Julia Watts Belser, professor of Jewish studies at Georgetown University, has been awarded the 2025 Grawemeyer Award for Religion from the University of Louisville and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. She was honored for her recent book, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subersiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (Beacon Press, 2023). The publication won a 2024 National Jewish Book Award earlier this year.
At Georgetown, Rabbi Belser teaches in the department of theology and religious studies, as well as the disability studies program. She is also a senior research fellow at the university’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and the director of the Disability and Climate Change: A Public Archive Project. As a scholar, her work focuses on gender, sexuality, and disability in rabbinic literature, as well as queer feminist Jewish ethics and theology.
In addition to Loving Our Own Bones, Rabbi Belser is the author of several other publications, including Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2017) and A Health Handbook for Women With Disabilities (Hesperian Health Guides, 2008).
Rabbi Belser holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, a master’s degree from the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.