An Anti-Zionist Tenure Travesty: The Case of Dr. Benjamin Bross
by Cary Nelson and Richard Ross
Introduction
Ever since some faculty members exulted over Hamas’s October 7, 2023, murder spree in Israel and then campus encampments began chanting for Zionists to be cast out of the community, we have worried that we would also soon see a quiet, determined campaign to deny tenure to qualified Zionist faculty. The encampments were notable for their noise. The determined assault on pro-Israel faculty would be barely audible, carried out by confidential committees and cloaked in self-righteous if deeply compromised professionalism. We have faced exactly that in our own community, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
As members of the executive committee of Faculty for Academic Freedom and Against Antisemitism, we offer this essay as a warning that it will spread worldwide.
The problem arises when radical anti-Zionists serve on tenure committees that are reviewing expressly Zionist candidates for tenure. When the faculty in both categories are known to hold those opposing beliefs, there is an obvious suggestion of bias and a clear appearance of a conflict of interest. It doesn’t matter how fair and impartial the compromised committee members may be. In the principle that governs both legal and academic professions, among others, the appearance of a conflict of interest must be “managed” by recusal. There is no accusation involved, just the recognizable fact—the appearance of a conflict. There may of course be serious conflicts of interest involved, but managing them by dealing with the appearance of conflicts solves the problem without triggering investigations and hostile confrontations.
At the core of the issue is the academy’s most intractable antisemitic problem: academic disciplines and their local departments that have embraced radical anti-Zionism as part of their core identity. Radical anti-Zionism is an ideology devoted to eliminating the Jewish state. Not to reforming it, not to changing Israeli policies, but rather to erasing Israel as the nation-state and homeland of the Jewish people through violence, boycott, and political implosion, or dissolution into a “one-state solution.” Faculty hopes of harming Zionist Jews have manifested themselves not only through teaching propaganda in the classroom, but also through discriminatory hiring and promotion decisions.
In 2021, some academic departments steeped in the belief that Israel is an unethical state—the only state in the world that does not deserve to exist—began adopting official position statements embodying that conviction. In the wake of 10/7, a still more severe conviction became the norm on the left: that Israel is unreformable, irredeemable, born in original sin. And this belief coalesced around the claim that something evil in Zionism was manifest in the very founding of the Jewish state. The key date for decades had been 1967, when Israel won authority over the West Bank and Gaza from the Jordanian and Egyptian dictators who had ruled there ever since they blocked the local Arabs from their own UN-designated sovereignty. Now the date called out in chants and scrawled on banners was 1948. One could reverse 1967 by making the occupied territories into a Palestinian state. You could only reverse 1948 by eliminating Israel.
That had long been a minority anti-Zionist position, but in 2023 it became the core of the anti-Zionist left’s self-definition. The number of departments issuing anti-Zionist declarations or manifestos escalated. And with it a new morality began to shape campus politics. If Israel was a demonic entity, people on campus allied with Israel, including faculty, became doubtful, problematic, or flatly unacceptable as colleagues. Variations of “No Zionists permitted here” appeared at some encampments. The BDS anti-normalization strategy of refusing contact with Israelis gained a new element: you shouldn’t normalize Zionism by discussing issues with Zionist colleagues.
This is much worse than the usual academic tussles over methodology. A comparativist may view ethnographic or quantitative approaches as incomplete, even obtuse—but not wicked. By contrast, anti-Zionists position pro-Israel scholars as a moral pollution, as the supporters of racism, child murder, ethnic cleansing, white supremacism, and, finally, genocide. Zionists don’t belong in the room. These are not our words, they are theirs. It follows logically that it is ethically acceptable, even morally necessary, to dispose of Zionist faculty colleagues when the opportunity arises. And it arises as an official opportunity during tenure deliberations.
A good early warning sign of disciplines in trouble is when the national disciplinary organization adopts an anti-Zionist statement. But those national organizations do not include all the faculty in the field, so they are not an automatic match for individual departments. Some local departments want to preserve an environment of open debate and so resist official politicization. The ideological match between disciplinary organization and local departments is mostly consistent in Mideast studies, women’s studies, anthropology, and Asian American studies, among a few others.
But the embrace of anti-Zionism extends beyond the disciplines more well known to be anti-Zionist. For many people, it’s surprising to learn that fields like urban and regional planning, including the department in Urbana-Champaign, are pervasively anti-Zionist. Likewise, many of us are just learning of an anti-Zionist trend in medical education. The national organizations of psychologists and psychoanalysts have largely been taken over by anti-Zionists, who are increasingly shaping the graduate curriculum in their fields.
