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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 Central Synagogue attack had no clear connection to Mamdani. He’s still being blamed.
A stabbing outside a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Dozens of swastikas painted on a Brooklyn playground. A Queens synagogue desecrated with feces and motor oil.
Combined with an unprecedented call by New York’s mayor to protest Israel’s prime minister, the recent rash of crimes against Jews in New York City has the community on edge.
So after Larry Montes, 46, was charged with hate crimes for attempting to disrupt Central Synagogue’s Friday night Shabbat service, striking a congregant and spitting on a security guard, many online rushed to blame Mayor Zohran Mamdani for his rhetoric against Israel. The incident seemed to fit into the political narrative held among Mamdani’s fiercest critics.
“The attack at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue is a direct result of Mayor Mamdani’s sustained campaign of incitement,” Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York, posted to X Saturday morning. “I warned that words would turn into actions, and that is exactly what is happening.”
The details that have emerged about Montes complicate that conclusion. A Forward analysis of the attacker’s social media and statements from his family paint a very different picture of Montes: a pro-Israel Republican who wanted to convert to Judaism.
In June, Montes reposted two videos critical of Mamdani: one comparing the mayor to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and another accusing Mamdani of having “betrayed” the city’s Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. In 2024, Montes posted a photo of the map of Israel with text overlaid that says, “Keep Israel in your heart.” He also reposted a video featuring Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi explaining why evangelical Christians support Israel.
If anything, Montes may have believed that the Reform congregation was too progressive. After his arrest, Montes called the congregants “fake Jews” in statements to the police, according to the assistant district attorney on the case, Ali Fazal.
Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said in an interview that the suspect appeared to have a “a deeply, frankly, disturbing worldview when it came to Jews that was simultaneously both philosemitic and antisemitic.” Conflating the suspect’s worldview with Mamdani’s, she added, “harms the fight against antisemitism.”
Online influencers place the blame on Mamdani
The attacker’s background and stance on Israel didn’t stop influencers and longstanding critics of Mamdani from piling on. “Do you think your non-stop demonization of Jews could have anything to do with it?” said Brianna Wu, an activist who has become a vocal critic of the progressive left, on X in response to Mamdani’s condemnation of the attack.
“It’s your fault Mr. Mayor,” Loay Alshareef, an activist who advocates for the Arab world to normalize relations with Israel, posted to X on the night of the attack. “You allowed this to happen.”
Others didn’t name Mamdani but quickly attributed the attack to increasing animus toward Zionists — even as the attacker’s social media suggests he was Zionist himself.
“American politics has become so obsessively antagonistic toward ‘Zionists’ that even a synagogue is seen as fair game for disruption and desecration,” said U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York, one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress, on X.
Why exactly Montes attacked one of New York’s iconic synagogues is still unclear. Montes’ aunt, Myriam Montes, told the New York Post he was “mentally traumatized” because of his desire to be Jewish — suggesting he may have wanted to convert to Judaism but was rebuffed.
Mental health may also have been a factor. Montes was arrested three times for violent robberies between 2019 and 2023, police said, and he was a known “emotionally disturbed person.”
Some have argued that outsized attention on Israel can make Jews a natural target especially for people in the throes of a mental health crisis.
Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran New York political consultant, said the suspects’ anti-Mamdani views don’t weaken the case against the mayor. “There are crazy people that take cues from what they hear and what they read,” Sheinkopf said.
Spitalnick disagreed. “There are absolutely things the mayor has done that further reinforce concerns about Jewish safety,” she said. At the same time, “it’s disingenuous and unhelpful to blame him for all antisemitism in New York, which long predates him and which, as the evidence in this specific incident shows, is far more complicated than that.”
All that’s to say Montes could have had any number of motives for attacking a congregant during Shabbat services, including but not limited to warped philosemitism, a mental health crisis and prejudice against Reform Jews.
Playing into Netanyahu’s campaign
Blaming hatred of Israel and local political rhetoric for the attack could have an ulterior motive and political consequences halfway around the world. As Netanyahu and the ruling Likud Party, of which Israeli Consul General Akunis is a member, face a tough reelection fight in the Israeli Knesset elections in October, Mamdani has become a campaign target.
Last month, Netanyahu incorporated Mamdani’s video address encouraging New Yorkers to protest the Israeli leader into his own political campaign. In a campaign clip, he portrayed Mamdani as the face of a worldwide surge of antisemitism directed at Israel. Mamdani had initially threatened to arrest Netanyahu in September when he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly, but the city’s legal department determined the mayor did not have the authority to do so.
Footage of Mamdani’s call to protest has now expanded to billboards and digital clips to rally Israeli voters on the right.
“They want Netanyahu to lose,” the new Likud campaign reads, placing Mamdani alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem. “Don’t let them win.”
