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WORK TITLE: This Narrow Space
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PSEUDONYM(S):
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CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
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PERSONAL
Married; children: two sons.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A.; Sackler School of Medicine (Tel Aviv, Israel), medical degree, 1998; additional training at Mount Sinai Medical Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Boston Children’s Hospital.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Physician, educator, and writer. Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital at Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY, medical director of pediatric palliative care; Columbia University, New York, assistant professor; Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, IL, associate chief of pediatric palliative care; Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, assistant professor.
RELIGION: Jewish.WRITINGS
Contributor to publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, and Bellevue Literary Review. Contributor to websites, including the Hill.
SIDELIGHTS
Elisha Waldman is a physician, educator, and writer. He specializes in pediatric palliative care. Waldman has worked at the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital at Columbia University Medical Center and the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. He has taught at Columbia University and Northwestern University. Waldman received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a medical degree from the Sackler School of Medicine, in Tel Aviv, Israel. Waldman explained how he came to focus on palliative care and oncology in an interview with Judy Bolton-Fasman, writer on the Jewish Boston website. He stated: “As I moved through my medical studies, I was constantly interested in the sicker patients. I was drawn to oncology because it is about the whole patient—not just one organ system. In retrospect, the arc makes a lot of sense, especially from where I’m sitting now with primary palliative care. I also recognize that an interest in human suffering was driving me. How do we address suffering? How do we alleviate suffering? Oncology was a pathway to consider those questions.”
In 2018, Waldman released his first book, This Narrow Space: A Pediatric Oncologist, His Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Patients, and a Hospital in Jerusalem. In this volume, he explains how his experience practicing at an Israeli hospital changed his views on religious and political differences. In an interview with Renee Ghert-Zand, contributor to the Times of Israel website, Waldman explained: “It’s about recognizing that there are certain values and strains of humanity that run through all of us, whether you are a Haredi Jew from Jerusalem or a secular Jew from Tel Aviv or a Palestinian coming in from Hebron.” Waldman also told Ghert-Zand: “My job is to help understand who these people are, what is important to them, and to figure out how we align our medical care with that. It was something about that experience in working in such a crazy and out of context place for me in Jerusalem that really allowed me to sharpen those skills.”
A Kirkus Reviews critic described This Narrow Space as an “engrossing debut memoir” and “a candid and revealing portrait of a man and a nation in turmoil.” “Waldman shows great honesty as he explores his own reactions,” asserted Uzodinma Iweala on the New York Times Online. Aharon Ben Anshel, reviewer on the Jewish Press website, suggested: “This book … is a very poignant memoir of a leading practitioner writing about the brave and endearing children he had the privilege to learn from.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2017, review of This Narrow Space: A Pediatric Oncologist, His Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Patients, and a Hospital in Jerusalem.
Tablet, February 6, 2018, “A Pediatric Oncologist Explains the Difficulty of Treating Palestinian Patients at Israeli Hospitals,” article by author.
ONLINE
ColumbiaDoctors, http://columbiapedscancer.org/ (May 31, 2018), author profile.
Jewish Boston, https://www.jewishboston.com/ (January 30, 2018), Judy Bolton-Fasman, author interview.
Jewish Press, http://www.jewishpress.com/ (March 22, 2018), Aharon Ben Anshel, review of This Narrow Space.
Lurie Children’s Hospital website, https://www.luriechildrens.org/ (May 31, 2018), author profile.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (March 2, 2018), Uzodinma Iweala, review of This Narrow Space.
Northwestern University website, http://www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/ (May 31, 2018), author faculty profile.
Penguin Random House website, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/ (May 31, 2018), author profile.
Times of Israel Online, https://www.timesofisrael.com/ (February 3, 2018), Renee Ghert-Zand, author interview.
Wisdom Daily, http://thewisdomdaily.com/ (May 3, 2018), Beth Kissileff, author interview.
ELISHA WALDMAN is associate chief, division of pediatric palliative care, at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. He was formerly medical director of pediatric palliative care at the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. He received his BA from Yale University and his medical degree from the Sackler School of Medicine in Tel Aviv. He also trained at Mount Sinai Medical Center and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and at Boston Children’s Hospital. His writing has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Hill, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Time. He lives in Chicago.