When the match is solid—when both the national disciplinary organization and the local department issue or sign anti-Zionist statements—faculty can conclude not only that they should practice anti-Zionist pedagogy but also that personnel decisions should be guided by political convictions. Denying tenure to a Zionist becomes a virtuous action. And that is where we are at the University of Illinois. Yet this is not just an American problem. It corrupts universities throughout the West.
The Benjamin Bross Case
All this came to a head with the tenure deliberations regarding an accomplished junior colleague in UIUC’s School of Architecture. With his ambitious first book, Mexico City’s Zócalo: A History of a Constructed Spatial Identity (Routledge, 2023), in hand, Bross received a strong and detailed endorsement in his third-year review. The book conceptualized and told the story of the 700-year history of this most powerfully symbolic of Mexico’s public spaces, the central square in Mexico City. The School of Architecture’s approval of Bross was reinforced in his fourth year. That same year the program nominated him for an award for scholarly excellence and the school’s director asked him to take on the task of coauthoring a book about the campus’s famous Memorial Stadium.
As Bross points out, “unlike the Depression-era projects administered by several government agencies, including the Public Works Administration (PWA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Memorial Stadium was built in the first third of what would eventually be dubbed the ‘Roaring Twenties.’ The drive and eventual construction of the stadium embodies, as all spatial products do, a set of social, political, economic, and aesthetic values and aspirations of its time.” It “is part of the dialogue of the interwar years, and the impact of major civic buildings that expressed the arrival of American optimism and economic dominance on the world stage.” As the UI administration urged, The University of Illinois Memorial Stadium (Routledge, 2024) was completed and published in time for the building’s one-hundredth anniversary.
Other than Dr. Bross having published several more essays and having received enthusiastic reviews of his teaching, the only other notable feature in his tenure profile came in the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, assault. Bross, who had kept quiet about his Zionist sympathies, now made them public. Before October 2023, Bross received a glowing third-year evaluation, a nomination for a scholarly prize, and an invitation by his school’s director to write a second book; in 2024, his tenure review committee suddenly went against the department’s prior endorsements of Bross and recommended denying him tenure through a one-sentence notice that his publications and teaching were inadequate. Meanwhile, other faculty were expressing their rage at Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.
The School of Architecture took no notice of the obvious conflicts at stake. Meanwhile, it made several other procedural mistakes in conducting Bross’s review. The school’s lax observation of university procedures had long been an issue. The local AAUP chapter’s governing board had been hearing that concern from one of its members for a decade. Now procedural negligence gave committed anti-Zionists an opportunity to act: first, when they were appointed to a Zionist’s tenure review committee and apparently saw no cause to recuse themselves; second, when they recommended outside reviewers instead of the senior faculty member in the candidate’s field of urban studies (as the School of Architecture requires); and third, when it came to an up-or-down vote on tenure. A negative vote from the initial committee provided all the cover that further review bodies needed to recommend a terminal contract.
The outside letters, for now, are confidential, and therefore we are unable to know what was said in them. We are unlikely to learn what they said unless they are released as part of the discovery process in legal proceedings. We are less concerned with the identity of the letter writers than with the content of the letters. This leaves us evidence in the form of the rest of his tenure case, the public record of anti-Zionist activism of members of the various tenure and appeals committees at UIUC, and our professional judgment about his books and essays and teaching evaluations. The seven of us on the executive committee of Faculty for Academic Freedom and Against Antisemitism (FAFAA), representing ninety-two faculty members at UIUC and UIC, gave ourselves a challenge: to construct plausible arguments against the quality of Benjamin Bross’s scholarship. We’ve had quite a few years’ experience with negative outside letters in numerous disciplines, but we couldn’t devise any in this case.
Dr. Bross’s publications, while intricate and rich in historical context, are also beautifully written and highly readable. Their range of theoretical references are familiar to many humanities scholars. They seek a broad academic audience, and several of us felt ourselves very much among his intended readers, people concerned about national histories and the significance of architecture for public life.
It would also be interesting to see a court-mandated collection of emails, Instagram messages, and phone records. What did committee members say privately about Zionists, antisemitism, Israel, Palestinians, or Bross himself? Were they in personal contact with reviewers? It would be better for everyone not to have to go that route, but we are in favor of doing so if justice cannot be achieved in any other way.
