The Shofar Awakens Us: A Call for Ethics in Social Work

As Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, 5787 approaches, everything feels loaded. The fringe has become mainstream and inversions are so commonplace we’re rarely surprised by the latest outlandish headline.

As the school year begins, our newest generation of social workers will learn about the dignity and worth of every person, self-determination, nondiscrimination, and the responsibility helping professionals have to examine their own biases.

But they’ll also be on the receiving end of frameworks that have been commandeering social work education: antiracist and anti-oppressive practice, decolonial approaches and abolitionist social work, to name a few.

Some of these approaches leave Jews completely out when addressing minority identity and oppression. Others go further, providing cover to dehumanize and discriminate against Jews by recasting us as “colonizers” and “oppressors.”

None should get an automatic pass simply because they employ the language of social justice.

A Profession With a Jewish History

The National Association of Social Workers adopted its first Code of Ethics in 1960. The Code set out ethical principles and standards intended to guide the profession and hold social workers accountable to the people they serve.

It is especially painful for Jewish social workers who have devoted so many years of our lives to these values to be living through the backlash of where we’ve landed in 2026.

Where Do Jews Fit in Antiracism and Anti-Oppressive Practice?

Jews are a minority population with a long history of persecution and oppression. Why wouldn’t we be included in ADEI?

Instead, Jewish identity, history, and Jew hatred itself are omitted. Social work scholars and advocates have documented how little attention is paid to Jew hatred in social work education and professional settings.1

While it’s true that Jewish identity does not fit neatly into contemporary American categories of race, this is because we are an ancient, indigenous minority population whose peoplehood long predates this modern concept.

Ironically, within social work, Jews are often reduced to “white” and “privileged” instead of understood as the diverse people we are.

But social workers are supposed to understand complexity and should be able to hold more than one truth at the same time.

Yes, many Jews have succeeded and thrived despite extreme adversity. History and present-day events have also shown us how quickly that acceptance and sense of belonging can change.

I don’t think this failure to recognize Jewish history is just an oversight. Jew hatred itself is to blame. As we know, one of the classic libels is to portray Jews as all-powerful, privileged, or threatening. Jewish success has never made us immune from the cycle of Jew hatred.

A Convergence of Exclusion

At Columbia School of Social Work, Foundations of Social Work Practice: Decolonizing Social Work is part of the curriculum. The course uses a Power, Race, Oppression, and Privilege framework and asks students to identify ways social work reproduces dominant worldviews and develop strategies to “decolonize the profession.”

At the University of Illinois Chicago’s Jane Addams College of Social Work, a Jewish social work student reported a troubling pattern of experiences. She described course materials that framed Jewish identity primarily through an antizionist lens while omitting core aspects of Jewish history and culture. She also relayed that aspects of her Jewish identity were publicly questioned in the classroom. When she raised concerns and requested alternative readings reflecting mainstream Jewish identity and culture, she said her request was deflected.

The student also described an incident in which she and other Jewish students were surrounded, blocked from leaving, and accused of genocide. According to her account, the university ultimately determined that the incident did not meet the threshold for harassment, and she believed the case was closed without a full investigation.

If this is what “decolonizing the profession” looks like for Jewish students, we need to examine it further.

The central problem with this and other newer frameworks is their treatment of “Zionists” as though they are somehow separate from Jews.

The overwhelming majority of Jews are Zionists. We count ourselves extremely lucky that Israel exists and know that the Jewish people, themselves indigenous to the land, have a right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland, Israel.

In other words, a belief held by most Jews is being used to recast Jews themselves as the oppressor. And we are seeing this spread across the mental-health professions.

The USA-Palestine Mental Health Network is another example. The Network includes social workers in its leadership and organizing. It describes Palestinians as suffering from “oppressive conditions generated by Zionism.” All this, as it maintains that it opposes antisemitism.

Similar ideas are appearing within established areas of psychotherapy, including Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS). These are not approaches that began as political movements, yet the same language has landed in their professional spaces.

Abolitionist social work seeks to dismantle systems it regards as inherently oppressive rather than reform them. What is newer is their incorporation of Palestine and antizionism into this movement.

In 2025, Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work devoted an entire special issue to Thinking and Practicing Abolition Through Palestine. Its guest editorial, Palestine as a Compass for Social Work, called Palestine the “moral and political center of gravity” for abolitionist social work and called on the profession to reckon with its complicity in “settler colonialism, Zionism, and the imperial logics that sustain them.” The authors also explicitly describe “Zionism as distinct from Jewish identity.”

This is also seen in in social work and mental health advocacy. After October 7, Social Work for Palestine, the Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work, upEND, and the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network began working together on what they term political education and organizing for social workers. Just last week, these groups met in Chicago for ‘Organizing Social Workers for Abolition,’ a summit intended to build “nationwide power” around abolitionist social work.

Across social work education, scholarship, professional networks, psychotherapy communities, and organizing, Jews are increasingly being positioned as “the Other.” Taken together, these developments are not simply isolating Jewish social workers. They threaten our continued presence in a profession we helped develop.

Antizionist ideology itself purports to oppose antisemitism while opposing the right of Jews to self-determination in their ancient homeland, Israel. This provides them cover: If I oppose antisemitism, then my actions against Zionists could not possibly involve prejudice against Jews.

Same Hate, Different Language

In the ancient and medieval world, Jews could be condemned for their religion. In the modern era, Jews were hated for not being white enough. In the years after the Holocaust, explicit antisemitism was frowned upon. But Jew hatred never disappeared.

As Dara Horn explores in her new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, A Love Story for the Living, the idea that antisemitism can be condemned while antizionism remains acceptable has its own history.

In the Soviet Union, Israel and Zionism were seen through the moral language of the time: imperialism, racism, colonialism, and even Nazism. Just as now, the Soviet Union could condemn antisemitism while maintaining a distinction between Jews and Zionists.

This campaign extended into international institutions including the United Nations. The language may have shifted but the moral cover for Jew hatred remained.

Over the past few years, my colleagues and I have asked Jewish social workers if they would recommend social work as a profession to a young Jewish person today. Most reply with an emphatic “no.”

This response must be seen as a profound indictment of a profession committed to diversity, inclusion, and human dignity.

The shofar calls us to wake up and notice what has been and what can and should change. For Jewish social workers, I see this as our call to action. We need to work together, create our own organizations, networks, scholarship, and movements.

At the same time, we should not give up our place in the institutions and professions we helped develop.

It is in keeping with our history to keep fighting for what is true and ethical, not only for ourselves, but because the integrity of the profession matters to everyone it serves.