A Florida college student said ‘F— Israel.’ Now she’s under federal investigation
Eden Deckerhoff confronted a student wearing an IDF shirt, and quickly found herself at the center of a political firestorm
A crowd outside the Florida State University football stadium on November 19, 2022 in Tallahassee. Photo by James Gilbert/Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld August 7, 2025
Eden Deckerhoff, a Florida State University graduate student, was riding an exercise bike in the campus gym last week when she saw a student in the lobby wearing an Israel Defense Forces shirt.
Deckerhoff told police that she walked downstairs to confront him. “I said, ‘You should be ashamed to wear a shirt for an army that is currently committing severe human rights violations,’ ” she recalled of the incident.
Yoel Rodrig, the rising sophomore who Deckerhoff confronted, said she also threatened to pour his smoothie over his head and said, “Your family needs to die, you guys are killing people.”
The only part of the conversation preserved on video is an eight-second clip Rodrig took in which Deckerhoff is pointing her middle finger at him. “Fuck Israel, Free Palestine,” Deckerhoff says before extending her arm toward the drink on the table in front of Rodrig, adding, “You’re an ignorant, f——- son of a b—-” before storming off.
By the next day, Deckerhoff would find herself branded an antisemite by Florida State and the Department of Justice, fired, suspended, banned from campus and placed under federal investigation — ultimately leading to her arrest for battery — at the behest of government officials eager to prosecute campus antisemitism while making little distinction between hostility toward Israel and animus toward Jews.
Rep. Randy Fine, a Florida Republican who believes the case’s treatment should serve as a national model, said that Deckerhoff might elicit pity from those who “feel bad for this kid whose life is over.”
But Fine, who is Jewish, is unbothered. “Live by the Muslim terror sword, die by the Muslim terror sword,” he said in an interview with the Forward.
This stemmed from an interaction that neither Rodrig nor the police officer who reviewed security video footage believed involved a clear act of violence — Rodrig said that Deckerhoff “tried kind of like shoving me” — and which was directed not at a student wearing a Star of David necklace or kippah, but rather sporting a shirt promoting the Israeli military.
Alexander Tsesis, a constitutional law professor at Florida State, said he had been impressed with the low level of antisemitism on campus and was dismayed by the incident at the gym, though acknowledged that Rodrig’s apparel might have sparked the confrontation.
“Certainly someone wearing a controversial shirt is inviting comment,” said Tsesis, who has worked with the Jewish law students club and described himself as a Zionist. “You’re inviting the conversation.”
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Deckerhoff confronted Rodrig last Wednesday evening, and he posted the brief clip of the incident to a private group of friends on Snapchat with the caption “Wheezing 😂.” Someone else appears to have recorded the clip and shared it with JEXIT, a movement to convince Jews to leave the Democratic party.
The organization posted it on X Wednesday night, where fewer than 2,000 people saw it, before the video found its way into the ecosystem of social media accounts that seek to shine a light on alleged antisemites.
The clip racked up more than three million views after StopAntisemitism shared it, another 265,000 from @JewsFightBack — “🚨 SHE SAW AN IDF SHIRT AND LOST HER DAMN MIND🚨” the account wrote — four million more from pro-Israel influencer Hen Mazzig, and tens of thousands more over the course of Thursday from smaller accounts like @VividProwess, @ShirionOrg and @BuffedJesus.
The goal of naming and shaming even obscure individuals who go after Jews or Israel dates back at least to 2014, when Canary Mission was launched, but has recently exploded in popularity. The Trump administration seems to have welcomed the assistance.
Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, says she starts each day by scrolling social media looking for potential cases to prosecute, and Betar, a far-right pro-Israel group, says it used facial recognition software to identify international students participating in campus protests and turned that information over to the Department of Homeland Security.
StopAntisemitism, whose founder Liora Reznichenko has been hosted on Capitol Hill by members of Congress, quickly found school photos of Deckerhoff and announced her name to its followers.
Florida State said on social media that Rodrig had reported the incident on Wednesday and that it was investigating. But Fine, the south Florida congressman who refers to himself as the “Hebrew Hammer,” saw the footage on Thursday evening and demanded the school expel Deckerhoff, who he called “a Muslim terrorist.”
Minutes later he followed up to announce that he’d contacted the school and they had agreed to suspend Deckerhoff “until an expulsion hearing” and ban her from campus. “It took only one call,” Fine boasted.
Florida State would not answer questions about what role Fine played, but six minutes after his social media post the university released a new statement stating Deckerhoff “has been prohibited from returning to campus” and referring to her behavior as an “instance of antisemitism.”
“I think I was helpful,” Fine said in an interview from Israel, where he was traveling this week.
Roughly 20 minutes after Florida State announced that Deckerhoff had been banned from campus, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that Dhillon and the local U.S. attorney were investigating the case. “Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Florida or anywhere else,” she wrote.
John Heekin, the U.S. attorney for the northern district of Florida, said in an email he has been monitoring “this disgusting incident” alongside Dhillon’s civil rights division.
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Despite its aggressive stance toward what federal officials have described as a crisis of campus antisemitism, the Trump administration has never articulated exactly what it considers to be antisemitic. Judges have reached divergent conclusions.
In June, for example, a federal judge in Philadelphia dismissed a lawsuit against the University of Pennsylvania that claimed a litany of activity, including the vandalism and theft of an Israeli flag, had created an antisemitic climate, writing that the plaintiffs’ complaints centered on the legal “expression of viewpoints which differ from their own.”
