Julia Watts Belser: 3 books

In Rabbinic Tales of Destruction, Julia Watts Belser examines early Jewish accounts of the Roman conquest of Judea. Faced with stories of sexual violence, enslavement, forced prostitution, disability, and bodily risk, Belser argues, our readings of rabbinic narrative must wrestle with the brutal body...

Rabbinic tales of drought, disaster, and charismatic holy men illuminate critical questions about power, ethics, and ecology in Jewish late antiquity. Through a sustained reading of the Babylonian Talmud's tractate on fasts in response to drought, this book shows how Bavli Taʿanit challenges Deuteronomy's...

This book borrows from the intellectual labor of queer theory in order to unsettle—or “queer”—the discourses of “religion” and “science,” and, by extension, the “science and religion discourse.” Drawing intellectual and social cues from works by influential theorists such as Michel...