Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem

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 costs of Roman imperial domination. She brings disability studies, feminist theory, and new materialist ecological thought to accounts of rabbinic catastrophe, revealing how rabbinic discourses...