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Julia Watts Belser

Georgetown University, Theology, Faculty Member

Harvard University, Women's Studies in Religion Program, Harvard Divinity School, Visiting Faculty & Research Associate

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Julia Watts Belser is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University, as well as affiliated faculty in the Program for Jewish Civilization. Her work centers on rabbinic literature and Jewish ethics, with particular research interests in Jewish feminism, queer culture, environmental thought, and disability studies.

She previously taught in the Department of Religious Studies at Missouri State University and held a residential fellowship in Women’s Studies in Religion at Harvard Divinity School during 2011-2012. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union and was ordained as a rabbi by the Academy for Jewish Religion, California. She has also taught at the Graduate Theological Union, the University of California, Davis, the Leaven Center for Spirituality and Social Change, and the Masorti Lehrhaus in Berlin, Germany.

Active in the American Academy of Religion, she co-chairs the program unit on Religion and Disability Studies and serves on the steering committee of Religion and Ecology. She chairs the Committee on the Status of People with Disabilities and is a member of the Committee on Theological Education. She also serves on the board of the Society for Jewish Ethics and is a board member of Nehirim, a national community of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender Jews, partners, and allies.

In addition to her academic publications, she has co-authored A Health Handbook for Women with Disabilities, published by the Hesperian Foundation and distributed to grassroots groups and health workers around the world. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Midstream: A Journal of Jewish Thought, Kalliope: A Journal of Women’s Art and Literature, and Fireweed: A Feminist Quarterly.

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Books by Julia Watts Belser

Rabbinic Tales of Destruction Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem - Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Power, Ethics, and Ecology in Jewish Late Antiquity: Rabbinic Responses to Drought and Disaster - Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

This book offers a sustained reading of Bavli Taanit, a tractate of the Babylonian Talmud that fo... more This book offers a sustained reading of Bavli Taanit, a tractate of the Babylonian Talmud that focuses on fasting in response to drought. Belser argues that Bavli Taanit’s narratives work to complicate Deuteronomy’s claim that virtue can assure abundance and that misfortune is an unambiguous sign of divine rebuke. In Bavli Taanit, drought and other communal crises become a canvass for probing the possibilities and perils of rabbinic power and charisma. Its discourse is strikingly self-critical. Bavli Taanit’s tales frequently castigate rabbis for misuse of power, exposing the limits of their perception and critiquing prevailing obsessions with social status. These narratives afford the rabbis a vibrant space through which to grapple with complex theological dilemmas—and to forge a self-critical ethical discourse that allows them to articulate sharp questions about their own piety and cherished principles.

The book examines how Bavli Taanit uses a narrative form Belser calls “aggadic dialectic” to engage in theological and ethical reflection. While individual rabbinic tales often express a straightforward moral claim, these theological and ethical assertions become contested over the course of lengthy narrative passages. By manipulating recurring motifs and symbols, the redactors of Bavli Taanit develop a form of talmudic theology that punctures facile conclusions and articulates a complex, unsettled form of moral reasoning. Aggadic dialectic allows Bavli Taanit’s redactors to articulate a sharply self-critical stance toward rabbinic culture. Rather than celebrate rabbinic prowess and laud its own culture heroes, Bavli Taanit is more likely to critique its own sages and mock rabbinic tendencies toward self-aggrandizement.

Review of Power Ethics and Ecology in Jewish Late Antiquity--AJS Review by Jordan Rosenblum

Review of Power, Ethics, and Ecology in Jewish Late Antiquity - by Catherine Hezser, Theologische Literaturzeitung.pdf

Papers by Julia Watts Belser

Judaism and Disability (in Disability and World Religions: An Introduction; edited by Darla Schumm and Michael Stoltzfus. Baylor University Press, 2016)

Rabbinic Trickster Tales: The Sex and Gender Politics of the Bavli's Sinful Sages (in Talmudic Transgressions: Engaging the Work of Daniel Boyarin, ed. Moulie Vidas et al, Brill, Forthcoming)

Vital Wheels: Disability, Relationality, and the Queer Animacy of Vibrant Things (Hypatia Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2016)

This article probes the philosophical and political significance of the relationships between whe... more This article probes the philosophical and political significance of the relationships between wheelchair activists and their wheelchairs. Analyzing disability memoirs and the work of a professional wheelchair dancer, I argue that wheelers frequently experience complex relationality and queer kinships with their wheels. By bringing the artistry of disabled writers and dancers into conversation with the notions of human-material relations in the work of Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, and Mel Chen, I show how alternative animacies shape wheelers' conceptions of interdependence and movement. The sensuous pleasure they take in their wheels queers conventional conceptions of how humans should relate to things. New materialist philosophy has increasingly drawn attention to the porous boundaries between the human and material world. But where posthumanist philosophers have largely aimed to dethrone the sovereignty of the human, disability activists use alternative animacies to raise up a devalued and discounted portion of humanity: to emphasize the agency and capacity of those whose lives are often cast as pitiable and powerless, to express a queer feminist disability culture and politics, and to claim the transgressive vitality and vibrant artistry of life with disability.

Disability, Animality, and Enslavement in Rabbinic Narratives of Bodily Restoration and Resurrection (Journal of Late Antiquity, 2015)

In rabbinic midrash, the resurrected body is often imagined as a site of eschatological healing, ... more In rabbinic midrash, the resurrected body is often imagined as a site of
eschatological healing, where the reversal of disability signals God’s capacity to overcome the seemingly intractable realities of the present. While conventional ideas of disability reversal often figure healing as the curative power to restore an individual body to full function, I argue that rabbinic texts frame healing as an act of social transformation. The article analyzes the Palestinian midrash Genesis Rabbah 95:1, demonstrating that the text parallels the restoration of the disabled body with God’s eschatological healing of the animals, so that predators no longer hunt prey. When read alongside rabbinic narratives that link disability with social violence and enslavement, Genesis Rabbah 95:1 reveals a rabbinic conception of healing as an act of communal liberation. The midrash also voices a frequent rabbinic claim that God will resurrect the dead with their corporeal differences intact so that they can be recognized by their kin, only healing their bodies as a subsequent act. The narrative thus figures disability as a critical marker of individual identity, a constitutive sign of the self that allows for and occasions recognition. While the midrash ultimately asserts that God will erase disability from the resurrected flesh, the rabbinic imagination nonetheless preserves a place for physical and sensory difference in
the afterlife.

Violence, Disability, and the Politics of Healing: The Inaugural Nancy Eiesland Endowment Lecture. (Journal of Disability & Religion, 2015)

Ancient and contemporary communities frequently portray the ideal, utopian society as a place wit... more Ancient and contemporary communities frequently portray the ideal, utopian society as a place without disability. Christian, Jewish, and secular eschatologies are often potent sites of disability erasure, forms of eugenic imagination that envision liberation through the denial of bodily and sensory difference. This lecture examines the complex relationship between violence, disability, and domination-and contests notions of healing that depoliticize disability or devalue the integrity of disabled lives. Bringing sacred texts into conversation with feminist disability studies and the lived experiences of disability justice activists, the lecture offers resources for religious voices seeking to reimagine disability, healing, and liberation.

Brides and Blemishes: Queering Women's Disability in Rabbinic Marriage Law (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2015)

Rabbinic literature situates marital intimacy at the nexus of desire and disablement. While analy... more Rabbinic literature situates marital intimacy at the nexus of desire and disablement. While analysis of disability in Jewish thought has primarily focused on the limits that disability places on men’s capacity to fulfill specific religious obligations, a feminist intersectional analysis of disability discourse in rabbinic marriage law illuminates the deeply gendered
nature of disability. While notions of male disability focus particularly on the occupational stench of low-class work, rabbinic texts conceptualize women’s disability in primarily visual terms. In the sensory anthropology of rabbinic desire, women are led by the nose—while men are drawn by the eye. This article uses Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of the queer
closet to probe the charged, sexual dimensions of knowledge and ignorance at the heart of rabbinic marriage. Rabbinic law aims to protect the husband from the possibility that a blemished bride might pass, while simultaneously guarding against the immodest gaze.

