With a handful of words, Tania eloquently summarises the shortcomings of social services departments in the current neoliberal era in Israel and other welfare states, when poverty is not recognised as a material predicament or an emotional and relational experience. The transition made by social work since the turn of the millennium from social care to care management has reframed the interactions of social workers with service users. These interactions are now based on information gathering, risk management and surveillance in a shift away from both the ethical foundation of the profession and relationship-based interactions (Jones, 2001; Schram and Silverman, 2012; Cummins, 2018; Ferguson, 2008, 2017a, 2017b). Given this 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 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.

This book offers hope for those who want to see social work as a profession that is rooted in critical thinking and fighting for social justice. It does so by presenting the Poverty-Aware Social Work Paradigm (PAP) – a paradigmatic way of thinking about social work with people in poverty that has been developed through 30 years of my involvement in research, teaching and activism, and implemented in Israel on a nationwide scale over the last five years. The uniqueness of the paradigm lies in the connections that it makes between poverty as a material predicament and poverty as an emotional and relational experience, as well as in its integration of the ways in which social work sees (its ontology), knows (its epistemology) and commits itself (its axiology) to people in poverty. Enriching these connections and making them part of actual practice is a theme that runs through the book.