Julia Watts Belser

WSRP Research Associate 2011–12
Colorado Scholar

Home institution

University of California, Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union

Research project

Fashioning Catastrophe: Talmudic Disaster Narratives and Feminist Environmental Ethics

This project examines discourses of gender, class, and vulnerability in disaster narratives from the Babylonian Talmud, analyzing how the rabbis use women's wealth and desperate hunger to voice complex questions about divine justice, innocent suffering, and the meaning of catastrophe. Bringing rabbinic narratives into dialogue with feminist environmental ethics, the project grapples with questions of power and privilege in contemporary rhetoric surrounding natural disaster and climate change.

WSRP lecture

Feasting, Fasting, and Famine: Talmudic Disaster Tales and Feminist Food Ethics

Course

HDS 1847: Jewish Feminist Ethics (Fall 2011)