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

Tong, M Adryael

2018

2018-09-24

2010-2019

Julia Watts Belser's methodological masterpiece marries the academic study of the Talmud with Jewish constructive theology. She combines a carefully crafted critical apparatus with creative close readings of tales of destruction from Bavli Gittin and associated midrashic texts. The volume incorporates insights from postcolonial theory, disability studies, ecological materialism, class critique, and gender and sexuality studies into a synthetic hermeneutic emphasizing embodiment as theorized in the rabbinic texts. Her central argument is two-fold. Firstly, her reading of tractate Gittin works to augment literary analyses of the destruction of Jerusalem that "have not yet grappled sufficiently with the consequences disaster has for ancient Jewish bodies"(xii). Her second aim is to rethink the typical "covenantal" (xiii) theological framework often presented in Biblical accounts of destruction in favor of a more nuanced understanding of divine responses to Jewish suffering in a post-Shoah world.

https://www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2018/9/24/book-note-rabbinic-t....

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12322/itc.ir:2018_tong_m_adryael_ajr

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/