Book review: The Jewish Woman’s Health Handbook

The All in the Family episode Gloria and the Riddle aired in October 1972. Gloria asked the following riddle: A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies, and the boy is rushed to the hospital in critical condition. In the operating room, the surgeon looks at the boy and says, “I can’t operate on this boy; he’s my son.” Who is the surgeon?”

Archie, Edith, and Mike are completely stumped. Archie’s chauvinistic brain scrambles for wild explanations, even wondering if the surgeon was the boy’s stepfather or a priest. Archie takes the riddle down to his friends at the bar, and they can’t figure it out either. Eventually, it is Edith who solves the riddle, stating the obvious answer that completely evaded the men – the surgeon is the boy’s mother.

The episode served as a satire of ingrained societal biases. Because everyone failed to connect the word surgeon with a female, their chauvinism is exposed.

Ask that riddle today and a 10-year-old will immediately answer “the mother.” But in 1972, that was not the case.

The new book The Jewish Woman’s Health Handbook: Navigating Personal and Family Healthcare for all Stages of Life (Mosaica Press) represents a similar societal progress, offering the first resource of its kind specifically tailored to the needs and concerns of Orthodox Jewish women. Edited by Dr. Jennie Berkovich, DO, and Dr. Miriam Knoll, MD, it features 9 chapters by female physicians and health-care professionals.

The editors and contributors are members of the Jewish Orthodox Women’s Medical Association (JOWMA). The organization provides free health education to the entire Orthodox Jewish community and supports a network of current and future Jewish female physician leaders. Their vision is a Jewish community that has easy access to culturally sensitive and relevant health information and can make informed medical decisions.

Against this backdrop of changing medical awareness, recent events have shown that far too many people get their health information from spurious sources such as TikTok and YouTube, with devastating, occasionally fatal consequences.

The book offers practical guidance for health issues from pregnancy through adolescence, midlife, and the end of life. It addresses gaps in accessible health information within the community.

Providing such guidance is especially important because many Orthodox women struggle under the load of motherhood and full-time jobs, in addition to handling many other communal requests.

To address these challenges, the chapter on The Foundations of a Healthy Lifestyle, by Julie Wilcox & Dr. Jacqueline Segelnick, stresses the importance of establishing boundaries and saying no – an especially difficult task in a chesed-oriented society.

They further emphasize that women must recognize their limits and prioritize self-care. Saying no to additional commitments or responsibilities can help reduce these overwhelming stresses and create space for personal well-being.

Another consistent theme throughout the book is the importance of a healthy diet. Relatedly, the dangers of smoking and vaping are mentioned several times.

As to vaping, Drs. Sarah Rosanel & Ariela Orkaby write about a new type of disease, one that is completely preventable, called Vaping, Product Use Associated Lung Injury (E/VAL)I. That is an umbrella term used to describe lung diseases associated with the use of vaping products that can be severe and life-threatening.

They write about lipoid pneumonia, something I had never heard of previously, which is a lung inflammation that develops when lipids (fats) enter the bronchial tree as a result of vaping. Anyone who thinks that vaping is relatively harmless will know otherwise after reading this.

The only negative about the book is its length of 8 chapters and 125 pages. There is certainly a lot more to write about, but hopefully the editors are working on volume 2.

Just as GPS helps navigate complex roads, Navigating Personal and Family Healthcare helps guide individuals through the complexities of health in modern society.