Elisha D Waldman, MD
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (Palliative Care )
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Bio Publications Disclosures
Education and Certification
MD: Sackler School of Medicine (1998)
Residency: Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, Pediatrics (2001)
Fellowship: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Pediatrics Hematology-Oncology (2004)
Fellowship: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Chief Fellow (2005)
Fellowship: Children's Hospital Medical Center, Boston, MA, Pediatrics Hospice and Palliative Medicine (2013)
Contact
312/227-3550
Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago Box 51
225 E Chicago Avenue
Chicago IL 60611
Links
Northwestern Scholars Profile
Hospital Affiliations
Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago
Institutes and Centers
Institute for Public Health and Medicine (IPHAM)
QUOTED: "It’s about recognizing that there are certain values and strains of humanity that run through all of us, whether you are a Haredi Jew from Jerusalem or a secular Jew from Tel Aviv or a Palestinian coming in from Hebron."
"My job is to help understand who these people are, what is important to them, and to figure out how we align our medical care with that. It was something about that experience in working in such a crazy and out of context place for me in Jerusalem that really allowed me to sharpen those skills."
Pediatric oncologist takes readers inside Hadassah hospital with new memoir
American-born Elisha Waldman reflects on the unique challenges of treating sick kids in religiously and politically complex Jerusalem
By Renee Ghert-Zand 3 February 2018, 8:31 am 7
282 shares
Dr. Elisha Waldman (Michael Lionstar)
Dr. Elisha Waldman (Michael Lionstar)
Enter any Israeli hospital on any given day, and you’ll see Israelis and Palestinians of all backgrounds and religions — staff and patients — coexisting and cooperating. It’s a microcosm of a broader hoped-for peace in the Middle East that most people outside the country are unaware of.
American-born physician Elisha Waldman experienced this reality while working at Hadassah Medical Center for seven years. Now, he introduces it to an American audience with his new memoir, “This Narrow Space: A Pediatric Oncologist, His Jewish, Muslim and Christian Patients, and a Hospital in Jerusalem.”
‘The Narrow Place’ by Elisha Waldman (Schocken)
Waldman takes readers onto Hadassah’s busy and (sometimes too) loud pediatric oncology ward, and particularly into the private spaces and conversations where doctors and nurses discuss treatment plans with severely ill young patients and their families. Tragically, sometimes there are no more medical options — on- or off-protocol — left to try.
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This, of course, would be the work of a pediatric oncologist anywhere in the world. What sets “This Narrow Space” apart is that it presents the unique complexities of caring for sick children in Jerusalem, arguably the most religiously and politically charged city in the world.
People from every sector of Israeli and Palestinian societies ended up under Waldman’s care: Secular Jews, ultra-Orthodox Jews, settler Israelis, Palestinians citizens of Israel, and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza who temporarily entered Israel with permits given on humanitarian grounds.
Waldman’s memoir shows how the hospital atmosphere positively highlights the commonalities among all these groups.
“It’s about recognizing that there are certain values and strains of humanity that run through all of us, whether you are a Haredi Jew from Jerusalem or a secular Jew from Tel Aviv or a Palestinian coming in from Hebron,” he said.
Aerial view of Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem, Jerusalem, March 17, 2014. (Yossi Zamir/Flash 90)
To a great extent, Waldman was forged in the Hadassah crucible. It was there that he learned more about himself, became a better physician, and also decided to specialize in pediatric palliative care.
“I became transformed as both a clinician and a person during my time there,” Waldman told The Times of Israel.
As a palliative care specialist, Waldman, who has had an abiding interest in spiritual matters, sits with families and kids making hard decisions.
“My job is to help understand who these people are, what is important to them, and to figure out how we align our medical care with that. It was something about that experience in working in such a crazy and out of context place for me in Jerusalem that really allowed me to sharpen those skills,” he said.
