Articles

Kutsher’s mem­oir is not just a mem­oir of his life but a mem­oir of a city long gone. Writ­ten orig­i­nal­ly in Yid­dish in 1955 after Kut­sher sur­vived the Holo­caust and left Poland, it reads more like a yizkor book than a per­son­al memoir.

Jan 13, 2025

A Taytsh Man­i­festo offers fresh analy­sis of the trans­la­tion­al under­pin­nings of Yid­dish across diverse cul­tur­al con­texts. How­ev­er, I ques­tion the util­i­ty of propos­ing ​“taytsh” as a par­a­digm shift for a field — and wider Jew­ish world — that finds itself in a state of pro­found upheaval.

Jan 08, 2025

Zaritt calls for schol­ar­ship that starts from the premise not of the fun­da­men­tal integri­ty of the lan­guage and cul­ture, but rather from the assump­tion that what we have grown used to des­ig­nat­ing by the term ​“Yid­dish” more accu­rate­ly (though one might sug­gest in Zaritt’s spir­it, nev­er ​“prop­er­ly”) names a set of con­tin­gent inter­ac­tions, and that the con­sti­tu­tion of that set, even if always incom­plete, is the task of schol­ar­ship to come.

Jan 08, 2025

Saul Noam Zaritt’s A Taytsh Man­i­festo rethinks the crit­i­cal terms and cat­e­gories that Yid­dish Stud­ies has inher­it­ed in order to reor­ga­nize and re-pri­or­i­tize, in the hopes of cre­at­ing some­thing new out of the build­ing blocks of inher­it­ed Yid­dish Stud­ies scholarship.

Jan 08, 2025

Notwith­stand­ing its thought­ful ground­ing in recent work in the field, the force of Zaritt’s polemic is to call into ques­tion ideas that have been broad­ly accept­ed in Yid­dish Stud­ies since Max Weinreich’s time.

Jan 08, 2025

Rather than pro­vid­ing a phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal the­o­ry of taytsh, Zaritt’s pro­gram con­cen­trates on replac­ing what he jus­ti­fi­ably iden­ti­fies as a nor­mal­iz­ing par­a­digm of Yid­dish with a prob­lema­tized par­a­digm of taytsh.

Jan 08, 2025

The prop­er place for dis­cussing a mono­graph is a book review. The prop­er exten­sion of a man­i­festo is a rev­o­lu­tion. If not a rev­o­lu­tion, a forum.

Jan 08, 2025

The estab­lished cor­pus of queer the­o­ry can offer even more lan­guage and fram­ing for under­stand­ing mod­ern Jew­ish cul­ture while, at the same time, sharp­en­ing how the taytsh frame­work can fill out what it means to read — lit­er­a­ture, cul­ture, his­to­ry — queer­ly, and Jew­ish­ly, if there is a dif­fer­ence between the two.

Jan 08, 2025

If the man­i­festo is to do any­thing, to make any­thing, it will be in how oth­ers take up its charges, refor­mu­late its con­clu­sions, and object to its provo­ca­tions. I am less inter­est­ed in its mechan­i­cal appli­ca­tion than in its ghost­ly after­lives. It is these pos­si­ble flights that hum­ble me.

Jan 08, 2025

Ayelet Brinn’s com­pre­hen­sive account of the gen­der dynam­ics that shaped Amer­i­can Jew­ish cul­ture dur­ing its for­ma­tive years reminds us that rev­o­lu­tions, espe­cial­ly those that have to do with gen­der, are nev­er finite or com­plete. With exquis­ite prose and nuanced analy­sis of a wide array of sources, A Rev­o­lu­tion in Type offers a time­ly and force­ful con­tri­bu­tion to the study of Jew­ish his­to­ry, cul­ture, and gender.

Dec 16, 2024