The Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), the field’s premier scholarly journal, has dedicated past issues to topics like the “various nuances through which water and design mix” and the “relationship between stories and architecture.” Last year, the journal landed on a different topic for its fall 2025 issue: The “ongoing Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza.”
The journal’s “call for papers”—a prompt for essay submissions—was littered with anti-Semitic rhetoric. It lauded “siege and prison breaks” as methods of “anti-colonial life- and land-protection” and justified Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack as “the rupture of settler containment.” The fall issue, the journal said, would center on “resistance to the Zionist, militarist, carceral, and capitalist regime of Israeli settler colonialism.” Its editors included Nora Akawi, a former Columbia University professor who now teaches at Cooper Union and has endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement as “justice against [the] Israeli racist colonial regime.”
The move sparked near-immediate pushback, with one group, Architects United Against Antisemitism, collecting hundreds of signatures in opposition to the prompt’s “antisemitic rhetoric and blood libels.” After months of inaction, the journal’s publisher—the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), which represents nearly 200 architecture schools at top universities across the United States—canceled the issue.
The journal’s entire board resigned in response.
The ordeal reflects the proliferation of anti-Semitic activism seen in higher education in the wake of Oct. 7—even in fields unrelated to international conflict like architecture. It also shows how a pledge to address that activism from state and federal regulators has impacted academic leaders’ decision making. In a March report, the ACSA said it canceled the Gaza issue not because it disagreed with the content but because of threats from both the Trump administration and at least two governors.
“ACSA learned that university presidents and governors in two states with IHRA antisemitism statutes were notified about the JAE call for papers, and urged to restrict the use of state funds for ACSA membership dues and activities,” the association wrote. “These two states alone have 12 architecture programs.”
“Other threats exist, particularly executive orders and federal task forces addressing antisemitism and attempting to define diversity/equity/inclusion programs as illegal.”
The journal, to be sure, has published articles about left-wing topics in the past, particularly climate change. In the wake of Hamas’s attack, however, its leaders pivoted to the Middle East—and made clear in doing so that they did not oppose the terror group’s actions on Oct. 7.
In March 2024, the journal’s editorial board, which included Akawi; Princeton University’s Caitlin Blanchfield; Barnard College’s Ignacio Galán; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Rania Ghosn, unanimously agreed to make the fall 2025 issue about Gaza. Throughout their since-deleted call for papers, the board members expressed sympathy for Hamas, at one point asking prospective collaborators to consider writing on “the tunnel as a route of militants’ fight and prisoners’ flight” and the “breaching of the border fence and the rupture of settler containment.”
“Refusing systemic military annihilation, containment, fragmentation, erasure, and designed uninhabitability in the ongoing Nakba, Palestinians have practiced anti-colonial life- and land- protection,” the call states. “Solidarity movements worldwide have joined in practicing and imagining decolonized futures through mass protest, student encampments, and the disruption of global trade and business-as-usual.”
“We invite contributions that document the architectural and spatial tools that participate in or are complicit in imperial formations of settler-colonial apartheid and genocide,” it continues. “Contributors might map, represent, theorize, and historicize genocide, ecocide, spaciocide, terracide, and urbicide as practices of colonial erasure and unpack the way they appear and operate.”
Before the call’s public dissemination, the ACSA expressed concern with its language. The association’s general counsel, according to Architects United Against Antisemitism, “advised that the call for papers meets the IHRA definition of antisemitism” and sent the journal’s editorial board a “series of questions and concerns about the issue,” including, “Does the call imply that Israel does not have a legitimate claim to its existence?” and “Where is the acknowledgement of the role of Hamas or other organizations furthering conflict and violence in the region?”
The journal’s editors balked at those questions. The call, they said, included “recognized scholars on Settler-colonialism” and received unanimous board approval after “eight months of rigorous internal discussion.” The final call for papers did not mention Hamas or Israel’s right to exist. The ACSA nonetheless approved it in September.
From there, pushback was swift. The ACSA fielded “concerns from Members about the language of the call” one month after its dissemination, in November. Two months later, it faced a flood of emails accusing both the association and its journal of harboring an “obvious antizionist, antisemitic agenda.”
Around that time, Trump took office—and immediately signed a slew of executive orders targeting campus anti-Semitism. Fifty-five percent of the ACSA’s revenue comes from university membership dues, so the association asked its legal counsel to review Trump’s directors and assess whether the Gaza issue could put revenue at risk. It could, the attorney said.
“[U]niversity members whose lifeline to federal and possibly state funding could be cut off after complaints that they would be supporting ACSA as an organization in violation of state law,” association president Cathi Ho Schar told members.
Shortly thereafter, on Feb. 21, the association’s board unanimously voted to cancel the Gaza issue. A week later, the board fired JAE interim executive editor McLain Clutter, an associate professor at the University of Michigan who refused to endorse the cancellation. The journal’s editorial board did not respond well.
On March 3, it sent the association a letter, titled “F*ck the ACSA.” The letter demanded Clutter’s reinstatement, the publishing of the Gaza issue, and a public apology. It then released a petition reiterating those demands and accused the ACSA of “pandering to the few institutions and states with the deepest pockets.” By March 10, the entire editorial board resigned.
The ACSA is now moving forward, having issued a job posting for a “dynamic executive editor for the Journal of Architectural Education” on its website. But for Architects United Against Antisemitism, a coalition of roughly 700 industry professionals who assembled in opposition to the journal’s Gaza issue, restoring trust in the association will take more than a new editor.
“This proposed issue of the JAE demonstrated that academics in ivory towers can become very detached from both reality on the ground and the impact their words can have,” the group wrote in a March 15 letter to the association. “We demand to know what will be done to ensure better judgement in the future.”
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