Nehami Baum

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Bar Ilan University

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a worldwide social problem. The current study explores underlining mechanisms of phenomenon by tying together intergenerational transmission theory, socialization theory, and trauma theory. It learns from men how the father figure shaped by their childhood experiences has contributed to their violence, how the fat...

Purpose: This paper explores the impact of stillbirth among men in Israeli society, which is marked by strong pronatalist norms. It sought to evaluate the impact of perceived social expectations and interactions with family, friends, and healthcare providers on the experience of problematic levels of grief among men experiencing stillbirth. Metho...

The most common surgical treatment for male breast cancer (MBC) is mastectomy. As breast reconstruction surgery is uncommon, men are thus left without a nipple and areola, with a surgical scar and chest asymmetry. MBC is an understudied field, with little known about how men experience their postsurgical bodies. The present study qualitatively expl...

לכולנו ברור שלמותו ואובדנו של אדם מתלווה כאב, אבל מה קורה כשחוויית האובדן אינה נובעת ממוות? האם גם אז נהירה לנו נוכחותם של הכאב, הצער והעצב? האם גם במצבים אלה ברור לנו שחשוב להיות נוכחים, לתת הכרה לחוויית האובדן ולרגשות המתלווים אליה? חוויות אובדן נובעות מאירועים שאינם צפויים, אך הן מתלוות גם למעברים צפויים, נורמטיביים, ואף משמחים. אך מכיוון שחוויו...

Background and objective Male breast cancer is a rare and understudied disease. In addition to coping with cancer, suffering from what is perceived as a “woman's disease” significantly burdens men's illness experience and can lead to stigmatization. The way men cope with these challenges has not been studied to date. Drawing on stigma, coping, and...

The purpose of this study is to enhance knowledge about the involvement of social workers in policy practice at social service departments in Israel from the perspective of department directors, as well as to identify the driving and restraining forces for involvement in policy practice. The research is based on a qualitative method. Semi-structure...

The aim of the present study, based on in-depth semistructured interviews conducted in Israel with 18 social workers (nine women and nine men), working as probation officers who diagnose and treat sex offenders, was twofold: The first goal was to examine how treating sex offenders affects the male and female practitioners’ daily lives and specifica...

Although there is a great deal of literature about the distress of therapists who work with sex offenders, little is known about possible gender differences in their distress. The article presents a systematic review and small-scale meta-analysis that address two questions: whether one gender is more susceptible than the other to the adverse effect...

This study examines the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of first- and second-generation Ethiopian immigrant mothers in Israel. This subject is important in and of itself and also because it serves as an example of what happens to immigrant mothers from traditional, collectivist societies in modern, individualistic ones. Face-to-face interviews...

This study explores social workers’ perceptions of inequalities in Israel’s national health care system. Unlike previous studies, which relied on patients’ and practitioners’ reports, it is based on interviews with 60 social workers in hospitals and ambulatory clinics. The findings show that although Israeli law provides for (almost) free, universa...

When researchers started to explore the cultural context of marriage, studies about how religious beliefs act within the marriage context have emerged. Most studies focused on Christian population, exploring how religiosity shape the nature of the marital relationship. The present study, however, examined the religious dynamics in one’s religious i...

Although the importance of including fathers in child welfare services has been increasingly recognized, social workers' engagement with fathers is still limited and sometimes fraught with negative bias. This paper attempts to lay some needed foundation to meet the challenge of working with fathers. It presents in succinct form the existing knowled...

This critical review shows that, despite increasing attention to fathers in social work practice and research, men are still largely the ‘unheard gender’. Almost all the social work literature that deals with men discusses them as fathers, namely in terms of their function in the family. Very little of it looks at men in other roles or situations o...

The issue of gender is largely ignored in studies of secondary traumatization (STS). This article addresses the question of gender differences in susceptibility to STS among clinicians who treat traumatized clients. It does so by systematically reviewing the very limited body of published findings on this subject to date. These are 10 published stu...

