The Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), the field's premier scholarly journal, has dedicated past issues to topics like the "various n
by Jessica Schwalb
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.
