Last Friday, while visiting Israel on a trade mission, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation to provide police with new enforcement mechanisms to punish perpetrators of antisemitic incidents and those who target the Jewish community.
“By signing HB 269, Governor DeSantis has once again made Florida a leader on protecting religious liberty and the State of Israel both in the United States and around the world,” said the governor’s office in a statement.
Florida state Rep. Randy Fine, who worked with DeSantis on the measures to combat antisemitism in the state, described the bill as the strongest antisemitism legislation in the United States.
“It's going to target the behavior that Nazis are using today to intimidate and hurt Jews,” Fine told Israel National News. “It has nothing to do with free speech, but it's going to say that a lot of things that they're doing where they're breaking the law, [they will face] enhanced penalties and they're going to go to prison.”
Florida state Rep. Mike Caruso added that by making the proposal into law, Florida “took a major step at fighting antisemitism.”
“When I presented this bill on the House floor last Thursday, it was the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw [Ghetto] Uprising where hundreds of Jews stood up and fought the Nazis even though they really didn't have a fighting chance of doing so, but their bravery counts. Today, we stand up to fight antisemitism throughout Florida, throughout the United States, and throughout the world.”
According to Fine, the new law enforcement tools may not stop the hate itself but they will stop the behaviours targeting the Jewish community.
“This is a whack-a-mole, if they find other ways to intimidate and scare and frighten Jews, we'll find new ways to go after them,” he said.
Caruso noted that while antisemitism has been around for thousands of years, he remains optimistic.
“I think it's important that we be optimistic. That's the only way we look forward in life, from an optimistic perspective, and I know that I passed a bill back in 2019 that made antisemitism in our k-20 grades illegal and that bill – everybody said, ‘Oh, it won't do anything.’ [But] it totally has taken antisemitism out of our schools, that hate among student to student. That's what we're trying to stop, the student on student hate,” he said.
Fine, who pointed out that he’s the only Jewish Republican in the Florida state legislature and has been advising DeSantis on the issue, praised the governor for his commitment to advancing legislation to combat antisemitism.
“I've been working with him on it since I got to the legislature. I'm the only Republican Jew in the Florida legislature so I advance these issues because they're important to me, they're important to my family, and they're important to the hundreds of thousands of Jews that live in Florida, so we'll keep working on it,” he said.
Caruso called DeSantis a leader on the bill in terms of making sure it passed through the legislature and was sent to him to be signed into law.
“All along he's been a leader at standing up for Israel as a state and he's been a leader in the fight against antisemitism,” he said. “We couldn't have done what we've done over the last five years in the Florida House without him.”