A discovery process might also reveal further disqualifying facts, such as membership in the radically anti-Zionist group Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) or evidence of a personal alliance with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Both FJP and SJP are considered hate groups by all mainstream Jewish organizations.
FAFAA became involved at Bross’s request after the School of Architecture endorsed the promotion and tenure committee’s recommendation to deny tenure. We have no reason to believe the school’s director acted with malicious intent. His skill at assuring that regulations were followed and procedures were carried out properly, however, is another matter. He failed in that responsibility, then passively accepted the committee’s recommendation. The case is riddled with procedural errors. That gave Bross the basis of an appeal to the UIUC campus Faculty Advisory Committee (FAC). Unfortunately, that introduced several more apparent conflicts of interest among the FAC’s own members.
Several members of FAFAA’s executive committee already knew Bross, though not all as a close friend. But it was helpful to have prior experience of his reliability. It’s necessary to make a judgment about that when a faculty member comes forward with a complaint. Many people are unreliable. Moreover, even when someone has been unfairly treated, they may represent themselves poorly, inevitably interpreting events through a glass darkly. Bross, however, kept meticulous records, and he was very thorough in gathering documents. We followed up by interviewing people so as not to rely on secondhand testimony.
What follows includes an account of the two letters the FAFAA executive committee wrote to the FAC and to all the relevant administrators, as well as to the Board of Trustees (the full letters can be read here). Perhaps this will provide some guidance to other campuses that face this challenge. If other scholars encounter comparable conflicts of interest when anti-Zionist faculty seek to eliminate their Zionist colleagues, as they surely will, these letters show what evidence we were willing to use and exactly how we addressed the problem. We discussed the options in detail before deciding how to deal with individual faculty conflicts of interest.
The names of the members of the two tenure committees are not confidential, and the names of the members of the campus-level Faculty Advisory Committee are on the university’s website. Nonetheless, FAFAA struggled about whether to name them and to document their individual apparent conflicts of interest. In the end, there was no way of convincing anyone that the apparent conflicts of interest are real and serious without documenting them. That is the advice we give to others who confront this challenge. There is a universe, of course, in which people say, “Thank you for alerting me to my apparent conflict of interest.” And there is the familiar world in which people become defensive and insist they are free of any unconscious bias. We did not know which world we would find ourselves in, but we expect to find out.
The letters we sent to UI administrators detail individuals’ conflicts of interest by name and are published on the FAFAA website. Here, we have a different aim: to encourage reflection on the rhetoric as it applies to its faculty endorsers everywhere, including the campuses of those who read our essay—campuses that will be conducting their own tenure reviews.
When people sign a passionately anti-Zionist letter, they accept its terms and commit to its politics. They adopt its voice as their own. They make it their own speech act and communicate it to their students and colleagues. As the letters accumulate names, they accumulate publicity. Indeed, that is the purpose of gathering more signatures. The rhetoric may or may not be precisely what you would use, but you set aside your doubts and sign. Or the language may give you exactly what you want to say. The difference is erased; it is irrelevant. You have made your choice.
The Appearance of Conflicts of Interest
As the letters attest, one of Benjamin Bross’s tenure review committee members apparently expressly told another person in the program that Dr. Bross’s Zionism was unacceptable. Although that faculty member later cycled off the committee to serve in another capacity, she was among those recommending outside reviewers. Not only should someone with such an apparent conflict not serve on a Zionist faculty member’s review committee, but they should also have no role in recommending outside reviewers.
Moreover, the School of Architecture’s rules call for the senior member in the field to recommend the reviewers. Another one of Bross’s tenure review committee members signed a “Call for Immediate Action” letter that condemned Israel for its role in the current Gaza war: “Such deliberate acts are considered both genocide—deliberately inflicting conditions of life to bring about the destruction of a group in whole or in part, and urbicide—deliberate destruction of built environments.” The letter also issued a broad declaration: “We stand in opposition to colonialism, militarism, apartheid, racism, white supremacy, and genocide in Palestine and around the world. We recall the historical role of educational and cultural institutions in anti-war, anti-apartheid, anti-imperial, and anti-genocide movements, and refuse the current institutional silence as Israel continues to commit crimes against humanity.” The letters FAFAA sent to the Board of Trustee and senior administrators detail all such political commitments that we know of, but we do not assume our citations are comprehensive. In any case, the UI rules are clear: “Any faculty member with a conflict of interest, or the appearance of a conflict of interest, should not participate (e.g., review, evaluate, advocate, or vote) in a candidate’s promotion and tenure review.
