Jordan Rosenblum

Education
B.A., Columbia University, 2001
B.A., Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2001
M.A., Emory University, 2003
A.M., Brown University, 2005
Ph.D., Brown University, 2008

Research Interests
Religious Food Laws; Rabbinic Literature; Kosher Laws; Theory and Method of Religious Studies; Animal Studies

Biography
Jordan D. Rosenblum is the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism, the Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the current director of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies (CJS). In 2009, he was a Starr Fellow at Harvard University. His research focuses on the literature, law, and social history of the rabbinic movement in general and, in particular, on rabbinic food regulations. He is the author of 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; paperback edition, 2019); and Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge University Press, 2010; paperback edition, 2014), as well as the co-editor of 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). His next book, Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig, will be published by New York University Press in October 2024.

Publications
“The Swine Suicides: On the Appearance and Disappearance of Pork-Related Jewish Martyrdom in Antiquity,” Journal of Religious Competition in Antiquity 1 (2019):37–47.

“A Brief History of Jews and Garlic,” in Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food, ed. Aaron Gross, Jody Myers, and Jordan D. Rosenblum, New York University Press, 2019, pp. 149–58.

“The Unwashed Masses: Handwashing as a Ritual of Social Distinction in Rabbinic Judaism,” Historia Religionum 10 (2018): 79–90.

“Thou Shalt Not Cook a Bird in its Mother’s Milk?: Theorizing the Evolution of a Rabbinic Regulation,” in Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation, ed. Elizabeth Shanks Alexander and Beth A. Berkowitz, Routledge Jewish Studies Series, Routledge, 2018, pp. 175–87.

“‘Blessings of the Breasts’: Breastfeeding in Rabbinic Literature,” Hebrew Union College Annual 87 (2016): 147–79.

“Changing the Subject: Rabbinic Legal Process in the Absence of Justification,” The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 18 (2015): 23–36.