Rate My Professor Jordan Rosenblum

Jordan D. Rosenblum is the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism and Director of the Religious Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Brown University in 2008, an A.M. from Brown University in 2005, an M.A. in Jewish Studies from Emory University in 2003, and B.A. degrees in Religion from Columbia University and in Ancient Judaism from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, both in 2001. Early in his career, he held a Starr Fellowship at Harvard University in 2009. Rosenblum's research focuses on religious food laws, rabbinic literature, kosher laws, the theory and method of religious studies, animal studies, rabbinic Judaism, food and Judaism, food and religion, and Jewish history from biblical to modern times. He is affiliated with the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for Law, Society & Justice, and the Department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies.

Rosenblum has produced influential scholarship that has shaped understandings of food, identity, and law in ancient Judaism. His books include Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig (New York University Press, 2024), which won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award; Rabbinic Drinking: What Beverages Teach Us About Rabbinic Literature (University of California Press, 2020); The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World (Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He co-edited Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food (New York University Press, 2019); Animals and the Law in Antiquity (Brown Judaic Studies, 2021); With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan (SBL Press, 2021); and Religious Competition in the Third Century C.E.: Jews, Christians, and the Greco-Roman World (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014). Notable articles include “The Swine Suicides: On the Appearance and Disappearance of Pork-Related Jewish Martyrdom in Antiquity” (Journal of Religious Competition in Antiquity, 2019) and “‘Blessings of the Breasts’: Breastfeeding in Rabbinic Literature” (Hebrew Union College Annual, 2016). He is currently researching the history of kosher controversies. The Wall Street Journal praised Forbidden as “an engaging and surprisingly cheerful study of that odd couple of the religious imagination, the Jew and the pig.”