The paper presents an empirical examination of the role social workers play in tempering inequality in medical care. Data were collected in 2011 through face-to-face, semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 60 social workers employed in hospitals and clinics in Israel and selected through purposive sampling. The interviews probed the social worke...

Fifty Israeli social workers at three hierarchical levels (direct service providers, agency or regional managers, policy makers) were interviewed about their experience of work–family conflict during wartime when the communities where they lived and most of them worked came under attack. The findings provide evidence of intensified work–family conf...

Although secondary traumatization has been extensively studied, gender difference in susceptibility has received limited attention. This study addressed the issue by a meta-analysis of published findings on male and female persons in close, extended relationships with trauma victims, namely, their spouses, parents, children, and therapists. The ana...

This paper examines the challenges faced by female Ultra-Orthodox students in a social work program designed for the Ultra-Orthodox community in Israel. Findings were obtained from four focus groups with a total of 32 students. The participants reported being exposed to contents that were inconsistent with the perspectives of their community, field...

The study reported in this article concerns the beginnings of higher education for women in the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) enclave in Israel. Haredi Jews are a self-secluded fundamentalist group committed to particularly strict interpretation of Jewish religious law. In recent years, they have been compelled by poverty and other factors to allow acade...

In modern societies, mate selection process has received extensive attention in the theoretical and research literature. Researchers were primarily concentrated in identifying the parameters that motivate and influence the choice of partner, as similarity, mutual benefits, and emotional aspects. Little attention, however, was given to the social an...

This study explores the contribution of others in the workplace to the self-identity and job integration of persons with severe mental health problems. Thematic content analysis of in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in 2009 with 15 Israelis with severe mental health problems who work in a variety of frameworks (protected and supported e...

Professionals working in shared traumatic realities—that is, in disasters in their home communities—are doubly exposed: as individuals and as professionals. This study examines the impact of the double exposure of sixty-three Israeli social workers who lived and worked in communities exposed to missile attacks during the Gaza War on their subsequen...

This paper addresses the question of gendered receptivity to Secondary Traumatic Syndrome (STS) in the family. Unlike other manifestations of distress in the family, where gender comparisons are a matter of course, very few such comparisons are made in studies of STS. Review of the findings of 12 studies, the only studies, to date, that provide dat...

The study, based on in-depth interviews with 15 fathers in Israel, reports on fathers' emotional reactions to the court-ordered removal of their children from home. The findings show that all the fathers experienced the removal as a traumatic event, which utterly devalued them and annihilated their paternal identity. Although they suffered intense...

This qualitative study explores the feelings, thoughts, and perceptions of Jewish Israeli social work field supervisors regarding Arab Israeli social work trainees, against the background of the ongoing violent political conflict in the region. Two key findings emerge from analysis of the supervisors' comments. One is of the supervisors' sympatheti...

The first experience of sex is a significant life event for men and women. Studies investigating first-time sex focus largely on relationships at a young age and among teenagers, whereas studies of that experience in the context of marriage are extremely sparse and focus mainly on clinical population of unconsummated marriage. The authors explore t...

In this study I explored the perceptions and responses of Jewish Israeli social workers to the health inequalities facing their Arab clients. Findings drawn from face-to-face, in-depth interviews with 26 Jewish Israeli social workers employed in the health field show that they were highly aware of the health inequalities. Although they uniformly in...

This article considers some of the impacts of armed political conflicts on field supervision where supervisor and student are affiliated with different sides, as exemplified by the Jewish supervisor/Arab student dyad in social work training in Israel. This conflict, it suggests, impedes the development of a trusting supervisory bond, makes it diffi...

Many professionals working in the wake of communal disasters are doubly exposed to the disaster, both as professionals and as members of the stricken community. Yet most studies of widely reported distress of these professionals examine manifestations like compassion fatigue, secondary traumatization, and vicarious traumatization, which do not take...

