza, and finally Oct. 7 — the two-state solution may simply not be something that can be pursued.
And maybe that’s why everyone has gone psychotic, and why so many theatergoers packed the house, to laugh in a time of tragedy — and, to use an American idiom, to “feel seen.”
As I was writing this in a Tel Aviv coffee shop, a young man came over and asked if he could ask me something. I said sure, expecting to be asked for money.
But he sat down and said he was a lochem, a fighter, and was just released, and needed to talk with somebody. Would I be willing to speak with him for a few minutes?
I said of course.
He wanted to be heard. He said his name was Tom, he was the second of six children and hoped to study business administration. We talked about where we grew up, how being a second kid feels like being inside a sandwich, and the difference between a mandatory draft in Israel and selective service in the US. And then he apologized. He said he had to keep walking to stay calm.
If he were to walk over to the Beit Lessin theater, he would find the benches on Dizengoff Street covered with bumper stickers memorializing young men lost in battle. Not far away, there is a fountain that memorializes those killed on Oct. 7. But these memorials do not provide answers. What’s sanity? What’s insanity? What’s “p’sichi” and what’s just a normal reaction to pain?
There are no easy answers. I waved to Tom as he walked on.
The post When a country has gone insane, a ‘psychotic’ Israeli play like this makes total sense appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
It’s not just Harvard and Columbia. Small liberal arts colleges are quietly settling antisemitism complaints.
As major universities across the U.S. strike deals with the Trump administration over antisemitism complaints, a handful of small liberal arts colleges have been quietly settling cases of their own.
In the past week, Oregon’s Reed College and Pennsylvania’s Haverford College have both settled complaints accusing them of failing to protect Jewish students in the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war. Pomona and Occidental Colleges, both in southern California, settled complaints in late 2024 and 2025, respectively.
At least nine other small liberal arts colleges — which unlike universities mainly focus on undergraduate and interdisciplinary education over research — are still locked in disputes.
These include Sarah Lawrence and Union in New York; Swarthmore and Lehigh in Pennsylvania; Middlebury in Vermont; Whitman in Washington; Wellesley and Williams in Massachusetts; and Scripps in California.
All colleges declined the Forward’s requests for comment.
“Institutions are failing to effectively respond to anti-Zionist conduct targeting Jews, as they’re legally obligated to do,” said Denise Katz-Prober, special counsel of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a non-profit dedicated to advancing the civil rights of the Jewish people. “Most, if not all, of the measures that would apply to a larger institution also apply to a small liberal arts school.”
In most cases, Jewish legal advocacy organizations such as the Brandeis Center, the Anti-Defamation League, or StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice (SCLJ) have leveled the accusations by filing complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
Jews at Haverford, a group of Jewish students, faculty, parents and alumni of the Pennsylvania school, opted for a different tactic, filing a civil lawsuit against the college.
The Trump administration launched investigations of 60 colleges and universities, including small liberal arts colleges. But it has not taken the same drastic measures with them as it did with larger universities, where it used federal funding as leverage. While some schools agreed to the federal government’s demands and reached multi-million dollar financial settlements, others like Harvard did not, and were subsequently hit with lawsuits. A judge dismissed the lawsuit against Harvard on Thursday.
Most complaints have been filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and allege that colleges didn’t take sufficient action when Jewish students complained they were discriminated against. The complaint against Reed College alleged that the school’s inaction after a student claimed she was harassed for being a Zionist created an environment where, soon after, the mezuzah on her doorframe was destroyed and a rock was thrown at her through her dorm window.
At Lehigh, a Jewish student’s mezuzah was stolen, according to the complaint, and, shortly after, a “Stand With Palestine” sticker was placed outside the same door. Lehigh police conducted and closed a brief investigation, the complaint says, but when the student identified who admitted to placing the sticker, the college declined to discipline them or increase security surveillance in the dormitory. Because of this, the complaint says, the Jewish student requested alternative housing for his own safety.
“This is outrageous and blatantly unequal treatment,” reads the complaint, filed by StandWithUs.
The lawsuit against Haverford accuses the school of being too permissive with pro-Palestinian protesters, who occupied the school’s main administrative building in December 2023. According to the suit, protesters would perform chants “quoting from the Hamas Charter,” which calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews. The suit also accused the president of saying she would take “no punitive action” against the protesters.
At Wellesley, a student resident assistant sent an email to the underclassmen in her dorm saying, “there should be no space, no consideration, and no support for Zionism within the Wellesley College community,” according to the complaint filed by the Brandeis Center.
