Mother’s Milk, Salon Book Event
How has Jewish culture endured for thousands of years – across continents, upheavals, and dramatic change? In her bold new book, Mother’s Milk: Essays on Child-Rearing, the Household, and the Making of Jewish Culture, Deena Aranoff proposes an intimate answer: look to the everyday life of the household.
Mother’s Millk reveals how Jewish culture has been nurtured and transmitted through family – feeding, caring, teaching, and raising children. From rabbinic law to family custom, she argues that Jewish culture has always been sustained by the rhythms of the household.
In conversation with Professor Leah Hochman of Hebrew Union College, Aranoff will explore how parenting, feminism, ritual, and daily practice shape Jewish memory and identity. Together they’ll illuminate how the ordinary becomes sacred: how milk, meals, and moments of care have sustained an entire civilization.
This event will be hosted by Professor Sarah Bunin Benor of Hebrew Union College and the University of Southern California. Venue information provided upon RSVP.
Deena Aranoff is Faculty Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. She teaches rabbinic literature, medieval patterns of Jewish thought, and the broader question of continuity and change in Jewish history. Her recent publications engage with the subjects of childcare, household life, and the making of Jewish culture.
Leah Hochman is associate professor of Jewish Thought at Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. Before coming to Hebrew Union College/Los Angeles in 2008, she was assistant professor of religion and Jewish studies at the University of Florida and taught in the Great Books program at Boston University. At Hebrew Union College, she teaches classes in medieval and modern philosophy, American Judaism, modern history, and food ethics. At USC, she teaches classes on contemporary Jewish literature, Jewish identity, and the academic study of Judaism.
She is the author of The Ugliness of Moses Mendelssohn: Aesthetics, Religion and Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2014) and the editor of Tastes of Faith: Jewish Eating in the United States (Purdue University Press, 2017).
