Introduction

No so long ago, I would meet Jewish Studies scholars working on feminist projects face to face in such settings as the Association for Jewish Studies annual conference, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton and the Oxford Seminars in Advanced Jewish Studies. We shared ideas not just on panels where papers were formally presented, but in hallway conversations, over rushed meals and on stolen walks. Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic shifting our lives to Zoom, I replay those treasured encounters, the formal and informal ones, especially those that jump-started precious "long-distance" relationships that merged personal and intellectual selves, with colleagues, junior and senior, from all over the world.

In the past few years, I was particularly interested to hear many colleagues—often ones I had just met—describing ethnographic or autoethnographic projects that considered matters of Jewish women's lives and gender from decidedly feminist perspectives. I could see lines of connection between their projects across diverse fields, including anthropology, sociology, folklore, religious studies and other related disciplines. The gracious invitation extended to me to serve as Consulting Editor of this issue of Nashim offered an opportunity to gather exemplars of the new work I had been hearing about, and to ask the authors to specify how they understood the impact of "feminist sensibilities" (a term I take from Michal Kravel-Tovi's article herein) in their choices of topics, research methodologies, modes of interacting with informants, or genres of writing.

As you will see, the authors whose work is collected in this issue (which is by no means intended as a representative sampling of the much larger variety of work being done in the field) describe methodologies that are particular to their disciplinary or interdisciplinary training, their topics and their frames of reference. No one single style or even definition of "new Jewish feminist ethnography" emerges, but there are indeed significant overlaps in their work, all of which, by the way, eschew gender essentialism, especially in comparison with much second-wave Jewish feminist scholarship. I do draw your attention to one robust connector: the presence of pressing feminist agendas, expressed in attention, for example, to intersectionality in women's lives, systemic inequalities of power, and the movement from marginalization to empowerment.

In-person fieldwork, long a hallmark of ethnographic research technique, characterizes four of the articles. In "The 'Vulnerable Hero' and His Wife: PTSD and Shifting Dynamics of Gender and Care in Contemporary Israel," Keren Friedman-Peleg chronicles her research as a participant-observer in a support group for Jewish-Israeli women whose husbands had been diagnosed with security-related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Friedman-Peleg discovers that the women's therapists, there in principle to help them, unwittingly turn out to be agents of the state, by enforcing the national expectation that women must care for their husbands who have suffered security-related traumas. But Friedman-Peled discovers a twist—the women use the psychological tools they have learned in the group sessions to analyze their own emotions, to resist gendered national and cultural expectations of caregiving, and even to consider leaving stressed marriages. Complicating her analysis further, Friedman-Peleg examines the taken-for-granted gendered moral/ethical implications of caregiving for victims of trauma. Further still: She brings our attention to political ramifications. As she writes: "The biomedical label of PTSD has been utilized not only as an ideological means to emphasize Jewish-Israeli suffering, while portraying the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories as perpetrators of terror, but also as a tool to valorize sufferers of mental injuries as a result of their active participation in the conflict."

Amy K. Milligan draws upon feminist folkloristics in "Creating Jewish Mothers: A Feminist Ethnographic Investigation of the Mothers Circle of Coastal Virginia and the Interfaith Parents Circle." Milligan observed the mutual support generated in peer-facilitated educational groups of non-Jews and Jews-by-choice raising Jewish children in a community in the American South. By focusing her gaze and empathetic listening upon mothers who are transmitting "Jewish identity in ways that...