About
I started my higher education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem studying Hebrew Literature. This study has become one of my constitutive academic experiences and has helped to shape me later as a qualitative researcher (and person). Later I moved to the School of Social Work at HU, where I studied for B.A., M.A. and PHD. I wrote my PhD thesis under the supervision of Israel Prize laureate, Prof. Jona Rosenfeld, on the life stories of women in poverty while working as a social worker and a psychotherapist. On 2000 I arrived at the Spitzer Department of Social Work at BGU as a Kreitman post-doc fellow, and have serve as a full professor there since 2016.
My commitment to the hard work of changing the world has led me to be involved as an activist in the Israeli Forum for the Eradication of Poverty, and to serve as a member of several governmental committees dealing with poverty. Since 2014 I am working closely with the Ministry of Welfare and Social Services on the implementation of the Poverty-Aware Social Work paradigm, that I developed with a team of talented post-graduate students. The implementation of the paradigm in social service departments nationwide has been developed into an ongoing huge project of pedagogy, practice research, and policy practice, with the aim of making poverty visible as a violation of human rights and establishing solidarity between social workers and people who know poverty firsthand. Given the neoliberal context, keeping alive against all odds the hope and belief that relationships matter, that social workers are able to imagine a world without injustice and are willing to stand by service users to ensure that such a world will come into being, has become both a basic necessity and a radical choice.
During the years, I was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, The Graduate Center at CUNY, Ghent University, University of Helsinki, University of London, and Università Cattolica of Milan. My work has been awarded several prizes, among them a lifetime achievement award for an outstanding contribution to social policy, a prize for an academic engaged in social change and a lifetime achievement award for contribution to the shaping of social Work and the Israeli welfare state.