Women Surviving and Thriving at Work

Every year dozens of very good Jewish books appear, works that inform, uplift, and inspire, and from which most of us would greatly profit if we had time to read them all. And then there are the one or two works that by virtue of the importance of the subject matter and the excellence of the presentation can rightfully claim a place on every Jewish bookshelf.

Rav Aaron Lopiansky’s Ben Torah for Life, on the transition from kollel to the broader working world, is one such recent sefer. Another is Ari and Miryam Wasserman’s Making It All Work: Women Surviving and Thriving at Work (a companion volume for women to an earlier volume for men, Making It Work: A Practical Guide to Halachah in the Workplace).

That, I will confess, is a not entirely disinterested opinion. I maintain a once-a-week chavrusa with Ari, and he is kind enough to credit Mishpacha with having greatly improved the book. More than a year ago, I placed at the bottom of my column an e-mail address to which women interested in being interviewed about their work experiences could respond. Approximately 30 women did so, and those interviews, in addition to others done previously, constitute one of the chief merits of Making It All Work. Excerpts from those interviews, often more than one, appear on almost every page.

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote. And because of those interviews, Making It All Work is not just a compendium of halachah, but an account of the actual experiences of a broad range of working frum women.