The RA sent an apology letter to residents, according to the complaint, but soon after posted on her social media that she stood by her statement, sent the apology because she “had a gun to [her] head,” and called students who objected to her message “some weak bitches fr.” The Title VI complaint against Wellesley alleges that the school didn’t do enough to address this issue.
As part of their settlements, Reed, Pomona and Occidental agreed to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism. The schools also agreed to include education to fight antisemitism in their bias training, and to strengthen the rules for campus demonstrations with regard to time, place and manner.
Haverford also agreed to adopt the IHRA definition, which states that claiming Israel’s existence is a “racist endeavor” or comparing “contemporary Israel policy to that of the Nazis” can be antisemitic.
Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at the University of Pennsylvania and an advocate for free speech on college campuses, fears that adopting this definition will stifle that freedom.
“I’m Jewish, and anti-Zionist rhetoric is hard for me to hear,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “But that’s why I should hear it. Zionism is probably the most contested question on our campuses right now. Unless everyone can address it freely and openly we’ll never get a good purchase on it.”
Katz-Prober of the Brandeis Center said the IHRA definition does not restrict or censor speech.
“The IHRA definition specifically and explicitly states that criticism leveled against Israel, similar to that leveled against any other country, is not antisemitism, and also requires context,” she said.
“Antisemitism cannot be effectively addressed without first being able to understand and recognize it and the IHRA definition is the most effective and widely accepted tool for doing just that.”
The post It’s not just Harvard and Columbia. Small liberal arts colleges are quietly settling antisemitism complaints. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israeli restaurants are hiding their identity. New York magazine won’t say why
I walked into Jerusalem Chicken restaurant because someone told me it served the best maqluba this side of Jerusalem — all within a few minutes of LAX.
Outside, the well-lit sign said, “Palestinian Chicken Eatery,” which, because I’d seen the Curb Your Enthusiasm “Palestinian Chicken” episode about a dozen times, already had me smiling. Then I stepped inside.
Across from a deli counter filled with platters of rice and roasted vegetables was a cardboard sign: “End US Funding of Israel. Defend Palestine. End the Cycle of Genocide.”
This was 2022. Genocide seemed like an especially scurrilous charge, but it was their restaurant. I could yell, scream, protest, vandalize the place or call for a boycott. The young man behind the counter served me a leg and a thigh roasted dark, fragrant with sumac, clove and cinnamon. I ate.
Call me crazy but that’s what I demand of restaurants: Good food, clean kitchens and kind service. But, it seems, when it comes to Israeli restaurants, a different standard applies.
Somewhere toward the end of her long New York magazine feature on Middle Eastern food in New York City, Madeleine Leung Coleman points out that Israeli restaurants are increasingly labeling themselves as Middle Eastern or Levantine rather than Israeli.
“There could be many reasons why,” she writes. “Perhaps there’s a fear of being targeted. Or they’re second-guessing if they should call their food ‘Israeli’ at all.”
I’m going to offer a third choice: Perhaps it’s because of articles like hers.
The disappearing ‘Israeli’ restaurant
Coleman understates the actual violence against Israeli and Jewish-owned restaurants (and, oddly, against Palestinian restaurants). She implies that Israeli restaurants serve food that is somehow stolen from Arab cultures. She blurs the distinction between Israeli restaurateurs and the actions of a government 7,000 miles away. In short, she reinforces the stigma she purports to describe. It’s a case study in journalism-as-activism, for which innocent restaurateurs and diners will pay the bill.
Her piece, “When Eating Out Is Political,” charts the evolution of Middle Eastern food in the city from turn-of-the-century market stalls, falafel stands and halal carts to its current incarnation in high-end, often Michelin-starred chef-driven restaurants.
The core argument is that Israeli restaurants became trendy by appropriating Palestinian, Mizrachi and North African dishes while Arab, Iranian and North African restaurants languished as cheap, “outer-borough” places, and especially post-9/11 hid their identities behind a vague “Mediterranean” label.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, and growing protest against Israel, the stigma has reversed. Palestinian, Syrian and Iranian restaurants have flourished with cheffy food, and owning their particularist labels, while Israeli restaurants have had to hide their identity.
It’s true that Middle Eastern cuisines are having their moment in New York, and Coleman’s descriptions of the “delicate, hand-shaped beef dumplings” at the Syrian restaurant Huda or the wild mallow “topped with twists of fried onion and salty black olives” at the Palestinian restaurant Tanoreen in Brooklyn make it clear that these chefs, whether Palestinian, Syrian or Iranian, should be celebrated.
But the celebration is tainted with bias and ignorance when it comes to all things Israeli.
