Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind in conversation with special guests

On Tuesday, March 5th at 6pm, join Massy Arts, Massy Books and Verso Books in celebrating the launch of Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom by Maya Wind, joined in conversation by Jasbir Puar and Kawika Guillermo.

“This book lands like a grenade, detonating comfortable and long held myths about the liberalism and independence of Israel’s university system. In their place, Wind’s rigorous and jaw-dropping research reveals countless ways that the nation’s most celebrated and storied education institutions are utterly entangled in the violent machinery of Palestinian dispossession, occupation, incarceration, surveillance, siege and military bombardment…An explosive contribution from a brilliant young scholar.” — Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and Doppelganger

This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver. We are located in the former MING WO building.

Registration is free and required for entrance.

The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.

Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.

For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility

Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

About the book:

How Israeli universities collaborate in Israeli state violence against Palestinians

Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth and documents how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights.
As this book shows, Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful expose of Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project.

About the author:

Maya Wind is a scholar of Israeli expertise and militarism. She is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

About the guests:

Jasbir K. Puar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of the award-winning books The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), which has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), available in French and Spanish, re-issued as an expanded version for its 10th anniversary (2017), and forthcoming in Greek and Portuguese. Her articles have been published in journals such as Social Text and South Atlantic Quarterly, mainstream venues such as Al-Jazeera and The Guardian, and translated into more than 15 languages.She is also co-author of exhibitions for the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019) and the Sharjah Art Biennial (2023). She is the recipient of the 2019 Kessler Award from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies (CLAGS) at CUNY, which recognizes lifetime achievement in and impact on queer research and organizing.

Kawika Guillermo is a third generation Filipino American whose family is primarily from Hawai’i and Texas. He has lived in Portland, Las Vegas, Seattle, Gimhae South Korea, Nanjing China, Hong Kong, and Vancouver, Canada. His debut novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel (2018), won the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Creative Prose, while his follow-up speculative fiction novel, All Flowers Bloom (2020), won the 2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best General Fiction/Novel. His first novel was recently adapted into the video game Stamped: an anti-travel game, released November 1st by Analgesic Productions. His latest, , was released by Duke University Press in 2023.

Event Venue

Massy Arts Society, 23 East Pender Street, Vancouver, Canada