Mike Monti, ACSA Executive Director mmonti@acsa-arch.org

Associate Professor Cathi Schar, ACSA President cathi@hawaii.edu

McLain Clutter, JAE Interim Executive Editor mclainc@umich.edu

 January 15, 2025

 Dear Mike Monti, Cathi Schar, McLain Clutter:

I write this letter in response to the ACSA/JAE’s choice of editors for theme issue 79:2 Palestine(Fall 2025), and in response to the editors’ recently published “Call For Submissions”.

The Call For Submissions, written by the four activist-editors and published through the ACSA/JAE makes claim to an “ongoing genocide campaign against Palestinians in Gaza” and does so subjectively and without any evidence.     Your selected editors also note that “This volume will build on existing knowledge, research and publications to continue to learn from and with practices of resistance to the Zionist, militarist, carceral, and capitalist regime of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid”, The editors, through the ACSA/JAE requested “contributions that document the architectural and spatial tools that participate in or are complicit in imperial formations of settler-colonial apartheid and genocide.”Further, the editors, through the ACSA/JAE requested “contributions that document the architectural and spatial tools that participate in or are complicit in imperial formations of settler-colonial apartheid and genocide”.  Additionally, and perhaps most shockingly, the editors through the ACSA/JAE requested submissions that explore “the breaching of the border fence and the rupture of settler containment.” This is a deeply troubling and egregious way for the ACSA/JAE and the editors to portray and minimize the mass murder of over 1,200 Israeli non-combatant babies, women and men who were slaughtered by Hamas militants as part of Hamas’ operation that “breached the border fence.”   Additionally, the ACSA/JAE and their selected editors requested submissions that explore “the tunnel as a route of militants’ fight…”   Tunnels that – as evidenced by broadly accepted documentation – are part of a terrorist organization’s infrastructure and thus served as a resource only for Hamas terrorists and combatants. The tunnels did not and do not serve Palestinian non-combatant citizens – only militants and terrorists (as even your editors recognize in the JAE’s Call For Submissions).

The ACSA/JAE has selected four activist-editors who are – by their own avowals, acknowledgements, and work, dedicated pro-Palestinian activists, vehemently anti-Zionist, and anti-Israel. They seek to deploy their work towards the removal the Jewish sovereign state from the lands of Israel and towards denying Jews a homeland from the river to the sea.  

Astonishingly, by selecting these four activists, you have simultaneously and inappropriately politicized the ACSA and the JAE.  You have made the ACSA and the JAE complicit in empowering and disseminating blatantly biased, racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Zionist propaganda.  Your four selected editors have already deployed the JAE as a platform for their vision and their goals. They have also used the JAE and its “Call For Submissions” to diminish and obfuscate extreme violence against a sovereign nation’s non-combatant citizens. 

The ACSA/JAE could have chosen to dedicate 79.2 to a balanced exploration of the Israeli-Palestine conflict through an informed scholarly unpacking of the full range of positions, complexities, and histories of that conflicted territory.  Such an approach could only have been accomplished by ensuring the free expression of the full range of positions on the conflict. This would have required selecting editors who collectively express diverse viewpoints and opposing opinions.  You have not done that.  Rather, the ACSA/JAE has handed over editorial decision-making to four self-described activists, who are passionately pro-Palestinian, vehemently anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, and unabashedly lucid in their calls to eradicate what they call the Jewish settler-colonialist state and remove its citizens.

Omar Jabani Salamanca (one of the four individuals selected by the JAE to serve as theme editor) described the October 7, 2023 murder of 1,200 non-combatant men, women and children, in his recent essay “It’s been 164 Days and a Long Century: Notes on Genocide, Solidarity, and Liberation” as follows:

 “It is from this carceral geography, where everyone and everything is tightly surveilled and managed, that on 7 October 2023, the inmates broke through the prison walls to give visibility to their plight as they symbolically returned to their historic homeland.

Astonishingly, The ACSA and the JAE leadership selected a man who described the premeditated slaughter of 1,200 innocent civilians as an “act of giving visibility” to another group’s plight.  Does he not understand that the act of “symbolically return(ing) to (one’s) historic homeland” shouldn’t involve the massacre of 1,200 civilians and that when it does, such a heinous act of mass-murder is not to be diminished, obfuscated, made poetic or celebrated.

I can make similar critiques of the activist work and writing of the three other editors that the JAE selected, but alas, time is short.

Mr. Salamanca, is free to espouse his support for militants, to make their murder seem poetic and to minimize the cruelty and viscousness of the October 7 slaughter.  However, the ACSA and the JAE Leadership’s decision to give Mr. Salamanca and his editorial colleagues, the platform of the JAE to do so is simply incomprehensible.

I would like to ask a rhetorical question of the ACSA and JAE leadership. After the George Floyd murder, would you have given a platform to Klu Klux Klan apologists, and enable them to defend, and justify his murder as “an act of giving visibility” to their white nationalist agenda?    If the ACSA and JAE leadership had selected the dissolution of Yugoslavia as a topic of exploration for a theme issue in 1995, would they have then selected four editors who had already claimed in their activist writings that the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Srebrenica was simply an act of “giving visibility” to legitimate Serbian political grievances against other ethno-religious groups, thus empowering the Serbian peoples’ “right of return” to Srebrenica?  The answers are No and No.  So, one must ask why is it different for the ACSA and JAE leadership when it comes to Jews and Israel? 