From Moshe’s Falafel to Solomonov
First, the history. By Coleman’s recounting, Israeli restaurants swooped in to success and instant “It” status sometime in the early aughts.
“We were told this was the flavor profile of this young country,” she writes, “which was so richly funded and supported by our own.”
I’m not sure what American aid to Israel has to do with the efforts of early chefs like Einat Admony and Michael Solomonov, but that sentence shows how Coleman condemns talented individual chefs for somehow being complicit in … foreign aid decisions?
She’s also wrong on the timeline. Israeli food came to America the same way Arab food did, with immigrant sweat and no guarantees of success. Moshe Mizrachi, an Israeli of Syrian origin, opened his falafel restaurant in Manhattan in 1981. It failed. He reincarnated it as a cart, and four decades later it’s an institution.
The food these Israelis brought with them wasn’t, as Coleman writes, Arab dishes or food their grandmothers made — her attempt to dismiss Israeli food as either stolen or copied.
She might have mentioned that over half of Israel’s population has origins in the greater Middle East and North Africa. Falafel, hummus, stuffed vegetables, shakshouka and all the glorious ingredients that go into them were part of their traditions too. What was a Jewish chef from Iraq supposed to cook, lox and cream cheese?
From shattah to schnitzel
Israelis also ate what Palestinians ate, and learned to cook it. This is how every culture’s foodways evolve — including that of Palestinians.
In the 15th century, Christopher Columbus brought chile peppers back from the Americas, after wreaking havoc on the native populations. Those chiles give Palestinian shattah sauce its heart and heat. The “most traditional Palestinian dish,” according to cookbook author Reem Kassis, is maftool, a pebbly couscous that likely arrived via the Berbers, whose own history of subjugation, rebellion and assimilation with the Muslim invaders is, to say the least, fraught. Schnitzel is now a popular Palestinian dish, likely adopted from Ashkenazi immigrants.
Cultures exchange food, like they do music, fashion and language. None of this is to say Israelis haven’t ignored or downplayed the Palestinian contribution to their cuisine, or used food as a political or economic weapon — most unconscionably in Gaza itself. But the Israeli chefs most associated with the New Israel Cuisine are usually the first to point all that out.
“I don’t think there’s enough understanding how deeply rooted Israeli food, as it’s cooked at the moment and seen all over the world, is actually based on Palestinian cooking,” the chef and author Yotam Ottolenghi told me in a 2022 interview.
Credit where credit is due. But the only reason to question an Israeli cook’s right to do what cooks throughout history have done is if you question Israel’s existence itself.
‘The land mass currently called Israel’
And Coleman clues us in that she leans that way.
She repeatedly refers to Israel’s attack on Gaza as a genocide. Many genocide experts and international bodies have concluded it is. Many others, including the International Court of Justice, have not, something a fair journalist would point out.
And then there is the strange way she describes an image on the menu of the Palestinian restaurant Ayat as “a cheerful tourist-style map in which the land mass currently called Israel is titled ‘Discover Palestine.’”
Even the progressive watchdog site Mediaite called that “bizarre.” Just as bizarre is her explanation for why chefs are less likely to publicize their connection to Israel.
“In the last few years,” she writes, “some Israeli restaurants have been vandalized, spray-painted with notices that accuse them of co-signing the Israeli government’s project. This may be one reason why some are staying silent.”
Here’s a better reason:
- In February 2022, vandals sprayed “F– Jews” on the wall of Miriam’s restaurant in Brooklyn.
- In December 2023 anti-Israel protesters surrounded Goldie’s, Michael Solomonov’s falafel restaurant in Philadelphia, vandalizing it and chanting, “Long live the intifada!”
- In February 2024 a masked man took a baseball bat to the windows of Rothschild TLV on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
- In July 2025, intruders broke into a Melbourne, Australia Israeli restaurant, threw chairs and shattered windows while people were eating.
- In August 2025, intruders ransacked Manny’s restaurant in San Francisco and spray-painted “F- Manny’s” and “Die Zionist” on the walls.
There’s more, but you get the idea. It isn’t a few kids with spray cans: it’s open season on Israeli and Jewish-owned restaurants. At least three Palestinian restaurants have been vandalized as well, as well as Kanaan in Berlin, which is owned by an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian. If every Israeli restaurant is complicit in the worst behaviors of the Israeli government, is Jerusalem Chicken collaborating with Hamas?
Israeli restaurants aren’t Med-washing their names because they’re reckoning or apologetic. They’re hiding because the violence against them is getting worse, for patently absurd reasons. Coleman could have written that story, not one where victims did something to deserve it.
The post Israeli restaurants are hiding their identity. New York magazine won’t say why appeared first on The Forward.
