DATE
6:00PM
19 March 2024
LOCATION
807 Schermerhorn
How Israeli universities collaborate in Israeli state violence against Palestinians.
Join us for a conversation with MAYA WIND about her new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (2024). Introduction and commentary by NADIA ABU EL-HAJ.
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. Read more
MAYA WIND is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her scholarship broadly investigates how settler societies and global systems of militarism and policing are sustained, with a particular focus on the reproduction and export of Israeli security expertise. She has received support for her research from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Killam Laureates Trust. Her first book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso 2024), investigates the complicity of Israeli universities in Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid.
NADIA ABU EL-HAJ is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies.