Description: "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 millennia? Mother's Milk: Essays on Child-Rearing, the Household, and the Making of Jewish Culture expresses the idea that a stage of the human experience is excluded from Jewish culture that includes the earliest phases of child-rearing in household context. Author Deena Aranoff argues that the inclusion of child-rearing would help strengthen the idea that Jewish cultural production is not restricted to the channels of rabbinic and literary activity alone. Mother's Milk expresses how Jewish practices, including rabbinic halakhah, are derived from household custom and maternal care in particular. Aranoff encourages us to revise the genealogy of Jewish culture to allow for dialectical interplay between everyday life and formal Jewish practice"--
Review Quotes:
"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."--Naomi Seidman, University of Toronto
"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."--Charlotte Fonrober, Stanford University
"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."--Daniel Boyarin, University of California, Berkeley
"The gathering of transhistorical sources of a variety of genres allows the reader a window into the way that Mother's Milk is a solvent for anxieties about author-ity and assimilation in the service of a critique of patriarchal power. Yet there are also times in which the lack of specificity about the material, social, and political realities that gave shape to various formations of the maternal "matrix" in each con-text threatens to undermine elements of Aranoff's critical work."--Cara Rock-Singer, Contemporary Jewry