God on Wheels: Disability and Jewish Feminist Theology (Tikkun Magazine)

Tikkun Magazine, 2014

Disability and the Social Politics of "Natural" Disaster: Toward a Jewish Feminist Ethics of Disaster Tales

Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology, 2015

The stories we tell about crisis and catastrophe often intensify structural violence, augmenting ... more The stories we tell about crisis and catastrophe often intensify structural violence, augmenting existing dynamics of racism, sexism, classism, and ableism. Disaster stories often reinforce cultural narratives of suffering womanhood and tragic stories of disability to portray people with disabilities—especially women—as “natural” and “inevitable” victims of a harsh new world. Examining both contemporary rhetoric in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and classical rabbinic Jewish narrative, I argue that tales of communities in crisis commonly depoliticize disaster. By inscribing the disabled body with a narrative of “natural” vulnerabilities and inevitable suffering, conventional disaster discourse obscures the political significance of structural inequalities that render people with disabilities more at risk in disaster. Bringing together disability studies scholarship and Jewish feminist ethics, I challenge the discursive tendency to portray disabled individuals as symbols of suffering—and to focus on the pathos of an individual in distress instead of critiquing social inequality. I advocate a constructive, redemptive storytelling that illuminates and critiques social and political exclusion, that underscores the agency and dignity of people in crisis, that valorizes the disability justice movement’s call for interdependence in community, and that captures the artistry and resiliency of disabled lives.

Religion, Disability, and the Environment: Introduction to Worldviews Special Issue

Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, Ecology, 2015

This issue of Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology brings together scholars working... more This issue of Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology brings together scholars working at an urgent, if as yet under-theorized nexus: the intersection between disability, religion, and the environment. Building on a stimulating panel at the 2012 American Academy of Religion that began a dialogue between the Program Units in Religion and Ecology and Religion and Disability Studies, this issue continues the conversation through three articles and three responses from scholars situated within diverse disciplines. By examining the interconnections between disability studies, feminist theology, religious environmentalism, new materialist thought, queer theory, and environmental ethics, we aim to open critical questions about the site and significance of disability in ecological thought and practice.

Privilege and Disaster: Toward a Jewish Feminist Ethics of Climate Silence and Environmental Unknowing

Sex in the Shadow of Rome: Sexual Violence and Theological Lament in Talmudic Disaster Tales

This article analyzes the representation of rape in three narratives from the Babylonian Talmud's... more This article analyzes the representation of rape in three narratives from the Babylonian Talmud's account of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and discusses the connection between sexual violence, enslavement, and colonial domination. These narratives mimic pervasive Roman symbolism of imperial dominance as a form of "sexual conquest," using that symbolism to express rabbinic lament and violation at the hands of Rome. These stories express elements of rabbinic resistance to imperial domination, emphasizing Jewish resilience even in the midst of intense suffering. Yet the symbolic and theological significance afforded to rape in these narratives also reinscribes the vulnerability and invisibility of women and enslaved people in both rabbinic and Roman cultures. By using rape to conceptualize divine woundedness and rabbinic lament, these narratives privilege the theological significance of Roman violation over the brutal body cost of imperial conquest.

Opulence and Oblivion: Talmudic Feasting, Famine, and the Social Politics of Disaster

AJS Review

Food and feasting narratives illuminate the social politics of disaster in the Babylonian Talmud’... more Food and feasting narratives illuminate the social politics of disaster in the Babylonian Talmud’s lengthiest account of the destruction of Jerusalem (Bavli Gittin 55b-58a). Key moments in this sugya center around food: the shame of Bar Kamẓa at a feast sparks his eventual betrayal of the Jews, the tale of Marta bat Boethus recounts the starvation of the wealthiest woman in Jerusalem, and Caesar destroys Tur Malka in retaliation for an opulent banquet. This article contextualizes these rabbinic narratives within the social politics of Roman and Sasanian banquet culture, while also parsing the intersections of gender, class, and social status in these disaster tales. Through its critical representation of high class oblivion, the sugya calls attention to the ethical cost of elite status by highlighting the physical and moral dangers of social privilege. Its stories of luxurious eating emphasize how corrosive concerns about status and shame often lead elites to protect their private interests by sacrificing the well-being of the broader community. Its feasting narratives assert that wealth, luxury, and social privilege distance elites from the awareness of suffering in their midst.

