My peers in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (DURP at UIUC) will be attending our graduation ceremony on Saturday, May 16, 2026, and I will not be joining them. It isn’t because I don’t want to be there.

When I entered UIUC in Fall 2022, I believed that a university should be a place where people with fundamentally different worldviews could and should engage one another respectfully. After all, UIUC, like other great research universities, purports to prize both intellectual engagement and a commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Yet, over my three and a half years as a student, I found that my minority identity as a religiously observant Jew was not welcomed, and that my support of the existence of the State of Israel placed me outside the bounds of my department’s understanding of inclusion.

So, when I learned eight months ago that my department’s small graduation ceremony would take place on Shabbat, and I requested an accommodation to move the ceremony to another day, I was not surprised when DURP refused. I was, however, disappointed; a department that spoke regularly about inclusion should have found a way to respect my religious observance — an immutable part of who I am — without interfering with anyone else’s experience.

Throughout my time in the Department, I was the only openly Modern Orthodox and Zionist Jewish student. I have always been aware that my involvement in the greater DURP community would be different from my peers’. As a Jew who keeps kosher and is Shabbat observant, full participation in certain departmental activities inherently presented challenges. However, with proper planning and arrangements, it was possible to overcome many of these hurdles.

DURP has a written “Commitment to Inclusion” posted on its website. This commitment ensures that students have the right to speak from personal experience, that students and faculty are responsible for maintaining an inclusive environment and respecting the opinions of others, and that students and faculty alike should “assume an active role in ensuring that we maintain a positive and open department climate by working to understand and avoid invalidations, insults, or offenses.”

Sadly, that was not my experience.

In the summer of 2024, I was an intern at the Jerusalem Transportation Masterplan Team in Israel. A few weeks before the start of the fall semester, I received an email invitation titled, “Highlight your Internship Experience for Planning at Illinois social media!” This email was sent by DURP staff to students who held summer internships in the field of Urban Planning and asked us to provide related photos and blurbs for posting on the Department’s Instagram and Facebook accounts.

I was excited to share my experiences, which included technical assignments, such as proofreading maps for Jerusalem Light Rail Stations to ensure they were accurately translated into Hebrew, Arabic, and English, visiting an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem, and seeing the area where a light rail line is planned for construction to provide easier access from Ramallah to Jerusalem’s city center.

After already sensing negativity towards my Zionist values the previous two semesters in the wake of the October 7 attacks, I was hoping my post would lead to positive and productive discussions about urban planning in Israel.

Instead, my post became a hotbed for hateful comments and offensive language directed at me, without any condemnation from the University or DURP.

Internal faculty email chains obtained through........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)