That faculty member later asserted in writing that she had no knowledge of Dr. Bross’s Zionist commitments, but Bross’s wife had earlier told her in considerable detail of the whole family’s Zionist commitments. Their son was in Israel on October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas assault. The family as a whole traveled to Israel after October 7, and, while Dr. Bross had to return to teach, Bross’s wife Datia stayed on to help with the harvest, as many of the foreign agricultural workers had fled the country. Datia told the faculty member in question that Dr. Bross encouraged her to stay. We should point out that this is exactly the kind of dispute that recusal enables a campus to avoid.
In a different but equally remarkable case, one of Bross’s tenure review committee members organized an entire conference in support of the protestors who were arrested during the campus’s Gaza solidarity encampment. The conference, “Protest in the Post-Political Era,” drew sympathetic comparison between the spring 2024 anti-Zionist encampments at UIUC and elsewhere and “the Civil Rights movement’s struggles for justice staged through boycotts and marches and in the public spaces of buses, lunch counters, and bridges, and the Stonewall riot against police raids of a gay bar in New York City.” What they did, which included resisting arrest, her announcement added, was “the last resort of people for whom the conventional methods of affecting change (though voting or litigation) have failed.” Bross organized a group letter supporting the state’s attorney’s decision to prosecute those arrested, and the letter was published in the local newspaper. Pro-Palestinian groups were agitating to drop the prosecutions. The issue was hotly debated in the community.
Documenting the Case and Its Future
The FAFAA website includes a page with additional documents linked to the case, including a Bross family biography, Bross’s CV, and the crucial third-year review letter, which states that Bross is doing “a remarkable job” and concludes that the committee producing the letter “did not see any major areas of concern in your progress toward the tenure and promotion review that will begin in year five.” There are none of the stern warnings that third-year letters often include. Indeed, the following year the School of Architecture nominated him for an award in recognition of his scholarly accomplishments.
There is a still broader and equally challenging set of questions that this case raises. First, would Benjamin Bross have been hired if he had revealed his Zionist sentiments at that point? The answer is almost certainly “No.” But that probability applies still more decisively to young scholars who write books or essays grounded in a belief that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. It no longer matters to anti-Zionists if they are critical of Israeli policies and do thorough original research. If the core assumption about Israel’s legitimacy is there, many humanities departments will cast such candidates aside. That leaves us with the question University of Maryland historian Jeffrey Herf asked at a May 18, 2025, conference at the Center for Jewish History: Is there a future in the academy for young Zionist scholars?
For programs like Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning, whose faculty unanimously endorsed a statement vilifying Israel, the answer seems clear. The statement explicitly asserts that the opposition to Zionism is both political and moral:
We refuse to be silent as tens of thousands of innocent people are dispossessed and hundreds more killed. . . . We join the Palestinian people in their immense sorrow and anger and stand alongside of [sic] them in their struggle against apartheid, colonization and state oppression. . . . We learn from a long history of struggles against racist oppression and their continuation in the present. We believe that the fight against white supremacy, colonialism and anti-Semitism are inseparable. We welcome those who have expressed their horror at the violence being wrought on Palestine and its people. . . . We call on everyone to recognize that these injustices are not just abstract or historical; they are active, ongoing and nowhere more embodied than in the Palestinian movement for liberation confronting the Israeli settler colonial state.
In April 2025, the UIUC provost, John Coleman, wrote to Dr. Bross to say: “I intend to request the Board of Trustees issue you a notice of nonreappointment and offer a terminal contract for the academic year 2025–2026.” Bross will receive that letter in August 2025, informing him that he has begun his final year at Illinois. If the UI administration can be convinced that the process was unfair, perhaps the clock can be reset and 2025–2026 can be declared Bross’s fifth year. A review committee can be appointed outside the School of Architecture. This essay is timed to interrupt the train denying tenure that has already left the station and is moving rapidly ahead.
In response to a Title VI complaint alleging that the campus inadequately addressed antisemitism, the university in September 2024 signed a “resolution agreement” under the auspices of the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Education. According to the OCR, the school “agreed to take the steps necessary to ensure its education community can learn, teach, and work without an unredressed antisemitic hostile environment, or any other hostility related to stereotypes about shared ancestry.” The counsel who negotiated the agreement has advised that the bias infecting Bross’s tenure process, coupled with acquiescence by campus administration, violates the resolution agreement.
Topics: Israel Initiative
Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the author, most recently, of Mindless: What Happened to Universities?
Richard Ross is David C. Baum Professor of Law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.