Reading Talmudic Bodies: Disability, Narrative, and the Gaze in Rabbinic Judaism

The Ethics of Representing Disaster: Rabbinic and Contemporary Depictions of Women in Narratives of Catastrophe

Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Winter/Spring 2013

Faced with the brutality of natural disaster or the suffering of war, witnesses agonize over ques... more Faced with the brutality of natural disaster or the suffering of war, witnesses agonize over questions of how to tell an unspeakable story. What narrative of catastrophe will capture the realities of lives in extremis? When famine unfolds, what image might stir the hearts of an audience who may never have gone to bed hungry? Representations of disaster often center attention on women and women's bodies, leading us to understand catastrophe through the lens of the tragic feminine. These disaster tales are not ethically neutral. The stories we tell about disaster have a powerful effect on the way we respond to crisis. They shape the political and theological meanings we ascribe to catastrophe, as well as the way we think about the people caught up in difficult circumstances. Tragic tales of suffering often intensify the vulnerability of people who are already on the margins, showcasing their pain in a way that generates pity, stripping their agency and playing into negative stereotypes of difference. Stories of disaster can do collateral damage.

"What No Longer Serves Us: Resisting Ableism and Anti-Judaism in New Testament Healing Narratives"

When feminists preach on the Gospel healing narratives, they often encounter a double bind. Effor... more When feminists preach on the Gospel healing narratives, they often encounter a double bind. Efforts to resist the oppression of people with disabilities by deemphasizing literal acts of healing tend to highlight Jesus's structural critique against unjust institutions, often represented in the Gospels by the Jewish leaders. Yet that message of structural critique and social transformation can easily lead to anti-Jewish readings of the Gospel narratives. The authors model a method of interrogating a previously published sermon, alongside the practice of situating people with disabilities at "the speaking center" of Gospel narratives and exegesis. The article concludes with five homeletic tools that Christian feminist preachers might employ to better undermine both ableism and anti-Judaism

Crying Out for Rain: The Human, the Holy, and the Earth in the Ritual Fasts of Rabbinic Literature

I trace the religious significance of rain in Tractate Taanit, a 6th century volume of the Babylo... more I trace the religious significance of rain in Tractate Taanit, a 6th century volume of the Babylonian Talmud that addresses fasts in response to drought among rabbinic Jewish communities in late antiquity. Tractate Taanit incorporates rain symbolism into key rabbinic conceptions of Torah, revelation, and divine compassion. As the tractate crafts rain into a symbol that expresses God’s presence and relationship with Israel, it also articulates drought as the essential expression of divine absence. Within the tractate, fasting serves as the quintessential collective response to the physical and spiritual crisis of drought. Fasting practice in Tractate Taʿanit fashions the vulnerable collective body into an instrument particularly suited to cry out for divine answer. By invoking and intensifying the experience of suffering caused by drought, the community uses its communal body to align itself with both a suffering God and a suffering earth, each of which yearn for reconciliation.

Rabbinic Tales of Destruction Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem - Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Power, Ethics, and Ecology in Jewish Late Antiquity: Rabbinic Responses to Drought and Disaster - Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

This book offers a sustained reading of Bavli Taanit, a tractate of the Babylonian Talmud that fo... more This book offers a sustained reading of Bavli Taanit, a tractate of the Babylonian Talmud that focuses on fasting in response to drought. Belser argues that Bavli Taanit’s narratives work to complicate Deuteronomy’s claim that virtue can assure abundance and that misfortune is an unambiguous sign of divine rebuke. In Bavli Taanit, drought and other communal crises become a canvass for probing the possibilities and perils of rabbinic power and charisma. Its discourse is strikingly self-critical. Bavli Taanit’s tales frequently castigate rabbis for misuse of power, exposing the limits of their perception and critiquing prevailing obsessions with social status. These narratives afford the rabbis a vibrant space through which to grapple with complex theological dilemmas—and to forge a self-critical ethical discourse that allows them to articulate sharp questions about their own piety and cherished principles.

The book examines how Bavli Taanit uses a narrative form Belser calls “aggadic dialectic” to engage in theological and ethical reflection. While individual rabbinic tales often express a straightforward moral claim, these theological and ethical assertions become contested over the course of lengthy narrative passages. By manipulating recurring motifs and symbols, the redactors of Bavli Taanit develop a form of talmudic theology that punctures facile conclusions and articulates a complex, unsettled form of moral reasoning. Aggadic dialectic allows Bavli Taanit’s redactors to articulate a sharply self-critical stance toward rabbinic culture. Rather than celebrate rabbinic prowess and laud its own culture heroes, Bavli Taanit is more likely to critique its own sages and mock rabbinic tendencies toward self-aggrandizement.