Dr. Elisha Waldman with medical clowns in Hadassah Medical Center’s pediatric oncology department, 2009. (YouTube screen shot)
Waldman, 46, no longer lives in Israel, and is currently associate chief of the division of pediatric palliative care at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
The author said he was heartbroken to leave Israel for a position at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital at Columbia University Medical Center in New York in 2014, when it became clear that Hadassah did not intend to support his efforts to establish Israel’s first full pediatric palliative care service.
“I left with feelings similar to ones you feel with unrequited love. I didn’t get the response I was hoping for or thought I deserved, whether that is egotistical, or fairly deserved. I’ve come to terms that this was a necessary and smart move for my family, but I miss Israel every single day,” said Waldman, who is married and has a young son, with another baby on the way.
I left with feelings similar to ones you feel with unrequited love
Prior to his residencies in pediatrics and oncology at Mount Sinai Medical Center and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Waldman lived in Israel while studying for his medical degree at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. He had also visited the country many times with his Conservative rabbi father, mother, and younger brother and sister while growing up in Connecticut. (His entire family now lives in Israel.)
A young Elisha Waldman (lef) and his brother in Israel on a family visit in 1979. (Courtesy)
However, Waldman’s aliya in 2007 and years as an attending physician at Hadassah gave him an entirely new perspective on what it’s like to be an Israeli doctor.
“It’s one thing to do your rotations in the hospital in medical school, when you are still trying to figure out how heart failure works and what medications to give for it, and another when you’re the attending physician actually managing a deathly ill child. You’re in a very different place trying to navigate that system,” he said.
As a young immigrant physician to Israel, Waldman was drafted to IDF service. He had just completed his officers training and was in charge of Hadassah’s pediatric oncology department for the month when Operation Cast Lead broke out in Gaza in December 2008. It was then that he wrote the essay that would eventually grow into “This Narrow Space.”
“A lot of things just emotionally came to a head for me in those couple of weeks in terms of my identity and the patients’ identity. This weird stew of the Israel issues mixing with the backdrop of really sick kids. I woke up at 2 a.m. in my apartment and just vomited out this essay onto paper of what it felt like to be working there at the middle of all that. I just needed to get it out of my soul,” Waldman said.
Dr. Elisha Waldman during his IDF service. (Courtesy)
A recurring theme in Waldman’s memoir is the influence local religious authorities have over their followers’ healthcare and end-of-life decisions.
“In the ideal world, communication between a patient’s rabbi and the medical team would be seamless, everyone working together to explore goals, hopes, and fears in order to come up with a plan that is both medically and religiously or culturally appropriate for a given family. But in reality that sort of relationship rarely materializes,” he wrote.
More than once in his memoir, Waldman expressed his astonishment and frustration when ultra-Orthodox Jewish and religious Muslim parents alike refused to let surgeons amputate their daughters’ life-threatening cancerous limbs because of disfigurement stigmas.
Going into it, Waldman assumed his biggest challenge would be dealing with the Palestinian population, and in particular not being sufficiently clued into the attendant political and cultural subtleties. It turned out that Jewish religious differences were the hardest nut to crack.
“I think it was maybe because I had more skin in the game when it came to this. It involved my own religious identity and my own sense of community… and waking up to the fact that there are a lot of sub-communities, and that not everyone takes a pluralistic approach to diversity,” Waldman said.
“It’s not to say that I was not invested in the Palestinian issue. I actually feel deeply invested as someone who made aliya [immigrated to Israel], and as a human being, but I think it was easier for me to look at that as something external to myself… The real puzzle was getting into the heads of the Haredim from Mea Shearim who pulled down even more of a veil between them and me [than the Palestinians did],” he said.
Parents and young cancer patients in the hemato-oncology department at Hadassah Ein Kerem march as they protest against Health Minister Yaakov Litzman and Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center CEO Zeev Rotstein in Jerusalem, June 7, 2017 (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Waldman has followed from afar the recent Hadassah pediatric oncology department crisis. In March 2017 his former boss and mentor, department head Prof. Michael (Mickey) Weintraub, along with five other doctors and three interns, decided to resign over a hospital management decision to reorganize that they felt unable to accept on medical and logistical grounds.
