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 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.