Barnard President Debora Spar Sees ‘Both Sides’ of Israel Gender Segregation
Both Sides? Barnard College President Debora Spar appeared to suggest she does not oppose an Israeli university?s effort to create gender-segregated classes for ultra-Orthodox Jews.
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
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