“I feel that what Mickey created in that department was a really beautiful, special bubble. It was a place where staff and patients and families — despite the fact that they were all threatened by the worse illnesses you can imagine — all felt safe and protected,” Waldman said.
“It seems to be me that the hospital leadership and Health Ministry were extremely short sighted and narrow minded, and cost the greater Jerusalem community an incredible asset,” he said.
Elisha D. Waldman, MD
Attending Physician, Palliative Care
Appointments & Referrals
1.800.543.7362 (1.800.KIDS DOC)
About Me
Clinical Interests: Pediatric hospice and palliative medicine, pediatric hematology-oncology
Specialties, Programs & Conditions
Specialties:
Palliative Care >
Education & Training
Education: Sackler School of Medicine, 1998
Postgraduate Training: Fellowship in hospice & palliative medicine, Children's Hospital Boston, 2012-2013; Fellowship in pediatric hematology/oncology, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, 2002-2005; Residency in pediatrics, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine Hospital, 1998-2001
Board Certifications: Pediatrics, Hematology/Oncology, Hospice and Palliative Medicine
Publications
Most recent publications
"I'm not a spiritual person." How hope might facilitate conversations about spirituality among teens and young adults with cancer J Pain Symptom Manage
A cross-sectional pilot study of compassion fatigue, burnout, and compassion satisfaction in pediatric palliative care providers in the United States Palliat Support Care 1-7
Dr. Elisha Waldman On End-Of-Life Care For His Arab And Jewish Patients
Dr. Elisha Waldman On End-Of-Life Care For His Arab And Jewish Patients
Beth Kissileff
by Beth Kissileff
May 03, 2018 No Comments
Elisha Waldman has the credentials of a doctor: the degrees, the training, the experience. His hospital ID badge reads that way as well: physician.
Don’t be fooled by those labels, for, at least from my impression, Waldman actually functions as clergy with the outward trappings of a doctor. I gained this notion from reading his recent memoir, This Narrow Space, and speaking to him in a a phone interview. In fact, the pediatric oncologist and palliative care specialist has long experience with watching clergy, as he grew up in a rabbinic family. I imagine that, for families Dr. Waldman works with, in many ways, he functions much as his father, Rabbi Leon Waldman(Jewish Theological Seminary Rabbinical school class of 1972), must have during his time in the pulpit in Fairfield, CT.
Waldman comes into contact with families at a harrowing juncture, when a child is critically ill. To help the families he works with, Waldman cares about words and how he speaks to patients. He also cares about hope, however that illusory concept may be defined. The doctor writes of hope, “I learn that hope- and hoping- is a far richer concept than I had suspected. I’ve learned to treat hope not as a noun but as a verb. Hope as a thing, as an object, can be shattered or lost. But hoping as an act doesn’t really ever have to stop.”
This sounds as good as anything most of us hear coming from the pulpit. After all, a rabbi, in many ways, attempts to give shape to the events of the world, whether it be current events in a weekly Sabbath sermon, or allowing the assembled to understand how to frame and process the enormity of the moment at a life cycle event. Waldman spent seven years at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and, in his time there, treated patients and their families from every sector of Israeli society – cancer seems to be undiscriminating in its ability to target all families.
He writes about how “a fair amount of literature has emerged over the past few years suggesting that spiritual care should in fact be a routine part of medical care-certainly when dealing with patients facing potentially life-threatening illness.” Waldman’s job as a pediatric oncologist, and especially later when he trains as a palliative care specialist, is both to help families choose how to treat illness and to aid them in finding ways to cope. In fact, Waldman told me in a phone interview that “at the heart of palliative care is the creation of the narrative.”
In our phone conversation on an afternoon he had off from seeing patients, he spoke about the value of words to those in palliative care. He told me that “in palliative care we have a saying, ‘our conversations are our procedures and our words are like scalpels.'” He wasn’t sure who to attribute this to, but added that most medical professionals do not have “a deep enough respect for what words can do, both good and bad.”
