Jessica Roitman is Full Professor of Jewish Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), a position she has held since 2021. She holds a PhD in History from Leiden University (2009) and has built her academic career in the Netherlands over the past twenty-six years. Trained as a historian of Jewish life in the Caribbean and Atlantic world, she has held positions at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden University, and as a postdoctoral fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is (co)editor-in-chief of the Journal of Early American History, the Amsterdam University Press Jewish Urban Cultures series, and Brill’s Privacy Studies series, and serves on the Board of the Menasseh ben Israel Institute, Amsterdam’s interdisciplinary institute for the study of Jewish history and culture. Her fellowships and awards include the Summer Institute of Israel Studies at Brandeis University (2023) and the Huntington-Clark Summer Institute in Early Modern Studies Fellowship at the Huntington Library.
Since October 7, 2023, Professor Roitman has emerged as one of the most prominent public intellectuals in the Netherlands engaging with antisemitism and antizionism in Dutch academic and public life. She has published op-eds in major national newspapers and magazines, appeared on television, and delivered public lectures on the normalization of antisemitism in Dutch higher education. She is an outspoken Zionist and active in the anti-BDS movement at Dutch universities. She served on the sounding board for the governmental Taskforce Antisemitismebestrijding, meets with government officials, and maintains close working relationships with leading Dutch Jewish communal institutions.
Professor Roitman is a recipient of the 2026 ISGAP Faculty Fellowship Training Program: Combatting Holocaust Distortion and Global Antisemitism.