The ACSA’s and JAE’s decision to supply cover, shield and sword to these editors for their demonization of the Jewish State, and their legitimization of violence against innocent Jews and Israelis as a strategy of achieving a long sought Palestinian “right of return” is shocking but not surprising.  These are not the first four academics to support terrorism against civilians as a justifiable means to an end.  But they are certainly the first to do so on behalf of and in the JAE.  

Antisemitism has a long history of trying to burrow into and camouflage itself as scholarship, as philosophical thought, as political discourse, and even as science.  And it has been welcomed and given sustenance in these realms far too often.  But, in the end, the thin veils of legitimacy fall away quickly and what is always revealed is the age-old unvarnished hatred of Jews combined with the equally ancient and odious desire to displace them from whatever places they have tried to call “home” (insert any geography; Germany, Poland, Spain, The Middle East, Israel, portions of Tennessee, Kentucky or Mississippi, or Bronxville NY).  This has always been part of the story. 

The biased, ahistorical and fallacious viewpoints  which are unapologetically voiced by YOUR four editors on behalf of the ACSA and the JAE in YOUR Call For Submissions, and which happens to also be antisemitic, and discriminatory (as defined by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the IHRA definition of antisemitism which is now binding in the US as per Executive Order 13899) is cause for the immediate dismissal and removal of these four activist-editors.  

The ACSA and the JAE have made an enormous misstep, and it simply cannot stand. To do so would be to invite catastrophe upon the JAE, and the ACSA.

Feel free to contact me should you have any questions.

 Sincerely,

Adam Drisin

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________JACSA/JAE RESPONSE:

Dear Adam,

Thank you for your email and for sharing your perspective on the JAE call. We acknowledge the deep divides that shape this context and the concerns that have been voiced.  We will share your response with our board of directors as we further our conversations with the JAE. 

Best,

Cathi

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

MY REBUTTAL TO ACSA/JAE’S RESPONSE:

Dear Cathi,

Thank you for your response and also for your commitment to bring this matter to the Board.  It seems an opportune moment for the Board to ask a number of critical rhetorical questions that may avoid future challenges and most importantly, help the ACSA and the JAE come to the right decision on how best to diffuse and mitigate the looming reputational calamity that the published Call for Submissions portends for both the organization and for the journal.  These questions are below.  

1) Does the Board believe that the ACSA and the JAE should be neutral and unbiased as academic organizations and thus uphold and abide by the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report on the academy’s role in political and social action.  https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/reports/KalvenRprt_0.pdf

the ACSA and the JAE might embrace the concept of institutional neutrality as a guiding compass (as so many Universities have already done).  

The Kalven Report notes   

“The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.” 

It goes on to state that; 

“The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints. And this neutrality as an institution has its complement in the fullest freedom for its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action and social protest. It finds its complement, too, in the obligation of the university to provide a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues.”

It should appear obvious and self-evident that the goal of remaining neutral would and should be embraced by an academic association such as the ACSA and certainly by an academic journal.  As such, the ACSA as an organization that represents a broad and diverse constituency and the JAE as an outlet for the creation of knowledge should not take institutional positions on social and political issues unless those issues “threaten the very mission of the academy and its values of free inquiry.” 

2) Does the ACSA Board support and embrace the demonstrably visible advocacy and backing that the JAE has already given - through the Call For Submissions - to only one of the many positions and perspectives on the Israel-Palestine Conflict?  

3) Does the ACSA Board feel confident that the publication of this issue will not result in current member universities being forced to discontinue their ACSA membership in order to comply with their state’s legally binding requirement that their state university remain neutral?  (For example, the architecture programs at Florida’s public universities will be required to drop their membership with the ACSA, as paying dues to an organization that has engaged in antisemitic rhetoric (as defined by IHRA and Presidential Executive order) would violate Florida House of Representatives Bill HB-187. As such, The Florida SUS Board of Governors will certainly insist that UF, Florida A&M, UCF, FAU, FIU, USF, and SFU all cease and desist from further dues payments associated with ACSA membership. And that is just one state. 

4) Does the Board stand behind the choice of selecting four activists who represent a monolithic and self-declared pro-Palestinian position that calls for the elimination of an extant sovereign nation state with 9.5 million citizens?  The JAE cannot claim neutral detachment from this decision, nor can the ACSA and its Board claim either neutral detachment or lack of knowledge regarding the decision to appoint these four individuals as Theme Issue Editors. 

“The ACSA Board of Directors (ACSA Board) supports the development of the JAE as the leading blind-refereed scholarly journal in the field, presenting thoughtful discussion about the state of architecture and architectural education.

The ACSA shall be listed as publisher of the journal and has final authority over policies governing publication of the journal, including, but not limited to, budget and appointment of personnel. “

5) Does the  ACSA Board stand behind the publication of a demonstrably biased, and politicized “Call For Submissions” that emphasizes the horrible violence perpetrated against one civilian population while diminishing and ignoring the violence and kidnapping perpetrated upon another?   Indeed, the Call goes so far as to suggest that the Oct 7 murder of innocent civilians was a heroic act of return.  The JAE cannot claim neutral detachment from this decision, nor can the ACSA and its Board claim either neutral detachment or lack of knowledge regarding the decision to publish this Call For Submissions. 

I very much hope that the Board considers these pertinent questions and that they do so swiftly.

Best,

Adam