Bar-Ilan's new dean: A Haredi woman who left no glass ceiling unsmashed - Features Israel News | Haaretz

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Home News Features Bar-Ilan's new dean: A Haredi woman who left no glass HAARETZ SELECT ceiling unsmashed Ultra-Orthodox Malka Schaps, a world-renowned professor of mathematics and a grandmother of 17, has made a habit of pushing the envelope, though not all her friends know she has. By Judy Maltz | Oct. 10, 2013 | 12:04 PM

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Malka Schaps Photo by Tomer Appelbaum

Malka Schaps has gone where few Haredi women have gone before. She’s a Text Harvard-educated professor of mathematics, a globetrotter who lectures at size

http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.551653[13/10/2013 09:03:52] Bar-Ilan's new dean: A Haredi woman who left no glass ceiling unsmashed - Features Israel News | Haaretz

academic conferences around the world, a bestselling novelist who has also Comments delved into non-fiction, and an ultra-Orthodox mother who actively (0) Print Page encouraged her sons to serve in the Israeli army. Send to friend

Last week, she pushed the envelope one notch further when she became Share on Facebook the first ultra-Orthodox woman in Israel (and probably anywhere else in Share on the world) to be appointed dean at a major university. As of the coming Share academic year, Schaps, who has until now headed Bar-Ilan University’s financial mathematics program, will serve as the dean of its faculty of exact THIS STORY IS BY sciences. Judy Maltz

The fact that she didn’t grow up in the ultra-Orthodox world, says Schaps, could very well explain why she’s such an anomaly. “Let’s remember, I RELATED TAGS came from the outside,” noted the 65-year-old grandmother of 17 in an The American football coach who wants to bring pigskin to Israel interview with Haaretz. “I got the academic push from my father, who had Bar Ilan By Ido Kenan | Magazine been a professor of American history but never got tenure. In a sense, I am fulfilling his unfulfilled ambitions.”

When Schaps refers to herself as an outsider, she Speak English? www.hr-dsnr.com/english_speakers doesn’t mean that she came from the non-Orthodox Join one of Israel’s largest world or even from a home that was remotely Jewish. companies .Apply online today! Born Mary Kramer, she grew up in a non-religious Protestant household in Cleveland, Ohio, the heart of the American Midwest, later moving to Washington D.C., when her father received a position at the Wind Energy National Science Foundation, and spending a bit of Breakthrough time in Texas along the way. When she was 19 years old Challenging the male hegemony of and an undergraduate student at Swarthmore, an elite Pet Immegration Israel's movie industry Why aren't more Israeli women taking leading roles liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, Schaps underwent Services both behind the movie camera and in front of it? In a an Orthodox conversion to Judaism. Haaretz roundtable, four up-and-coming female filmmakers talk about challenging the male hegemony in the movie indus