Waldman emphasized this, as I had quoted to him something that he wrote in an email to the mother of one of his patients, Jacqueline Dooley, which she used in an essay she wrote in Longreads, about parenting a child who is no longer living. Dooley was concerned that she not give her child false hope and Waldman replied to her, “One of the most wonderful and amazing attributes of the human soul is the near impossibility of crushing all hope. This is a gift. I don’t know if it’s God, or nature, or evolution, nor do I care — it is a beautiful and vital part of what makes us human. We have actual published data that people (patients and parents alike) can (and want to) hear frank, stark information about their prognosis, are able to internalize the fact that they are going to die of their disease, and yet still simultaneously maintain some sort of hope. The ability to simultaneously grasp one’s own mortality while still hoping for something is one of the beautiful paradoxes that makes us human and that allows us to function.”
It is clear that he is a physician concerned with the soul and the spirit, not merely the body. For Waldman, this need to hold on to hope, though it may need to be redefined as the patient’s conditions change, is something he helps both patients and their families work through.
In This Narrow Space, Waldman writes of being called up to reserve duty in the Israeli army during the 2014 war in Gaza and, when he returns, being asked by the family of an Arab patient where he had been. Waldman writes, “I had been so proud of what I’d been doing, even enjoying the training and looking forward to my first deployment in the reserves, so I am annoyed with myself when I feel my face flush with embarrassment. The women’s faces fall for an instant. But then, barely missing a beat, one of them looks up at me, manages a small smile and says, ‘We wish there were more people like you in the army. Maybe things would be different then.'”
Waldman faces the situation of ambiguity constantly, wanting to care for all his patients equally, but having the larger forces of the world outside the oncology ward make them at odds, though inside they are all fighting the battle against cancer. How to care for patients when outside the hospital there is a war going on?
One of the most interesting aspects of This Narrow Space is the opening it gives readers onto the various groups that make up Israeli society. When writing, he told me by phone, he conceived of the book as a work about Israel. Waldman meets Jews and Arabs from all segments of the country and becomes part of their lives in an incredibly intimate way. Part of the need for him as a physician to understand the family comes from their religious views, some of which he finds hard to understand. There were families who said they would rather have a child dead than amputate a leg, those who are in denial about the nearness that the patient is to death, and those who consult a rabbi who is in touch with all manner of medical specialists and recommends specific doctors to his flock.
The book educates, as well, about how the medical mind works. I, and I think most non-medical professionals, assume physicians are trained to make decisions on what the best courses of action to heal a patient are, and to know how to treat an illness… that their job gives them the unassailable credentials to decide precisely what to do. However, Waldman is not afraid to let readers know that much of what doctors think they know is not a certitude, that medical professionals dwell in a land of probabilities and percentages, and don’t actually ever know precisely how an individual patient will respond to a particular treatment protocol.
Waldman writes, “Now I see things in a much less binary way. Patient care is not an either/or construct, cure-driven or comfort-driven. Decisions and goals can be, and usually are, much more nuanced.” This is startling, coming from someone whose profession has often been seen as peddling certainty to its customers.
Waldman speaks of his training in palliative care as helping him “become more at ease with ambiguity. This is evident as I become more comfortable accompanying my patients into the gray areas of prognostic uncertainty. But it’s also evident in my own life. Process theology, which somehow accepts a divine force that is all-powerful and all good, yet also paradoxically, limited somehow jibes with my own experience… In keeping with the principles of palliative care, I’m learning to embrace uncertainty as simply a part of living.”
In our interview, he says as well that writing helped clarify things in his life. In fact, after he published the essay “Double Exposure” that eventually shifted into the book in spring 2014, he met the woman who became his wife. He said that “it is not an accident that I only settled down and married after palliative care training.” Waldman explained that “wallowing in the grayness with these families, the lessons from all of that I bring home and learned have allowed me to settle down.” In the time between when he wrote the first essay and the present, Waldman married and, in the past month, has just become a father to a second son.
