"It's at the Core of My Identity": Impacts of Jewish Identity on Choosing Social Work

Background and Purpose

Social work is a profession rooted in efforts of people who are often both social insiders and outsiders due to intersecting identities across race, ethnicity, class, religion, sexual orientation, and gender. While literature documents (un)intentional harms and benefits caused by social workers, we know less about why people enter the profession. This research draws on data from interviews with Jewish identifying social work academics (N=33), focusing on how cultural, religious, or historical identification as Jews influenced their social work professional path.

Methods

This study analyzes data from semi-structured interviews with Jewish-identifying social work respondents about their identity and experiences as US-based social work academics. The purposive sample was designed to maximize variation in roles and foci; age; time in the profession; ethnic/racial identity; geography; and type and size of their institution. Here we analyze data from responses to the request “please share whether/how your identity as someone who is Jewish is relevant to your identity as a social work academic”. We employed a 5-step thematic analysis strategy: reading transcripts to gain familiarity; close reading and coding; discussion and creation of a consensus codebook; coding all interviews; and identification of themes. Codes were a priori and emergent. The coding process relied on independent and shared coding by research team members holding diverse perspectives and positionalities in relation to the topic. Rigor was also ensured through member checking, audit trail, and peer debriefing.

Findings

Findings were grouped into three themes. 1) Cultural Identification, characterized by Jewish concepts and values such as “tikkun olam” (repairing the world) or “if I am only for myself, then who am I”. These drew respondents to a profession serving others or striving to make society better, for instance by aligning with ADEI efforts. 2) Generational and Personal Experiences, relating to respondents’ own experiences, or to generational resonances of oppression. Examples included social workers with parents or grandparents who Holocaust survivors or had themselves fled other countries as children. These experiences led to their desire to serve people or groups who they saw as marginalized or oppressed, such as refugees or racialized minorities, or to pursue careers devoted to resonant traumas, such as attachment disruption among young children. 3) Osmosis, which was a general feeling of concordance between what respondents absorbed from different Jewish environments, including family, community, or religious institution, that made social work including, for some, the social work academy, seem a natural fit.

Implications

Alignment with social work values among Jewish-identifying social work academics was an important driver of their careers. We should acknowledge how people’s identities inform their social work trajectories yet have been largely unrecognized and unexplored. The nexus of our values across diverse backgrounds can strengthen professional solidarity and provide us with a guide for our shared social work mission.