The political logic is straightforward. Portray Mamdani as the symbol of a hostile movement against Israel. Cast Netanyahu’s political survival as part of the larger fight against international efforts to isolate the Jewish state.
Both Spitalnick and Sheinkopf facetiously called Mamdani’s pledge to arrest Netanyahu an “in-kind contribution” to the Netanyahu campaign. Spitalnick said the Israeli leader “thrives by being able to point to that as opposed to talking about his own policies and record.”
Jewish leaders and local politicians have called for lowering the temperature. Micah Lasher, the Democratic nominee for the 12th congressional district that includes Central Synagogue, told The New York Times after the attack that the political climate must be taken into consideration at a time like this.
“You can’t divorce the dramatic increase in violence targeted at the Jewish community,” he said, “from the political climate and the tone and tenor of the discourse around Jews and Israel.”
The post The Central Synagogue attack had no clear connection to Mamdani. He’s still being blamed. appeared first on The Forward.
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‘We are in a time of biblical proportions’: What survivors of past shul attacks want Central Synagogue to know
When Audrey Glickman heard about the Friday night attack at Central Synagogue, a prominent congregation on Manhattan’s East Side, she had a visceral, immediate reaction.
“My first thought with anything like this is: they’ve been invaded,” she said. “And I know how that feels.”
Glickman, 69, survived the October 2018 attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue — the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history that killed 11 worshippers. She was leading services when she heard the rat-a-tat of gunfire. She grabbed fellow congregant Joe Charny, then 88, and raced up the stairs into a small room filled with bags of clothes to be donated to those in need. Together, huddled and scared, they hid under their prayer shawls until it was over.
In New York City this weekend, an attacker struck a congregant and a security guard, then was arrested and charged with hate crimes. Police said no one was seriously hurt.
“You never shake that feeling that somebody came into your space and invaded your safety, and you can’t undo it,” Glickman said. “My heart goes out to them.”
The suspect in New York, Larry Montes, 46, was charged with felony hate crimes and told police afterward that the attack was religiously motivated, citing hostility toward Jews and Black people. Montes, who has two prior misdemeanors, was granted bail at his Saturday night arraignment and is due back in court Thursday.
The attack landed amid a citywide surge: New NYPD data shows anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York rose 8.5% during Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first seven months in office and made up 57% of hate crimes citywide, with July alone seeing a 53% jump from a year earlier.
Glickman said she hopes New York officials can eventually give the congregation answers. A federal jury sentenced the Tree of Life gunman, Robert Bowers, to death in August 2023.
“I hope they have the kind of investigators that we had here to figure out what went on,” she said. “When you can close up the case, it feels a lot better.”
But Glickman said every targeted congregation eventually has to answer a harder question: How do you stay open to strangers, newcomers and the unaffiliated, while keeping the people inside safe?
For that answer, she said, members of Tree of Life turned to a friend: the Rev. Eric Manning of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a gunman killed nine Black worshippers during a Bible study in 2015.
Manning and then-Tree of Life’s Rabbi Jeffrey Myers leaned on each other. Myers invited Manning to speak at the funeral of Rose Mallinger, the oldest of the shooting victims, and the two clergy have stayed close in the years since. Manning’s advice to Glickman’s congregation has stayed with her: “You can’t close your doors.”
Nearly eight years later, Glickman still goes to shul most mornings, and still worships on Shabbat with Tree of Life, which continues to meet in borrowed space while its building is rebuilt.
Her message for the congregation in Manhattan: “We’re here, and we know how they feel,” Glickman said. “It’s not a good feeling, and we shouldn’t have to live with this. We are in a time of biblical proportions.”
‘The walls will never be high enough’
Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, 50, has an unusually direct connection to Central Synagogue. In January 2022, a gunman held Cytron-Walker and three congregants hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, after Cytron-Walker let him in from the cold and offered him tea.
The gunman, Malik Akram, had done his research, the FBI later found: He’d chosen the synagogue because it was the closest one to the federal prison holding Aafia Siddiqui, sentenced to 86 years for attempted murder and other felonies. Akram demanded her release and ordered Cytron-Walker to get America’s equivalent of a chief rabbi on the phone. He’d seen photos of Central Synagogue’s senior rabbi, Angela Buchdahl, with President Barack Obama and insisted that Cytron-Walker call her.
Cytron-Walker didn’t know her personally; he tracked down a number and left her a voicemail.
The 11-hour standoff — caught in its entirety on the synagogue’s security cameras — ended with all the hostages escaping unharmed. Authorities shot and killed Akram on the scene.
“While it was sad to hear that there was an attack at Rabbi Buchdahl’s congregation, I was very grateful to hear that the security protocols they have in place minimized any disruption,” Cytron-Walker said.
He was struck by how quickly the congregation returned to prayer. “You always have to weigh, when there’s a disruption, what the community needs in that moment,” he said. “What the community needed was not to let what turns out to be a minor incident ruin the night — to be able to celebrate Shabbat as a community despite the disruption.”