But this week a different federal judge declared that attacking an Israeli flag was as “racially motivated” as using the n-word.
“No student should ever feel threatened or unsafe because of their Jewish identity or support for the State of Israel.”Jewish Alumni NetworkFlorida State University
In general, experts agree that accosting a Jewish person over Israel is antisemitic if you’re doing so based on the fact that they’re Jewish. That seems to be what Rodrig believed took place last week, telling police that he assumed that Deckerhoff confronted him because his IDF shirt led her to believe he was Jewish. “She definitely just hate crimed me,” Rodrig said, though he demurred when asked the morning after the incident if he wished to press charges.
It gets more complicated when someone is confronted over their actual support for Israel, and contentious debates have broken out over whether protesting a synagogue that is hosting land sales in West Bank settlements is antisemitic. Neither Bondi nor Florida State would explain how they classified the incident at Florida State as antisemitic.
Brian Pelc, the campus Hillel director, said his concern was that, whatever Deckerhoff’s motivations might have been, too many Jewish students are being forced to answer for the actions of Israel.
“We live in a climate where non-Jewish students somehow feel it is permissible to ID somebody — whether they know they’re Jewish or not — that they want to unleash and vent their frustration toward a foreign government at,” Pelc said. “That’s a strategy saved solely for Jewish students, or solely for the issue of Israel and Gaza.”
The Jewish Alumni Network was more blunt in a statement: “No student should ever feel threatened or unsafe because of their Jewish identity or support for the State of Israel.”
Pelc said that while he worries about Rodrig feeling comfortable when he returns to campus in a few weeks, Florida State has been a generally welcoming environment for Jewish students.
Fine credits that climate, and Florida State’s quick response to Deckerhoff’s behavior, in part on a 2019 law he authored while a member of the state legislature, which is intended to mandate that antisemitism be treated the same as other forms of racism in Florida schools.
“If a white student called a Black student the n-word no one wonders what would happen,” Fine said. “Everyone knows they’d be gone in 10 seconds — and by the way, they should be gone.”
But some students on campus say allegations of antisemitism are now being taken more seriously than the kind of racism Fine referenced. After Owen Howard, an honors student at Florida State, shared a video of a Black Greek life event with the caption “chimps are going to chimp out,” the school said it could not comment on whether it had taken any action against him because doing so would violate Howard’s privacy rights.
The school was also rocked by a mass shooting in April in which a student who had expressed white supremacist views and shared neo-Nazi imagery killed two people.
“What she said is almost certainly the only reason she’s being prosecuted.”Angelo PetrighDefender Clinic, Boston University School of Law
Florida State, which is located in the liberal bubble of Tallahassee in the state’s otherwise conservative panhandle, banned the campus chapters of both Students for Justice in Palestine and Students for a Democratic Society following Oct. 7, and has been the subject of a federal investigation alleging anti-Palestinian discrimination. It adopted stringent demonstration rules last year that limit masks, amplified sound and certain signs and posters.
The result has been a campus that experienced relatively few disruptions related to the war in Gaza, and pro-Israel counterprotesters often outnumber students protesting against Israel.
“They will yell and they will harass us,” said JJ Glueck, a spokesperson for Tally for SDS, which replaced the campus club. “I’ve heard ‘Kill the Arabs,’ I’ve been called slurs — I’ve been called a f—–, I’ve been called a baby murderer, I’ve been told I want to kill Jewish people.”
Glueck, whose organization defended Deckerhoff on Instagram, said the counterprotesters often wave Israeli flags and wear IDF shirts. “It’s clear that one side of the political aisle is being silenced,” she said.
Glueck added that she was assaulted during a protest against a speech by Charlie Kirk, a right-wing influencer with a track record of antisemitism.
“FSU PD stood right there and watched as they hurled full water bottles at our heads,” she said. “So it’s just ironic to many of us that now when somebody gets frustrated and speaks up for Palestine they’re the ones who are ‘violent’ and committing antisemitism.”
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Deckerhoff told campus police that she had confronted Rodrig because she was angry over the images and videos she had seen of Palestinians starving in Gaza. But she was also embarrassed. “I knew that was a bad idea,” she said of the outburst, and offered to apologize to Rodrig.
The social work student, though, was adamant that she had never touched Rodrig. Deckerhoff said she had reached for his smoothie, which flustered him, but she never made contact. The police report stated that surveillance footage showed that Deckerhoff “appears to hit the male’s shoulder area while attempting to reach for his beverage.”
(Neither Rodrig nor Deckerhoff responded to requests for comment on social media, and this account is based on their interviews with police.)
Jack Campbell, the local prosecutor, said that he decided to charge Deckerhoff with misdemeanor battery after consulting with Heekin and the Justice Department.
Campbell also declined to charge Deckerhoff with a hate crime enhancement, though some observers said that the battery charge itself may not stand up in court. Battery involves the intentional and unwanted touching of another person, but the police report is ambiguous about whether Deckerhoff intended to touch Rodrig’s shoulder or inadvertently bumped into it while leaning to grab his drink.
Angelo Petrigh, who runs a criminal defense clinic at Boston University’s law school, called it a “rather weak battery case.” But he added that the case was more likely to move forward given that the prosecutor and judge are likely aware of the political pressure to convict Deckerhoff of assault.
The government has almost unlimited discretion in choosing which cases to prosecute, and defense attorneys are generally not allowed to tell the jury that they believe the case is politically motivated.
“She’s not being prosecuted because of what she said,” Petrigh said. “But, at the same time, what she said is almost certainly the only reason she’s being prosecuted.”
