JVP Academic Council Condemns CUNY’s Firing of Faculty for Supporting Palestinian Freedom

15 July 2025

President Michelle Anderson, Brooklyn College
Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, Brooklyn College
Board of Trustees Chair, Evan Silverstein, Brooklyn College

NY State Governor Kathy Hochul
NYC Mayor Eric Adams
Chairman of House Education and Workforce, Tim Walberg
Ranking Member of House Education and Workforce, Bobby Scott

The Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace fully endorses Jewish CUNY faculty and staff’s statement of June 30 condemning “the firing of at least four” faculty members after they were vetted and reappointed, clearly because of their support for Palestinian freedom and equality.

That statement, currently with over 100 signatures of Jewish faculty from across CUNY’s schools, academic ranks, and scholarly disciplines, and the letter of the same date from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress, carefully document that administrators departed from established and legitimate procedures in the reappointment of adjunct faculty. The letters also make clear that these departures from established university procedures and policy, and the resulting terminations of faculty employment, tramples academic freedom and thus the pursuit of educational excellence at CUNY.

In accord with the Jewish faculty and staff statement, the Academic Council affirms that speech and activism in support of Palestine—and in opposition to Israeli state oppression of Palestinians-–is neither antisemitic nor tainted by antisemitism. Jewish Voice for Peace, and we as its Academic Council, are committed to Palestinian liberation and a Judaism beyond Zionism, proudly and without qualification. The members of the Academic Council affirm that these twinned commitments are grounded in Jewish values of social justice and Jewish obligations to respond with support to those suffering from oppression. As a body of scholars–including leading experts on all periods of Jewish history; on Zionism and the history of Palestine/Israel; and on contemporary Jewish plurality–we also affirm that the disjunction of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is also grounded in the established and best scholarship in these areas.

The Academic Council thus unequivocally supports the reinstatement of the CUNY faculty who, by all available evidence, have been terminated because of their support for Palestine.

Finally, the Academic Council knows that administrative attacks on pro-Palestinian faculty, as well as pro-Palestinian students, are anything but distinctive to CUNY. To the contrary, they are today commonplace in U.S. higher education. We know that this is a matter of higher education administrators pursuing success in their official capacities, in a historical moment when the Trump administration is conditioning financial and legal support on fealty to the Israeli state—even as that state carries out genocide in Gaza. Put otherwise, the termination of pro-Palestinian faculty by CUNY’s senior administrators is a variety, in and of our own historical moment, of what Hannah Arendt trenchantly called “the banality of evil.” As a body of faculty and scholars, JVP’s Academic Council expects and demands that higher education administrators—from chancellors and presidents to deans and chairs—pull themselves away from this banal wickedness.

JVP is a national, grassroots organization working towards Palestinian freedom and Judaism beyond Zionism. With roughly 750,000 members, supporters, and participants in the last year, JVP is the largest such organization in the world. The Academic Council is a network of scholars within JVP with a shared commitment to JVP’s core values.

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