He writes about the first time he was with a patient as she died and the first time he was asked to help clean the patient’s body after death. He explains that “tubes, IVs, catheters, and tape” are removed, and wounds are sewn up. Waldman hesitated when the nurse asked whether he wanted to assist. But he writes, “What surprised me most was that the process was also transformative for me. I felt a sense of fulfillment of my responsibility to this person who had been entrusted into my care.”
Now that he has a family, not just patients entrusted to his care, readers will have to look forward to hearing about the doctor’s next experiences.
Elisha D. Waldman, MD
Contact Information
1-212-305-9770
1-212-305-8408
Academic Title(s)
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at CUMC
Education & Training
Medical School
Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University (Israel)
Residency
Mount Sinai Medical Center
Fellowship
Dana Farber Cancer Institute
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center
Interests/Specialties
Hospice and Palliative Medicine
Research & Grants
QUOTED: "As I moved through my medical studies, I was constantly interested in the sicker patients. I was drawn to oncology because it is about the whole patient—not just one organ system. In retrospect, the arc makes a lot of sense, especially from where I’m sitting now with primary palliative care. I also recognize that an interest in human suffering was driving me. How do we address suffering? How do we alleviate suffering? Oncology was a pathway to consider those questions."
By Judy Bolton-Fasman for JewishBoston
The Determination to Make a Difference: Pediatric Oncology in Israel
A former pediatric oncologist in Jerusalem, Elisha Waldman details treating children from various backgrounds in his new memoir, “This Narrow Space.”
Top Pick January 30, 2018 0 0
(Photo: jojof/iStock)
(Photo: jojof/iStock)
When Elisha Waldman, a pediatric oncologist, moved to Israel over a decade ago, he was determined to make a difference in the lives of his patients at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Optimistic and empathetic, Waldman treated children from all backgrounds. As he chronicles in his new memoir, “This Narrow Space: A Pediatric Oncologist, His Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Patients, and a Hospital in Jerusalem,” he appreciates that each family and each child have a unique history.
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Waldman was determined to navigate physical and cultural barriers to treat the whole patient. As he writes in his book, even the silences that occur by a patient’s bedside in the middle of the night communicate his or her wishes and dreams: “Each bed contained its own story, and we were given the gift of playing a part—hopefully a useful part—in that story. I sensed even that in that silence something like a sacred duty was to be found, that somewhere in there was the still, small voice in the whirlwind.”
Waldman moved back to the United States, where he pursued a fellowship in palliative care at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is now the associate chief of the division of palliative care at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
Waldman recently spoke to JewishBoston ahead of his Feb. 6 appearance at Brookline Booksmith.
Elisha Waldman (Photo: Michael Lionstar)
Elisha Waldman (Photo: Michael Lionstar)
What moved you to practice pediatric oncology?
As I moved through my medical studies, I was constantly interested in the sicker patients. I was drawn to oncology because it is about the whole patient—not just one organ system. In retrospect, the arc makes a lot of sense, especially from where I’m sitting now with primary palliative care. I also recognize that an interest in human suffering was driving me. How do we address suffering? How do we alleviate suffering? Oncology was a pathway to consider those questions.
What moved you to practice in Israel?
I grew up in a classic liberal Zionist home. My dad is a Conservative rabbi and my family eventually moved to Israel from Connecticut. Right now, I’m the only family member not there. Practicing pediatric oncology was really a synthesis of all of these different things into one beautiful thing—dealing with human suffering against the backdrop of a place that is fascinating, a place I love and have aspirations for.
At one point you write that you are drawn to treating children with cancer because of your ongoing interest in theology and humanities. Can you elaborate on that?
My undergraduate degree was in religious studies. Part of what drove me as an undergraduate was not just an academic interest in religion, but also the elements of personal challenge to my religious practice today. I deal with kids who are very sick, and I try to touch on their spiritual needs as part of a holistic approach to their treatment.
Until I started looking into palliative care, these two interests were really intertwining threads that I only recognized when I worked with the chaplains in Boston Children’s Hospital. Medicine in general is undergoing a period of change. If you look at the sweep of history, the separation of spirituality and medicine is a relatively modern event. Now clinicians are becoming more comfortable with recognizing that we need to address spiritual needs in the hospital the same way we need to address pain and suffering.
