Mother's Milk

"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