Introduction to A Taytsh Forum

Saul Zaritt’s A Taytsh Manifesto bravely, somewhat dizzyingly, begins by throwing into question one of the few things Yiddish scholars can generally agree upon, the name of their language and field: “The central conceit of this manifesto,” Zaritt writes, “is a challenge to the very name of the Yiddish language” (1). As bracing as this gesture is, it’s not unprecedented in other academic fields. Down the hall from the offices of Yiddish professors and teachers, colleagues have been actively debating what to call their own fields, too (think of French departments adding “Francophone,” or the recent rise of “STEM”). Yiddish Studies in the U.S. academy is neither so old nor so firmly institutionalized as to foreclose the possibility of a shift in nomenclature.

What becomes clear, moreover, over the course of reading Zaritt’s book, is that despite the polemical framing, calling the language “Taytsh” turns out to be less a call for change and more an attempt to describe and distill the creative energies of the-field-currently-known-as-Yiddish, as it has been practiced lately. Zaritt’s chapters, each developing his understanding of taytsh in a different direction, call for “scholarship that repeatedly challenges the stability presumed by naming a language ‘Jewish,’” insist that “theft, borrowing, adaptation [haunt] the entire project of modern Jewish culture,” and suggest we tarry “in a space conditioned by translation, where one cannot decide exactly what word to use or whose language one is speaking.”

That these efforts are congruent, and not in conflict, with the most exciting recent work in Yiddish Studies can be observed concretely in a section in the book’s conclusion, in which Zaritt surveys the ways in which “taytsh is already at work in the field of Yiddish studies.” To illustrate that point, he cites, among other recent books and podcasts, half a dozen recent articles and features from In geveb. Even within the chapters themselves, Zaritt’s examinations of the meanings of taytsh build upon the work of his contemporaries in and out of the academy, including Rokhl Kafrissen’s attention to the word “verklempt,” Dalia Wolfson’s translations and readings of Yenta Serdatsky, and, if I may pat myself on the back, my own discussion of a 1965 Yankev Glatshteyn essay about pornography.

Notwithstanding this thoughtful grounding in recent work in the field, though, 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. The privileging of modern, secular, self-consciously literary works over shund, Old Yiddish sources, and the textual production of Hasidic Yiddish speakers certainly endures. The description of Yiddish as a fusion language and its association with an allegedly self-evident Jewish population also remain commonplace assertions within both academic and nonacademic discussions of Yiddish.

The promise of taytsh, as deployed here by Zaritt, is that it might help to change all of that, or at least some of it. To understand more about how this manifesto might push the field of Yiddish Studies forward, outward, inward, or backward, the editors of the peer-reviewed section of In geveb have invited a group of scholars working at the frontiers of Yiddish Studies to offer responses to A Taytsh Manifesto. These responses, as varied and complex as A Taytsh Manifesto itself, are followed by a reply from Zaritt.