Julia Watts Belser

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.