(Courtesy image)
(Courtesy image)
You write that, as a doctor in Israel, your “entire care management algorithm changes to adapt to the geopolitical situation.” Can you give an example?
One of the best examples is when a patient has a low-grade fever while getting chemotherapy. It’s a red flag. We instruct parents that if a child has a fever of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, they must come to the hospital no matter the time. From West Jerusalem and the surrounding Israeli areas, parents can easily get to the hospital, yet ultra-Orthodox families will often wait until after Shabbat to bring their child in.
But the real place you have to change the algorithm is where you have a Palestinian patient who you know has no immune system and will get a fever in the next day or two. Their family most likely lives in a Palestinian village miles away or a refugee camp on the other side of the separation barrier. What do I do if I think this child is going to get a fever at 2 in the morning and is not able to get back so easily? There is the reality of checkpoints in the middle of the night—a family can’t just get in the car and go to the hospital. In those cases, we would manufacture fevers to admit kids. It’s very different than practicing medicine at a place like Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Israel will soon celebrate its 70th anniversary. What are some of your hopes and dreams for it?
I’m a liberal Zionist Jew and I believe very much in a Jewish state. I deeply love the country and believe in its mission, despite my issues with some of its policies. But I also believe that in establishing such a state, we have a responsibility to the people who were already there. The reality is that there are millions of Palestinians living under our rule. As far as I can see, there are two solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict: One solution is that we figure out how to live together in two states. The other option, which is not realistic, is to clear the West Bank and Gaza. If that happened, the state would become something unrecognizable to me—something that I wouldn’t want to be a part of. I think the majority of Israelis feel that way too. In light of those parameters, I perceive this book to be a love song about unrequited love for Israel.
QUOTED: "engrossing debut memoir" "a candid and revealing portrait of a man and a nation in turmoil."
Waldman, Elisha: THIS NARROW SPACE
Kirkus Reviews. (Oct. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Waldman, Elisha THIS NARROW SPACE Schocken (Adult Nonfiction) $25.95 1, 30 ISBN: 978-0-8052-4332-1
The story of an American physician who faced medical, personal, and cultural challenges at a hospital in Jerusalem.
In his engrossing debut memoir, Waldman, a pediatric oncologist and associate chief in the division of palliative care at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago, recounts 7 years as attending physician at the Hadassah Medical Center, where his young patients included Israeli Jews and Arabs and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. His motivation for moving to Israel was to make aliyah, contributing to the success of the Zionist project; he hoped, also, to find meaning and purpose for his life. Growing up in suburban Connecticut, the son of a conservative rabbi, Waldman had majored in religious studies and felt nurtured by his faith until he began working as a doctor, confronted daily with suffering and death. Part of his reason for emigrating was to make sense of his spiritual crisis and, not least, to find a true home: he had been moving from place to place, "fixated on erasing the person I used to be." In Jerusalem, in his first senior position, he became aware of some profound shortcomings: nowhere in his medical training, for example, was he ever taught how to address his patients' spiritual needs. In fact, he adds, "at no point was I even taught that it's an issue at all." Nor did he have a clear understanding of the oppression and racism experienced by Arabs, no matter where they lived. Palestinian families had to endure hours at multiple military checkpoints to bring their desperately sick children to the hospital. Even a beloved Arab nurse was often treated "as though she is a traitor, an Arab Uncle Tom." Jews questioned her competence. Besides offering warm portraits of the children he treated and their distraught families, Waldman chronicles his transformation from a somewhat naAaAaAeA ve, underprepared physician one more politically and culturally astute.
