“Deena Aranoff's brilliant and groundbreaking book opens vistas on the crucial role of the household and child-rearing in the making of Jewish culture, a role lost to our amnesia of early childhood and the ideological erasure of the maternal labor required to sustain it.”
“These essays offer poetic reflections on the undercurrents - the ground, really - of much of rabbinic law and literature, namely, Jewish everyday life, the household that frames it, and the ethos of maternal care that sustains it. This book gifts us with an extraordinary contribution to Jewish feminist writing.”
"This is a brilliant work of scholarship, as well as a piece of exceptionally beautiful academic writing. The thesis is that the very matrix of Jewish cultural continuation and vitality is the home, usually maternal, that is the environment of early, even earliest, childhood."
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Mother's Milk
This book engages with an age-old question: What accounts for the persistence of Jewish culture through the ages? Despite significant variations, how were Jewish cultural elements sustained over the millennia?
Mother’s Milk: Essays on Child-Rearing, the Household, and the Making of Jewish Culture proposes that we include the earliest phases of child-rearing in the history of Jewish cultural production. Author Deena Aranoff argues that some of the most enduring aspects of Jewish culture are produced in the context of household and family relations.
Mother’s Milk examines how Jewish practices, including rabbinic halakhah, are derived from household custom and unfold within the context of family life. Aranoff proposes a revised genealogy of Jewish culture that emphasizes the interplay between everyday life and formal Jewish practice.
Sample Excerpt:
“On a more basic level…this book integrates the role of family relations, especially of maternal care, in the history of the Jews. Its title, Mother’s Milk, refers to knowledge acquired in a primary way—absorbed, as it were—via mimetic mechanisms of transmission. It refers to things learned early in life, so fully absorbed as to become a part of the person, like the stuff of milk that becomes the cells of the infant body. The phrase Mother's Milk is intended to invoke both senses of the term: the elemental sense of breast milk as well as its metaphoric extension—that is, the stuff transmitted early in life and that takes up a firm and fixed place in the person. Furthermore…the two senses of the term are inseparable; mother’s milk is not the provision of universal sustenance only later mixed with the specificity of culture. It is a cultural act from the start. To some extent, these essays revisit the matrilineal principle in the transmission of Jewishness and explore its social and cultural foundations. It is not my purpose, to argue for a biological basis for this maternal transmission; quite the opposite. The purpose here is to identify the cultural and social dynamics through which lasting Jewish formations take place."
-From Mother’s Milk
