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Loving Our Own Bones: A Conversation with Rabbi Julia Watts Belser

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In celebration of the 15th anniversary of Jewish Disability Awareness, Acceptance, and Inclusion Month (JDAIM), Rabbi Julia Watts Belser joined us in conversation about her new book Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole. In Loving Our Own Bones, which was the 2024 JDAIM Book Club Selection, Julia brings Jewish sacred texts into relationship with disability culture to deepen conversations about disability, spirituality, and social justice. We explored the intersections of access, ableism, and antisemitism in biblical texts and contemporary culture, learned how Shabbat practice can offer us spiritual tools for centering disability wisdom, and considered disability as a generative force that calls us to confront structures of exclusion and recommit to the work of building a more welcoming world.

About Julia Watts Belser

Julia Watts Belser, a white Jewish woman with curly brown hair, sits happily in her wheelchair in front of a flowering bush. She's wearing a patterned red blazer and red kippah (beret) to match.Julia Watts Belser is a rabbi, scholar, and spiritual teacher, as well as a longtime activist for disability, LGBTQ, and gender justice. She is a professor of Jewish studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University and core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program, as well as a senior research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Author of Rabbinic Tales of Destruction, among other scholarly books, she has held faculty fellowships at Harvard Divinity School and the Katz Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s also an avid wheelchair hiker and a lover of wild places.

About Loving Our Own Bones

Through fresh and unexpected readings of the Bible, Loving Our Own Bones instead paints a luminous portrait of what it means to be disabled and one of God’s beloved. Belser delves deep into sacred literature, braiding the insights of disabled, feminist, Black, and queer thinkers with her own experiences as a queer disabled Jewish feminist. She talks back to biblical commentators who traffic in disability stigma and shame. What unfolds is a profound gift of disability wisdom, a radical act of spiritual imagination that can guide us all toward a powerful reckoning with each other and with our bodies.

Loving Our Own Bones invites readers to claim the power and promise of spiritual dissent, and to nourish their own souls through the revolutionary art of radical self-love. Learn more about the book and how you can get a copy at the Penguin Random House website.

Meet the Author

Disability Belongs™ Staff

Disability Belongs™ is a diverse, disability-led nonprofit that works to create systemic change in how society views and values people with disabilities, and that advances policies and practices that empower people with disabilities to have a better future. Our mission is to drive cultural and policy change to ensure our full representation and influence, creating a more accessible, equitable, and inclusive society.

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