Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Barnard President Debora Spar Sees ‘Both Sides’ of Israel Gender Segregation

Hundreds of Hebrew University faculty members last week signed a petition protesting a plan to create special gender-segregated classrooms for ultra-Orthodox students on campus.

For them, it represented a blatant affront to women’s rights and equality in higher academia. But for Debora Spar, the top administrator at all-women’s Barnard College, the issue is more nuanced.

“I can see arguing the question on both sides,” Spar said during an interview in Tel Aviv this week. “On the one hand, as a firm believer in the power of higher education, anything the universities can do to bring folks who haven’t been in a university environment into higher education is a really powerful thing. Higher education does tend to serve as a homogenizing force or as a cosmopolitanizing force.”

On the other hand, she says, “I can see why it’s very problematic, and I think that at the end of the day I would tend to go for whatever I think would be the greatest force for modernization.”

Spar is part of a delegation of U.S. university presidents and chancellors from the United States here on a weeklong visit organized by Project Interchange, a program run by the American Jewish Committee to promote bilateral academic cooperation.

For more go to Haaretz

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.