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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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Trump nominee for Kuwait ambassador, grilled at confirmation hearing, loses support over Israel views
(JTA) — After Amer Ghalib became the most prominent Muslim politician in the country to endorse Donald Trump for president last year, he did so on pro-Palestinian grounds. And he was rewarded with a plum position: the administration’s ambassadorship to Kuwait.
But the mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, had to get through Senate approval first. And at Thursday’s confirmation hearing before the foreign relations committee, multiple Republicans broke rank and took Ghalib to task for his past social media posts and actions about Jews and Israel.
“It appears you have a deep-felt and passionate view about the Middle East,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told Ghalib. “But it is a view that is in direct conflict with the policy positions of President Trump and this administration.”
Cruz grilled the Yemen-born mayor on Hamtramck becoming the first American city to adopt a boycott, divestment and sanctions policy against Israel; on his previous “liking” of Facebook posts comparing Jews to monkeys; and on his past stances opposing the Abraham Accords.
He wasn’t the only Republican to take issue with Ghalib. Sens. David McCormick of Pennsylvania and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska also harshly questioned the mayor on his views on Jews and Israel.
Ghalib did not disavow any of his past stances or posts. The BDS resolution, he said, had been drafted by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and approved unanimously by the city council. “It wasn’t my idea,” he said. “We don’t have any companies that deal with Israel in our city.” He said he had no power to remove a city council official who had said the Holocaust was advance punishment for Israel.
He “liked” the Facebook post about monkeys, he said, because he used to “like” every post on his feed before becoming mayor. “The person who wrote it is mentally challenged in our community,” he said of the post, later adding, “It’s definitely antisemitism, but clicking on it doesn’t mean I endorse that.”
“Actually, ‘like’ means exactly that,” Cruz retorted.
In response to a question from McCormick about whether he would “accept President Trump’s view that Israel is and should be the national home of the Jewish people,” Ghalib dodged. “I think we can coexist in the region and that’s the answer, that everybody has the right to exist now,” he said. “I trust the president’s policies and I will support his policies.”
At the end of the hearing, Cruz said he would vote no on confirming Ghalib, putting the mayor’s appointment on shaky ground.
Ghalib had endorsed Trump after previously siding with the “Uncommitted” movement that had targeted President Joe Biden’s support for Israel. In a meeting with Trump prior to his endorsement, the mayor said the two had discussed the possibility of a ceasefire in Gaza. Michigan, which has a large Arab population, wound up swinging to Trump.
A separate nominee at the same hearing, South Africa ambassador hopeful Leo Bozell, pledged to push the country to end its genocide charge against Israel in front of the International Court of Justice.
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The best Shabbat I ever kept, or how to dodge the biggest World Series spoiler ever
This time a year ago, with Sukkot ending and the World Series upon us, I and many other Shabbat-observant Jews were coming apart at the spiritual seams.
Naturally, I wrote about it: The New York Yankees and the Los Angeles (formerly Brooklyn) Dodgers were facing off in the Fall Classic for the 12th time in their storied rivalry and the first time in 43 years. But because the first two games overlapped with Shabbat — falling on Friday and Saturday evenings — thousands of diehards in the two biggest Jewish communities in the U.S. couldn’t watch.
Or could we?
When I asked those fans about the quandary, a few of them told me they’d found ways to watch: A friend’s apartment, the in-laws downstairs, little loopholes with which I was well-versed. (When I was a kid, the dry cleaner’s flatscreen usually sufficed.) Others who couldn’t or wouldn’t watch planned to learn the outcome through the grapevine the next day.
No one I spoke to, however, planned to record the game and watch it after Shabbat ended. Sure, starting a replay of Game 1 on Saturday night meant you couldn’t join Game 2 in progress. But the bigger reason was also kind of funny: In a community that insists on unplugging for 25 hours, finding out a sports score — even inadvertently — was generally seen as inevitable. The only person who believed it was possible to avoid World Series spoilers and watch the whole thing, start-to-finish, 24 hours after the fact, was me.
I also just wanted my precious Shabbat left alone. On the job, I am regularly contending with a firehose of information — much of it discouraging — and the intensity hardly lessens when I’m off the clock. When people ask me whether it’s hard to turn off my phone on Friday afternoon, my answer is that it’s really not. The challenge — the imperative — is protecting the feeling of rest that comes with it. So: No sports fandom, either.
Now, the problem of spoilers is close to my heart. I once wrote an article for this publication about a Harry Potter spoiler that became the most devastating Camp Ramah prank of all time. I now believe that Jewish law actually regards ruining an ending without consent as an act of theft — one called g’neivat da’at (literally, “theft of knowledge”). Of course, the harder a person works to avoid spoilers, the more easily something is spoiled; friends know not to text me asking if I watched the game because that means it ended!!!