Review of Power Ethics and Ecology in Jewish Late Antiquity--AJS Review by Jordan Rosenblum

Review of Power, Ethics, and Ecology in Jewish Late Antiquity - by Catherine Hezser, Theologische Literaturzeitung.pdf

Judaism and Disability (in Disability and World Religions: An Introduction; edited by Darla Schumm and Michael Stoltzfus. Baylor University Press, 2016)

Rabbinic Trickster Tales: The Sex and Gender Politics of the Bavli's Sinful Sages (in Talmudic Transgressions: Engaging the Work of Daniel Boyarin, ed. Moulie Vidas et al, Brill, Forthcoming)

Vital Wheels: Disability, Relationality, and the Queer Animacy of Vibrant Things (Hypatia Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2016)

This article probes the philosophical and political significance of the relationships between whe... more This article probes the philosophical and political significance of the relationships between wheelchair activists and their wheelchairs. Analyzing disability memoirs and the work of a professional wheelchair dancer, I argue that wheelers frequently experience complex relationality and queer kinships with their wheels. By bringing the artistry of disabled writers and dancers into conversation with the notions of human-material relations in the work of Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, and Mel Chen, I show how alternative animacies shape wheelers' conceptions of interdependence and movement. The sensuous pleasure they take in their wheels queers conventional conceptions of how humans should relate to things. New materialist philosophy has increasingly drawn attention to the porous boundaries between the human and material world. But where posthumanist philosophers have largely aimed to dethrone the sovereignty of the human, disability activists use alternative animacies to raise up a devalued and discounted portion of humanity: to emphasize the agency and capacity of those whose lives are often cast as pitiable and powerless, to express a queer feminist disability culture and politics, and to claim the transgressive vitality and vibrant artistry of life with disability.

Disability, Animality, and Enslavement in Rabbinic Narratives of Bodily Restoration and Resurrection (Journal of Late Antiquity, 2015)

In rabbinic midrash, the resurrected body is often imagined as a site of eschatological healing, ... more In rabbinic midrash, the resurrected body is often imagined as a site of
eschatological healing, where the reversal of disability signals God’s capacity to overcome the seemingly intractable realities of the present. While conventional ideas of disability reversal often figure healing as the curative power to restore an individual body to full function, I argue that rabbinic texts frame healing as an act of social transformation. The article analyzes the Palestinian midrash Genesis Rabbah 95:1, demonstrating that the text parallels the restoration of the disabled body with God’s eschatological healing of the animals, so that predators no longer hunt prey. When read alongside rabbinic narratives that link disability with social violence and enslavement, Genesis Rabbah 95:1 reveals a rabbinic conception of healing as an act of communal liberation. The midrash also voices a frequent rabbinic claim that God will resurrect the dead with their corporeal differences intact so that they can be recognized by their kin, only healing their bodies as a subsequent act. The narrative thus figures disability as a critical marker of individual identity, a constitutive sign of the self that allows for and occasions recognition. While the midrash ultimately asserts that God will erase disability from the resurrected flesh, the rabbinic imagination nonetheless preserves a place for physical and sensory difference in
the afterlife.

Violence, Disability, and the Politics of Healing: The Inaugural Nancy Eiesland Endowment Lecture. (Journal of Disability & Religion, 2015)

Ancient and contemporary communities frequently portray the ideal, utopian society as a place wit... more Ancient and contemporary communities frequently portray the ideal, utopian society as a place without disability. Christian, Jewish, and secular eschatologies are often potent sites of disability erasure, forms of eugenic imagination that envision liberation through the denial of bodily and sensory difference. This lecture examines the complex relationship between violence, disability, and domination-and contests notions of healing that depoliticize disability or devalue the integrity of disabled lives. Bringing sacred texts into conversation with feminist disability studies and the lived experiences of disability justice activists, the lecture offers resources for religious voices seeking to reimagine disability, healing, and liberation.