Cytron-Walker, now the spiritual leader of Temple Emanuel in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said Jewish congregations have to hold two values at once. “We have to live our values of loving the stranger,” he said. “Judaism has always been a part of the world, even when we try to isolate ourselves from it. The walls will never be high enough.”
At the same time, he said, “it is also a Jewish value to protect our own lives, to value our own lives. We should employ that with the rational part of our brain, not the emotional part. We shouldn’t panic, but we should be prepared.”
Just like Glickman, Cytron-Walker said he hopes Central Synagogue receives the kind of support that helped his own congregation heal.
“The Jewish people are not only receiving hate,” he said. “We’re also receiving love and support. It may not always be as much as we want, and when we do receive it, let’s offer gratitude and allow that to help with our healing.”
The post ‘We are in a time of biblical proportions’: What survivors of past shul attacks want Central Synagogue to know appeared first on The Forward.
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On my first Shabbat in NYC, the sanctuary was attacked
I don’t often go to synagogue. Outside of the High Holidays, it is not somewhere I would ordinarily find myself on a Friday night.
In the last few years, I have made a point of spending Shabbat with my grandmother. We light candles, eat together and let the week recede for a few hours. I don’t see it as an obligation so much as the comfort of doing something that has been done before, by people I love, in a rhythm that existed long before I did.
And yet, synagogues have a strange way of finding me when I need them.
Last summer, while travelling through Europe to visit two of my closest friends, I found myself in London, exhausted from weeks of constant movement. I happened to walk past a synagogue and realized that Shabbat was the following day. I reached out and asked if I could join their services. I remember thinking that perhaps this was exactly what I needed: a few hours to sit still, focus, and breathe.
And I was right.
There is something uniquely grounding about entering a synagogue in an unfamiliar place and discovering that the ritual is familiar. You may be thousands of miles from home, surrounded by people you’ve never met, but you know when to stand. You recognize the melodies. You open the same prayers. You know that somewhere else in the world, other Jews are doing some version of the same thing.
So when, only a few days after moving to New York, I was connected with a member of Central Synagogue through a potential landlord and they invited me to join them for Shabbat services, I thought: Why not?
I had just arrived in a city where I was beginning a new job at the Forward, a new life, one that, for the first time, was entirely mine to shape. That is a daunting task. What better way to spend my first Friday night than doing something that has always made the unknown feel a little more manageable.
Moments after services began, I was sitting in the sanctuary, allowing myself to take in the week that had just passed — my first week in New York — when a man entered and began moving violently through the congregation.
He knocked down the Shabbat candles that had just been lit. He moved through the rows of congregants. I watched him strike another person.
People around me ran toward the sides of the sanctuary. My own body went into the same instinctive state of shock and survival: Where is the danger? Where can I go? What do I need to watch for?
The security response was swift. The intruder was stopped, we re-lit the candles, and services continued.
Those around me who knew I was new to the synagogue immediately went into protection mode. They checked on me, expressing disbelief that something like this could have happened there, especially given the level of security they pride themselves on maintaining. They told me that in the nearly three years since October 7, nothing like this had happened.
The clergy, too, seemed to understand what the moment required. They gave us strength and courage, using the same voices that had moments earlier been leading us in song and prayer to restore some sense of calm. Throughout the service and again afterward in their online response, they returned to the same idea: it was our duty to keep joy alive.
Joy, one of the rabbis said, is itself an act of resistance.
I understood the sentiment. But my body hadn’t quite caught up.
Shabbat is one of the rare times when I allow myself to become completely uninhibited. I sing. I look up from the prayer book. I watch the rabbis and the people around me. I let myself become absorbed in something larger than whatever has been occupying my mind that week. For a few hours, I am not thinking about work, or apartment hunting, or navigating a new city. I am simply there.
That is also why the disruption was so jarring. I had come to Shabbat to let my guard down, and suddenly I found myself unable to do so.
I kept my eyes toward the front of the room, watching for movement. When it came time to turn around during Lecha Dodi, I felt a jolt of anxiety at the thought of putting my back toward the congregation. I could no longer surrender myself completely to the moment and what it required of me. I knew, rationally, that the threat had passed. But my body had learned something different: that even here, even now, even in this room, I might need to be ready.
For a moment, I considered leaving. But the people around me seemed to embody a quiet confidence that everything was going to be okay. They had chosen to stay, and I followed their lead. There is a certain strength in knowing that you are not standing alone.
I had come to Central Synagogue because I wanted to feel at home in my new city. Instead, on my first Shabbat in New York, I was reminded how quickly the simple act of practicing Judaism can become an exercise in vigilance. And yet, looking around the room that evening, I also understood that vigilance does not have to mean retreat.
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