Staying out of the loop would be difficult, but I’d spent half a lifetime watching Saturday games on tape delay. In case you weren’t aware, streaming apps are all apparently hell-bent on revealing the outcome of a game that’s just happened before you watch it, by, to take one infuriating example, making the thumbnail image a picture of one of the teams celebrating. In the face of this adversity, I’ve developed the specific muscle of keeping my eyes just focused enough to find the game I want and put it on. These ocular reps would surely prepare me for the World Series.
The Saturday morning after Game 1, I walked to shul with my sister. Well, I was headed to shul; she was headed first to the shul security guard, that singular oracle of contemporary American Orthodox Judaism, who would have the scoop. I escaped that spoiler by skipping ahead as we approached, but my plan faced some resistance in the pews. Everyone else knew what had happened and wanted to discuss it. And I’ll never forget the look of sheer annoyance one in-the-know friend had when I explained my choice. “You’re just gonna go the whole day not knowing?” Sir, that was the whole point.
Several hours later, I was pacing in front of the television in my apartment. There were two outs, bases loaded, bottom of the 10th inning, Dodgers down one. All of it had already happened, and yet none of it had, when I watched Freddie Freeman limp to the plate. You don’t need me to tell you what happened next.
A walk-off grand slam. Reader, I was screaming. I started a replay of Game 2 a few minutes later.
Now, I titled this column “the best Shabbat I ever kept,” but the truth is I don’t really remember too much about that Shabbat. I probably spent it like most others — whiling away a few hours in shul, seeing family and friends, nodding off on the couch. I’m sure only that it wasn’t spoiled. Dodgers history awaited me after Havdalah.
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Are you a Good Witch or a Bad Witch? Or a Jewitch?
When I was a little girl, I played Witch all the time. I was The Grande Madame — the Queen of all the Witches. I even wrote spooky musicals for the neighborhood kids. We set up lawn chairs in my friend Susie’s backyard in Queens, and made our parents watch. If I had been more business minded, I would have sold tickets.
Now I teach music and something must have stayed with me, because October is my favorite month — Witchy Music Month. This week, I put on my pointy hat, plugged in my spooky orange lights, and played some scenes from The Wizard of Oz and Snow White for the kiddos.
Then I noticed something.
Both witches had big, hooked noses. What they used to call “Jewish Noses.” The noses that kept New York surgeons busy when we hit 18. Many of us got nose jobs. It wasn’t a secret. It was expected.
My mother said no, so I couldn’t get one, but it didn’t stop me from kvetching. (I also asked to be sent to a Swiss Finishing School — again, no.)
I looked it up. A big study in 1914 debunked the theory that Jews actually had big noses — 14% aquiline, compared with 10% of the regular population. Considering that Jews are a people sometimes “bottlenecked from geographic diversity” in a more modern study in 2022, meaning that we weren’t allowed to live anywhere we wanted, and definitely meaning that we inbred, it doesn’t sound like we owned Big Nose.
Tell everybody.
Still, the “hook-nosed” Jewish stereotype remains. Hard to get rid of stereotypes, and harder to get rid of what most people find conventionally attractive. Especially when Disney adds to the Big Hooked Nose in Snow White’s witch — with some well-placed warts.
The most famous Jewish Witch story was when King Saul wanted to go to battle with the Philistines and consulted the Witch of Endor. She summoned Prophet Samuel’s Spirit for the King. Alas Samuel prophesied Doom, and King Saul and his son Jonathan were killed the next day.
The irony was that King Saul had banned all witches, until he needed one himself.
And do you remember what TV writer Sol Sacks named Samantha’s mother in the TV series, Bewitched? Yes, Endora. I bet Sacks’ Hebrew School teacher was proud.
My son, Aaron, is most like me, and I guess most susceptible to my witchiness. He really believed when he was little, and I remember once picking him up from his second grade class. As I bent down to tie Aaron’s shoe, I felt 100 little eyes on me. When I straightened up, I was surrounded by a solemn crowd. A little girl pointed and said, “Aaron, she doesn’t look like a witch.”
I have to admit, I was a little insulted.
I also have to admit that I did use my powers on Aaron and I am a little ashamed. When he was six, he hated Shabbos because of its restrictions. No TV, no piano, no trips in the car to the 7-Eleven for Slurpees; and endless synagogue.
But this happened on a Wednesday night. He was in a mood and was smashing all her plastic swords and yelling, and I was on the phone trying to accept a music gig with a bride and groom. I told the couple I’d call them right back.
“Aaron,” I looked at him. “If you don’t stop right now — I’m gonna make it SHABBOS!”
He dropped his swords in petrified horror. “C-c-can you really DO that?”
And then I did something I’m even more ashamed of. I smiled.
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