This article addresses courtship and mate selection patterns of young adults who belong to two parallel cultures: traditional and modern. In-depth interviews with 36 Modern-Orthodox Jewish men and women during their first year of marriage reveal unique considerations for mate selection and the dynamic flow between cultural systems. The findings sho...

This paper describes and illustrates a reflective writing assignment given by a classroom instructor to provide social work student trainees with the opportunity to work through unfinished business left over from unresolved poor supervisory relationships. It is a structured assignment, which integrates reading, emotional expression, and cognitive a...

In this article we present the findings of a qualitative examination of 30 mothers of very-low-birth-weight babies. Interviews conducted with the mothers when the babies were still in neonatal hospitalization show that virtually all the mothers described their delivery both as a traumatic event, and as a nonevent in which they felt that they barely...

This article presents a qualitative examination of the supervisory relationship among a field supervisor and multiple students. It examines the perceptions of 75 students regarding differences in their field supervisors treatment of and relationship with them and their cosupervisees, and the association between their perceptions and their relations...

Most of our knowledge about the consequences of professionals double exposure-as professionals and as individuals-to disasters in the communities in which they live and work comes from studies following a single terror attack or a one-time natural disaster. This paper reports the findings of a qualitative, interview-based study of the experiences o...

The therapeutic dyad of clinician and client affiliated with rival groups in a violent conflict shares many features that complicate psychotherapy with persons of different ethnic, racial, and cultural groups, including lack of knowledge, negative stereotyping, differences in fundamental values and world views, and power differentials. Although a g...

This qualitative study examines the feelings and concerns of 80 social work students at the ending of their fieldwork supervision. The findings show that students who described good relationships reported mixed or ambivalent feelings about the ending, deriving from their warm feelings of attachment, on the one hand, and from their drive to grow and...

This article presents findings from a qualitative study of the experience of aging among elderly gay men in Israel. It focuses on their inter-personal relationships and the way they are experienced and perceived by them. In-depth interviews were held with ten homosexual men aged 72-80, some of whom had never revealed their homosexuality and were no...

In Israel, the government partially supports personal home care services (grooming, feeding, assistance with transfers) as a means to maintain frail individuals in their home environment for as long as possible. Social workers capture a prominent position in these arrangements as initiators and supervisors of personal home care services. This study...

Since most social work student trainees are women of child bearing age, every year at least some of them become pregnant in the course of their fieldwork. This study investigates the dual transitions of becoming a mother while becoming a professional among 10 married social work student trainees whose fieldwork training coincided with their first p...

Shared traumatic reality refers to those situations in which social workers help survivors cope with the very traumas that they themselves have been threatened by and/or exposed to, given the reality that they live and work in the same community as their clients. This paper is an initial attempt to present the knowledge gathered to date about provi...

This paper discusses the feelings and experiences of Israeli-Arab social workers following terror attacks during the Second Intifada, against the background of two contrasting perspectives: Terror Management Theory and the Contact Hypothesis. The findings, based on in-depth interviews with 25 professionals, show pervasive tension and anxiety follow...

This qualitative study identifies similarities in relationships between co-supervisees sharing the same fieldwork supervisor and that of siblings in the same family. Social work students’ written replies reveal a range of functions served by the co-supervisee, similar to some of the functions served by siblings, as well as a mixture of positive and...

The phenomenon variously termed “shared reality,” “shared trauma,” or “shared traumatic reality” refers to situations in which helper and helpee, psychotherapist and client, are exposed to the same communal disaster. This article has two aims. One, pursued in the first part of the article, is to trace the development of the concept; analyze the con...

This paper compares the degree and nature of anxiety experienced by American and Israeli social work students as they anticipate beginning field placement. Despite having greater prior exposure to social work through relevant coursework and experience, American students were significantly more anxious than Israeli ones. Overall, Americans reported...

