The University of Minnesota paused the hiring of a professor who wrote that Israel’s military operation against Hamas in Gaza after Oct. 7 was “a textbook case of genocide” to head the school’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS), Jewish Insider has learned.

The pause, which has not yet been publicly announced by the university, came on Monday evening after two members of the center’s advisory board resigned in protest on Friday.

“The assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes,” Raz Segal, an Israeli associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, wrote in the Jewish Currents on Oct. 13. “I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians,” he wrote.

A spokesperson for the University of Minnesota told JI that the director selection process was put on hold “to allow an opportunity to determine next steps.”