Bar-Ilan's New Dean: a Haredi Woman Who Left No Glass Ceiling Unsmashed - Features Israel News | Haaretz
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Bar-Ilan's new dean: A Haredi woman who left no glass ceiling unsmashed - Features Israel News | Haaretz SUBSCRIBE TO HAARETZ DIGITAL EDITIONS TheMarker ISRAEL MINT עכבר העיר TheMarker הארץ Haaretz.com Café Weekend Not a member? Register now Dear Haaretz, please bar talkbacks Sunday, October 13, 2013 Cheshvan 9, 5774 NEWS OPINION JEWISH WORLD BUSINESS TRAVEL CULTURE WEEKEND BLOGS ARCHAEOLOGY NEWS BROADCAST ISRAEL NEWS Nobel Prize Rabbi Ovadia Yosef Word of the Day Syria Israel's brain drain Follow BREAKING NEWS 5:274:52 PM SuspectedQuake of 6.4 Israeli magnitude spies stand detected trial westin Iran of (AP) Crete (Reuters) More Breaking News 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 5 Tweet 17 Soul doctor: Meet the cardiologist who doesn’t believe in medicine It takes nearly a year to get an appointment with Dr. Nader Butto. Why? By Ayelett Shani | Magazine A trip to the Galilee to set the record straight on a Middle Eastern delicacy By Ronit Vered | Pleasure Hunting 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 Twitter 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 industry. “I really felt that a person should be good, and in my RELATED ARTICLES By Nirit Anderman | Weekend | 2 original very secular upbringing, there wasn’t really a Malka Schaps becomes first female Haredi lot of motivation for that,” she says to explain her The Village: The new reality TV show dean at Israeli university that is rewriting Israeli history attraction to Judaism. Her decision to convert was By Haaretz | Oct. 2, 2013 | 5:06 PM | 4 ultimately taken as a foreign exchange student in By Tal Niv | Tal Niv | 3 Germany, when she became very affected by the Professors threaten to resign if injunctions Holocaust – the theme of her two non-fiction literary served By Tamara Traubman | Jan. 10, 2008 | 12:00 AM works. A sum total of many pages Schaps met her husband, David, when they were both By Charlotte Halle | Mar. 7, 2003 | 11:00 AM students at Swarthmore. Now a professor of classics at Malka Schaps Bar-Ilan, he was a latecomer to Jewish Orthodoxy. By Charlotte Halle | Nov. 13, 2003 | 12:00 AM Schaps followed her husband to Harvard, where the two of them received their doctoral degrees. Many of her friends and neighbors in Bnei Brak, the ultra-Orthodox community where she has lived since immigrating to Israel with David in 1972, have absolutely no idea what she does when she’s not at home, doing errands in the neighborhood or attending synagogue, acknowledges Schaps. “Most of them don’t even know that I’m a professor at the FEATURES university, and those of them who do really have no idea what research is,” Word of the Day / Milhama: she notes. “My friends in Bnei Brak are all women, rebbetzins [rabbis’ Sometimes war is just a wives] and school principals. It would be very hard to explain to them the game type of math I do because it’s dealing with the sort of theoretical concepts By Shoshana Kordova |09:51 AM you don’t learn in high school.” This day in Jewish history / Her appointment to a top administrative position at Bar-Ilan, which made First minyan forms in headlines locally, can be seen within the wider context of a concerted effort Chicago, promptly splits By David B. Green |09:27 AM at Israel’s only religious university to move women into what was once almost exclusively male territory. Schaps is the latest in a rather long list of 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 women named to high-level jobs at the university in recent years – a list Creating a circle of empowerment, drawing the that includes Professor Yaffa Zilbershats, the deputy president; Professor line on rape Miriam Faust, the vice rector; Professor Zemira Mevarech, dean of the By Alona Ferber |06:30 PM faculty of social sciences; Professor Shulamit Michaeli, dean of the faculty of life sciences; and Judith Haimoff, vice president for external relations. Word of the Day / Tor: Toeing the line As difficult as it is for most women, especially mothers of small children to By Shoshana Kordova |02:47 PM move up the ranks in the “publish or perish” world of academia, it is even more daunting, notes Schaps, for an ultra-Orthodox woman, and especially one like her who specializes in an overwhelmingly male- dominated field. “I really can’t indulge in the type of two-week, three-week MORE FROM THE WEB or four-week collaboration my colleagues can do,” she explains. “I just feel 10 tips for boosting your it’s not appropriate. So I do lot of work by email, and it has definitely made wireless router signal things harder for me.” On one paper that she co-authored, recounts (ITProPortal.com) Schaps, she only met her collaborator face-to-face when they were about to submit it for publication. Putin warns of attack on Israel (Jewish Schaps, whose area of specialization in mathematics is representation Journal) theory, has authored or co-authored more than 50 academic papers to date. She was promoted to full professor at Bar-Ilan in 2006. In addition Armenia aligns with the East, to their two biological children, a daughter and a son, she and her husband turning its back on the… have fostered four other children; two boys remained with them. (Caspian Research Institute) As a young woman, she says, one of her dreams was to become a writer. Recommended by She waited until she had obtained tenure in 1979 to let that dream “come FACEBOOK out of the closet,” as she puts it. ACTIVITY RECOMMENDATIONS Under the pen name Rachel Pomerantz, Schaps has published seven novels, which address many of the conflicts and challenges she has confronted in her own personal life – taking in foster children, balancing a high-powered career with Orthodoxy, conversion, immigration, and Israel’s cultural divides. All her books, several of which have been translated into Hebrew, target Orthodox readers. Her decision to adopt a pseudonym as a writer, Schaps has said, was motivated by her fear that this form of moonlighting might harm her academic reputation. In addition, Schaps has published two non-fiction works on the Holocaust as well as several academic papers on Orthodox fiction. Non-academic writing, she says, is something she spends about an hour a day on. “It used to be 8:30 to 9:30 every evening, but now that my husband’s changed his schedule, I can start earlier. It takes me about three years to write a novel.” In her spare time, she is also quite active in the Harvard Club of Israel, an alumni organization she co-chaired between 2002 and 2008.