Brides and Blemishes: Queering Women's Disability in Rabbinic Marriage Law (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2015)

Rabbinic literature situates marital intimacy at the nexus of desire and disablement. While analy... more Rabbinic literature situates marital intimacy at the nexus of desire and disablement. While analysis of disability in Jewish thought has primarily focused on the limits that disability places on men’s capacity to fulfill specific religious obligations, a feminist intersectional analysis of disability discourse in rabbinic marriage law illuminates the deeply gendered
nature of disability. While notions of male disability focus particularly on the occupational stench of low-class work, rabbinic texts conceptualize women’s disability in primarily visual terms. In the sensory anthropology of rabbinic desire, women are led by the nose—while men are drawn by the eye. This article uses Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of the queer
closet to probe the charged, sexual dimensions of knowledge and ignorance at the heart of rabbinic marriage. Rabbinic law aims to protect the husband from the possibility that a blemished bride might pass, while simultaneously guarding against the immodest gaze.

God on Wheels: Disability and Jewish Feminist Theology (Tikkun Magazine)

Tikkun Magazine, 2014

Disability and the Social Politics of "Natural" Disaster: Toward a Jewish Feminist Ethics of Disaster Tales

Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology, 2015

The stories we tell about crisis and catastrophe often intensify structural violence, augmenting ... more The stories we tell about crisis and catastrophe often intensify structural violence, augmenting existing dynamics of racism, sexism, classism, and ableism. Disaster stories often reinforce cultural narratives of suffering womanhood and tragic stories of disability to portray people with disabilities—especially women—as “natural” and “inevitable” victims of a harsh new world. Examining both contemporary rhetoric in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and classical rabbinic Jewish narrative, I argue that tales of communities in crisis commonly depoliticize disaster. By inscribing the disabled body with a narrative of “natural” vulnerabilities and inevitable suffering, conventional disaster discourse obscures the political significance of structural inequalities that render people with disabilities more at risk in disaster. Bringing together disability studies scholarship and Jewish feminist ethics, I challenge the discursive tendency to portray disabled individuals as symbols of suffering—and to focus on the pathos of an individual in distress instead of critiquing social inequality. I advocate a constructive, redemptive storytelling that illuminates and critiques social and political exclusion, that underscores the agency and dignity of people in crisis, that valorizes the disability justice movement’s call for interdependence in community, and that captures the artistry and resiliency of disabled lives.

Religion, Disability, and the Environment: Introduction to Worldviews Special Issue

Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, Ecology, 2015

This issue of Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology brings together scholars working... more This issue of Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology brings together scholars working at an urgent, if as yet under-theorized nexus: the intersection between disability, religion, and the environment. Building on a stimulating panel at the 2012 American Academy of Religion that began a dialogue between the Program Units in Religion and Ecology and Religion and Disability Studies, this issue continues the conversation through three articles and three responses from scholars situated within diverse disciplines. By examining the interconnections between disability studies, feminist theology, religious environmentalism, new materialist thought, queer theory, and environmental ethics, we aim to open critical questions about the site and significance of disability in ecological thought and practice.

Privilege and Disaster: Toward a Jewish Feminist Ethics of Climate Silence and Environmental Unknowing

Sex in the Shadow of Rome: Sexual Violence and Theological Lament in Talmudic Disaster Tales

This article analyzes the representation of rape in three narratives from the Babylonian Talmud's... more This article analyzes the representation of rape in three narratives from the Babylonian Talmud's account of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and discusses the connection between sexual violence, enslavement, and colonial domination. These narratives mimic pervasive Roman symbolism of imperial dominance as a form of "sexual conquest," using that symbolism to express rabbinic lament and violation at the hands of Rome. These stories express elements of rabbinic resistance to imperial domination, emphasizing Jewish resilience even in the midst of intense suffering. Yet the symbolic and theological significance afforded to rape in these narratives also reinscribes the vulnerability and invisibility of women and enslaved people in both rabbinic and Roman cultures. By using rape to conceptualize divine woundedness and rabbinic lament, these narratives privilege the theological significance of Roman violation over the brutal body cost of imperial conquest.