This study attempts to examine implications of political conflicts in social work with clients from the rival group. Using an anonymous, open-ended questionnaire, this study examines responses of 78 Jewish Israeli social work students to the hypothetical prospect of treating an Israeli Arab client. The vast majority expected cultural and political...

• Summary: This article examines professional growth among Jewish and Arab social workers in Israel in the wake of the Second Intifada. The paper is based on a further in-depth analysis of data from semi-structured face to face and telephone interviews with 58 social workers. • Findings: The findings show professional growth, in the form of increas...

Israel's evacuation of settlers from their homes in Gaza and North Samaria provided a real time opportunity to examine social workers' attitudes towards offering their services in controversial political situations. This study, conducted shortly before the evacuation, is a qualitative examination of the attitudes of 108 Israeli social workers towar...

Introduction The vital need for helping professionals in situations of communal disasters is widely recognized in the literature. In these situations professionals who live in the stricken community find themselves in a "shared traumatic reality," in which they are exposed to the catastrophe both as professionals and as members of the community. St...

The paper, based on interviews, follows something of the process by which a group of Palestinian social workers came to ‘stand tall’ as Palestinian citizens of Israel. The process began with their acute discomfort both with blending into Jewish Israeli society and with being singled out for exclusion or harsh treatment as Palestinians. These feelin...

This study uses postings by divorced fathers to an unmoderated Internet chat room to sound and analyze their voices. The findings show that the posters expressed an acute sense of powerlessness with respect to their status as non-residential fathers, the imposition of child support, the mothers of their children, the family courts, and lawyers and...

This study examines supervisors' reactions to their pregnant supervisees. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with social work supervisees who were pregnant for the first time during fieldwork training. The interviewees were either in the ninth month (N = 5) or 2 to12 months after delivery (N = 5). Content analysis revealed three themes regar...

This chapter will discuss three inter-related psychological processes that affect the paternal functioning of non-custodial divorced fathers and illustrate their operation in three examples: of a disengaged father, a father in perpetual conflict with his ex-wife, and a father who continues to meet his children's needs. The processes are: mourning t...

In an effort to examine the impact of violent political conflict on clinicians, the study compared the feelings and thoughts evoked in 78 Jewish Israeli social work trainees at the prospect of treating an Arab Israeli client1 and a Jewish Ultra-Orthodox client. Both clients represented groups that are very different culturally from most Jewish Isra...

The study investigates predictors of emotional responses to treatment termination in a sample of 48 professional social workers and 92 student social workers in Israel. The findings show that the respondents found treatment termination to be moderately difficult, and client initiated terminations to be especially difficult and to bring in its wake...

This paper explores the “separation guilt” of women who initiate divorce. The paper argues that the gender-specific processes of separation individuation and socialization that women undergo in childhood make them vulnerable to similar guilt feelings when they initiate divorce, only towards the husband they are leaving. It further argues that these...

This paper looks at the divorce process from the perspective of Kleinan theory. It argues that during the early stages of divorce, most persons are in Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position, characterized by splitting and persecutory anxiety, and that they move on to the depressive position, characterized by sadness and longing, only later. The movemen...

This study examined guilt feelings among social work students who were pregnant for the first time during field work training. Semi-structured interviews were conducted either in the 9th month (n=5) or 2—12 months after delivery (n=5). Content analysis revealed 6 main triggers, illustrated by excerpts, which stimulated field students' guilt feeling...

The aim of this study is to direct attention to the impact of political conflict on social work. To this end, the responses of a group of Jewish Israeli social workers to a knotty labor relations dilemma between a Jewish Israeli mental health facility director and a paraprofessional Palestinian employee were analyzed. This report presents a picture...

This study deals with the neglected subject of the feelings and concerns of field supervisors at the termination of the supervisory relationship. Analysis of the written responses of 55 field supervisors to three open ended questions reveals a mixture of co-existent feelings: satisfaction, fulfillment and pride, along with relief, sadness, and/or f...