A candid and revealing portrait of a man and a nation in turmoil.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Waldman, Elisha: THIS NARROW SPACE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509244179/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e85007a3. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509244179
A Pediatric Oncologist Explains the Difficulty of Treating Palestinian Patients at Israeli Hospitals
Elisha Waldman
Tablet Magazine. (Feb. 6, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Nextbook
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For some patients, home may not always feel like the safest or most comfortable place to be. When faced with advancing illness, some children and their parents in fact prefer the hospital, where they can be supported and comforted by the staff around the clock. Providing options is important. At this critical time in the life of a family, when so many options are being taken away, preserving choices for how and where a patient's final days are spent is almost an act of defiance: death may be inevitable, but the family will, as much as possible, maintain control over what happens between now and then, including where it happens.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Waldman, Elisha. "A Pediatric Oncologist Explains the Difficulty of Treating Palestinian Patients at Israeli Hospitals." Tablet Magazine, 6 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526411307/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d938b0f5. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526411307
QUOTED: "Waldman shows great honesty as he explores his own reactions."
The Shortlist
Putting Down the Scalpel, Picking Up the Pen
Image
CreditJohn Gall
By Uzodinma Iweala
March 2, 2018
THIS NARROW SPACE
A Pediatric Oncologist, His Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Patients, and a Hospital in Jerusalem
By Elisha Waldman
245 pp. Schocken. $25.95.
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Can you truly be compassionate when external circumstances create walls that cannot be broken or scaled no matter how hard you try? This seems to be the central question in Waldman’s fantastic book. A Jewish American pediatric oncologist and palliative care specialist who makes aliyah to Israel to work at the Hadassah hospital in West Jerusalem, Waldman exhibits a rare self-awareness, avoiding the “Middle-East-splaining” that often accompanies stories from the region. Waldman believes in the Zionist project as much as he believes that as a doctor his mission is to heal whomever he comes in contact with regardless of religion or ethnic affiliation. At the same time, his left-of-center politics put him at odds with a society that, during his seven years in Israel, grows more Balkanized and violent.
Waldman shows great honesty as he explores his own reactions to Palestinian patients and the incongruity of serving as an Israeli Army medic during Operation Cast Lead while simultaneously treating cancer patients from Gaza. He even takes a close look at his own internal identity conflict, feeling too American to be Israeli, but too invested in Zionism to fully identify as an American. It all illustrates just how difficult it is to reconcile devotion to the healing mission with the realities of a complex life.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 26 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Shortlist / Medical Memoirs.
QUOTED: "This book ... is a very poignant memoir of a leading practitioner writing about the brave and endearing children he had the privilege to learn from."
Title: This Narrow Space: A Pediatric Oncologist, His Jewish, Muslim and Christian patients, and a hospital in Jerusalem
By
Aharon Ben Anshel -
6 Nisan 5778 – March 22, 2018 0
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Photo Credit: Schocken Books
Title: This Narrow Space: A Pediatric Oncologist, His Jewish, Muslim and Christian patients, and a hospital in Jerusalem
Author: Elisha Waldman
Publisher: Schocken Books, New York
When Bernard Madoff’s ponzi scheme took down, among many others, the finances of The Hadassah Women’s’ Organization, the event shattered the dreams of Dr. Elisha Waldman, a Pediatric Oncologist, whose aim in life was to establish the first Pediatric Palliative Care clinic in Israel at the Hadassah Medical Center in Yerushalayim.
The Narrow Space, which was recently released by Schocken Books, a premier publisher of books of Jewish life, tells the story of how Dr. Waldman came to this point in his life during which he rendered tender care to any sick children who arrived at his clinic, no matter their religion or the citizenship of their families, similar to the word of the renowned Doctors Without Borders.
The single devastating element that unified his patient clientele was that they had all been diagnosed with some form of pediatric cancer. His work left a mark of accomplishment, although Israeli bureaucracy and regional politics stood in the way of treatment of the neediest patients. Lack of funding due to the Madoff Ponzi scheme led to shortfalls of hospital funding, and the ever present threat of war and cultural clashes often spilled over to the clinical practice.
Inasmuch as Waldman was still an unmarried single, his work life spilled over way past his official work hours, and it wasn’t until he was ensconced back in another hospital in America that he was able to go through the normal process of socializing, dating, and finally marriage.
This book, which encapsulates his disappointment with the Israeli hospital and healthcare system, is a very poignant memoir of a leading practitioner writing about the brave and endearing children he had the privilege to learn from.