Opulence and Oblivion: Talmudic Feasting, Famine, and the Social Politics of Disaster

AJS Review

Food and feasting narratives illuminate the social politics of disaster in the Babylonian Talmud’... more Food and feasting narratives illuminate the social politics of disaster in the Babylonian Talmud’s lengthiest account of the destruction of Jerusalem (Bavli Gittin 55b-58a). Key moments in this sugya center around food: the shame of Bar Kamẓa at a feast sparks his eventual betrayal of the Jews, the tale of Marta bat Boethus recounts the starvation of the wealthiest woman in Jerusalem, and Caesar destroys Tur Malka in retaliation for an opulent banquet. This article contextualizes these rabbinic narratives within the social politics of Roman and Sasanian banquet culture, while also parsing the intersections of gender, class, and social status in these disaster tales. Through its critical representation of high class oblivion, the sugya calls attention to the ethical cost of elite status by highlighting the physical and moral dangers of social privilege. Its stories of luxurious eating emphasize how corrosive concerns about status and shame often lead elites to protect their private interests by sacrificing the well-being of the broader community. Its feasting narratives assert that wealth, luxury, and social privilege distance elites from the awareness of suffering in their midst.

Reading Talmudic Bodies: Disability, Narrative, and the Gaze in Rabbinic Judaism

The Ethics of Representing Disaster: Rabbinic and Contemporary Depictions of Women in Narratives of Catastrophe

Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Winter/Spring 2013

Faced with the brutality of natural disaster or the suffering of war, witnesses agonize over ques... more Faced with the brutality of natural disaster or the suffering of war, witnesses agonize over questions of how to tell an unspeakable story. What narrative of catastrophe will capture the realities of lives in extremis? When famine unfolds, what image might stir the hearts of an audience who may never have gone to bed hungry? Representations of disaster often center attention on women and women's bodies, leading us to understand catastrophe through the lens of the tragic feminine. These disaster tales are not ethically neutral. The stories we tell about disaster have a powerful effect on the way we respond to crisis. They shape the political and theological meanings we ascribe to catastrophe, as well as the way we think about the people caught up in difficult circumstances. Tragic tales of suffering often intensify the vulnerability of people who are already on the margins, showcasing their pain in a way that generates pity, stripping their agency and playing into negative stereotypes of difference. Stories of disaster can do collateral damage.

"What No Longer Serves Us: Resisting Ableism and Anti-Judaism in New Testament Healing Narratives"

When feminists preach on the Gospel healing narratives, they often encounter a double bind. Effor... more When feminists preach on the Gospel healing narratives, they often encounter a double bind. Efforts to resist the oppression of people with disabilities by deemphasizing literal acts of healing tend to highlight Jesus's structural critique against unjust institutions, often represented in the Gospels by the Jewish leaders. Yet that message of structural critique and social transformation can easily lead to anti-Jewish readings of the Gospel narratives. The authors model a method of interrogating a previously published sermon, alongside the practice of situating people with disabilities at "the speaking center" of Gospel narratives and exegesis. The article concludes with five homeletic tools that Christian feminist preachers might employ to better undermine both ableism and anti-Judaism

Crying Out for Rain: The Human, the Holy, and the Earth in the Ritual Fasts of Rabbinic Literature

I trace the religious significance of rain in Tractate Taanit, a 6th century volume of the Babylo... more I trace the religious significance of rain in Tractate Taanit, a 6th century volume of the Babylonian Talmud that addresses fasts in response to drought among rabbinic Jewish communities in late antiquity. Tractate Taanit incorporates rain symbolism into key rabbinic conceptions of Torah, revelation, and divine compassion. As the tractate crafts rain into a symbol that expresses God’s presence and relationship with Israel, it also articulates drought as the essential expression of divine absence. Within the tractate, fasting serves as the quintessential collective response to the physical and spiritual crisis of drought. Fasting practice in Tractate Taʿanit fashions the vulnerable collective body into an instrument particularly suited to cry out for divine answer. By invoking and intensifying the experience of suffering caused by drought, the community uses its communal body to align itself with both a suffering God and a suffering earth, each of which yearn for reconciliation.

AAR Spotlight on Theological Education: Environmental Justice and Interreligious Ecotheology

Religious Studies News

Returning to Flesh: A Jewish Reflection on Feminist Disability Theology - JFSR Roundtable

Book Review: Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic

Book Review: Martin Jaffee, The End of Jewish Radar: Snapshots of a Postethnic American Judaism

Conservative Judaism

Book Review: Gail Labovitz, Marriage and Metaphor: Constructions of Gender in Rabbinic Literature

Conservative Judaism

Book Review: Leonard Greenspoon, ed. "The Mountains Shall Drip Wine: Jews and the Environment"

Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture

Book Review: Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism by Jordan D. Rosenblum (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Book Review: Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities by Mira Beth Wasserman. Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 2018.