This paper tries to raise awareness of the distortions that violent political conflict may introduce into social work practice with members of the rival community, and proposes training guidelines for social workers to help reduce those distortions. The understanding of the impact of political conflict on practice is based on the Israeli–Palestinia...

In this article, I suggest that postdivorce paternal disengagement may be rooted in the father's tendency to link his children and ex-wife as a single entity in consequence of his failure to adequately mourn the loss of his ex-wife and to redefine his paternal role and identity in distinction from his spousal role and identity. I also suggest that...

This study compares the responses of field supervisors to the termination of their relationships with student interns with the responses of student interns to the termination of their relationships with clients. The findings do not support the view that the terminations of the supervisor-student relationship and the student-client relationship are...

This qualitative study of the feelings and concerns of social work student trainees regarding their end-of-year treatment termination paint a picture of great personal distress. As the students see it, the premature termination prevented them from reaching their treatment goals, did not suit the needs of the clients, and raised serious ethical ques...

This study, conducted on a heterogeneous sample of 70 divorced custodial mothers in Israel, explores changes in the self-concept of divorced women. Findings showed that most of the study participants saw themselves as having changed, and improved, in the surveyed aspects of self-concept. Comparing their present situation to that before their divorc...

A theoretical model explaining co-parental relationship and parental functioning after divorce by means of two personality traits: narcissism and self-differentiation was proposed and empirically tested on 100 divorced Israeli parents (50 former couples). A LISREL analysis of the data (separate for men and women) led to some modification in the mod...

This study investigates the associations between clients’ emotional and behavioral responses to treatment termination and eight sets of indepentent variables, covering the source of termination (client, therapist, external source); the termination process (speed, centrality, control, choice, and desire), and the perceived outcome (failure, goal ach...

This study examines the responses of social work students to the wave of terror of the Second Intifada, focusing on issues of professional identity raised by the terror. The study, based on statements of students who lost meaningful persons in the terror and on class discussions, identifies four key issues involving the formation of the students' p...

The paper presents a typology of co-parental relationships of divorced couples, based on an empirical examination of the quality of the co-parental relationship, the parental functioning of each parent, and the parents' means of conflict resolution (compromise, attack) in a sample of 50 divorced couples. Similar to previous typologies, three types...

This article is based on the view that the nature of the divorced father's involvement with his children is affected by psychological processes that enable him to separate his parental from his spousal role and identity. It argues that the ability to cope with the simultaneous absence of the spousal role and identity and presence of the paternal ro...

The end-of-year treatment terminations of social work student trainees are usually discussed as forced terminations, similar to those of professional therapists. This paper discusses them from the perspective of Ebaugh's (1988) role exit theory, which defines role exit as the departure from any role that is central to one's self-identity. This pape...

The paper argues that (1) full recognition of men's losses in divorce is an essential prerequisite to offering divorced men the emotional help they may need and (2) that since men mourn the losses of divorce differently from women, counselors should take their unique way of mourning into consideration in their treatment of divorced men. The article...

This study examines the relationship between divorced parents' modes of conflict management and two personality traits: self-differentiation, as defined by Bowen (1990), and narcissistic personality traits, using as its sample 100 Israeli divorcees, consisting of fifty ex-couples, with children. The findings show that the divorced parents' modes of...

Based on the literature on divorce, this paper explores the distinct ways in which men mourn the losses inherent in the breakup of a marriage. It argues that men have a distinct way of mourning that differs from that of women. They start the mourning process later than women, mourn the loss of their home and children more than the loss of their wiv...

This study examines the association between two sets of divorce process variables, a) initiation of and responsibility for the divorce and b) difficulty and duration of the legal procedure, and divorced spouses' co-parental relationship and parental functioning. In a random sample of 50 former couples, in Israel, findings showed that the longer and...

This study is an attempt to explain the changes in the self-identities of divorced women by means of their socio-economic backgrounds, three life-stage variables and two variables pertaining to relationships with former and present partners. The sample included 70 custodial Israeli mothers who have been divorced at least two years.