Julia Watts Belser is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies in the Theology Department at Georgetown University. As an ordained rabbi and long-time disability activist, she is passionate about bringing disability arts and activism into conversation with queer Jewish culture—and creating spaces for queer and crip communities to claim and celebrate their own sense of the sacred.
Belser is a scholar of rabbinic literature and Jewish late antiquity, as well as contemporary feminist ethics, with expertise in disability studies, queer theory, and environmental justice. She is the author of two scholarly books: Power, Ethics, and Ecology in Jewish Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2018). She has held research fellowships at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Women’s Studies and Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School.
An ardent supporter of disability and gender justice, Belser co-authored A Health Handbook for Women with Disabilities (Hesperian Foundation, 2007), a grassroots public health book developed in collaboration with disabled women from 40 countries, which has been translated into more than ten languages. She lectures widely on disability in Jewish communities, and wrote a commissioned guide to Jewish Values and Disability Rights (Jewish Funders Network, 2016). Her essays and poetry can be found in Tikkun, Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, Midstream and Fireweed: A Feminist Quarterly.
