On Queertaytsh

Saul Noam Zaritt’s A Taytsh Manifesto proposes taytsh as a necessary intervention in the Yiddish literary and scholarly trends that have privileged nationalist cultural aims. To promote a veneer of cultural originality, autonomy, and authenticity, Yiddish scholars have long denied the core translational nature of Yiddish in particular and modern Jewish culture more broadly. Taytsh is a theoretically rigorous call to recenter these quintessential translational and interdependent practices.

As a theoretical intervention, the taytsh paradigm has much in common with other theories that have emerged from minority experience (Gloria Anzaldúa’s “mestiza consciousness” and W.E.B. DuBois’s “double consciousness”), insofar as hybridity, translation, and insider/outsider positionality are conditions of minoritized experience. Zaritt asserts that taytsh may be “particularly useful as a way out of the seemingly insurmountable disconnect between Jewish studies and critical disciplines such as postcolonial theory, queer studies, and ethnic studies” (29), demonstrating through skilled close readings and analysis that taytsh indeed increases our sensitivity to raced, classed, and gendered aspects of Yiddish culture.

Keeping pace with taytsh as a cultural condition of Yiddish and modern Jewish culture is, as Zaritt points out, the persistent drive to normalize Yiddish culture. Attempts first by Yiddish writers and now by Yiddishist scholars to renter Yiddish culture inextricable from Jewishness can be seen, that is, as a way of mitigating anxieties about the translational aspects of Yiddish and funneling cultural production into the project of Jewish (diaspora) nationalism. As an answer to normalization, or, the “pacifying [of] those elements of the language that do not seem to comply” with more “legible” nationalistic models of culture, taytsh resurfaces those elements which do not fit, promoting a “rhetoric of exposure,” or, we might say, an outing of the queer of Yiddish (14).

Zaritt explicitly names queer theory as a partial model for his proposed “Jew theory,” highlighting the ways that both “queer” and “Jew” are bound to but also extend far beyond identity. Moreover, these identities themselves are not “stable object[s] of analysis” (154) but rather must be figured as “structural rather than incidental” (156) conditions. However, the commonalities between taytsh and queer as conceptual models appear to me to run even deeper. Here, I cursorily outline some of these resonances in an attempt to promote future inquiry into this intersection. 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.

Taytsh is fundamentally a non-binary paradigm. It refuses the mainstream demands to compulsively delineate Yiddish cultural production as part of either “the canon or the trash heap” (39); it disrupts the binary of “original and copy” (4), of “public and private” (120). These are culturally mandated binaries that queerness, too, insistently resists – through the epistemology of the closet, the aesthetics of camp, and the disruptive and illegible work of “queer” itself. To challenge these conventional binaries through the taytsh paradigm and its theorization of shund (trash) is also to accept Jack Halberstam’s invitation to engage in the Queer Art of Failure (2011) and to read “reparatively” (Sedgwick 1997), attuning to the often dissonant affective elements of surprise and disappointment in the text without preempting, neutralizing, or needing to overcome its failures.

Fascinating in Zaritt’s discussion of Yiddish vulgarity is his highlighting of Glatstein’s critique of Isaac Bashevis Singer, guilty of making Yiddish “dirty” in a way that the language could only ever tolerate when it is aimed at capitalist consumption in translation. But it is not only the translational element that makes Bashevis’s writings “pornographic,” it is also his repeated narration of queer and transgender characters, figured perhaps as the physical embodiments of taytsh. It can be argued that the internal and external cultural threats posed by Jewish perversity long predate both Yiddish and modernity, á la Daniel Boyarin’s Carnal Israel.

Alongside the overdetermined Judaization of Yiddish as a nationalistic normalizing force, Zaritt recalls that scholars have repeatedly framed the history of modern Yiddish literature in bionormative and “reprosexual” (Warner 1993) terms, upholding what queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman would have critiqued as “chrononormativity,” which is core to the production and reproduction of the capitalist nation-state (Freeman 2010). Jeffrey Shandler highlights the inaccuracy of the biologically deterministic narrative of Yiddish culture in his discussion of queer Yiddishkeit, arguing that modern Yiddish culture, like queer culture, is and has for centuries been inherited not biologically but rather through cohort generations (Shandler 2008). This bio-determinism also takes the form of the familial mythicization of the “forefathers” of modern Yiddish literature. However, as Zaritt is keen to point out, the “‘authentic’ voices of the folk are already ghosts in the hands of the father of Yiddish literature,” Sholem Aleykhem (96).

This spectrality of Yiddish characters and Ashkenazi culture already “pronounced dead” (96) then gets transposed onto Yiddish itself as a language permanently figured as dying. “The dismissal of […] dynamic continuities, or the attempt to see them as minor revivals with uncertain histories and futures, indicates that there remains some need to pacify Yiddish. What the death-and-revival stories seem to suggest is uneasiness about a language that refuses to die” (117), and, I would add, that insists on the non-binary space between life and death. The timeline of Yiddish, always already dead and yet undead, with imagined pasts and an ever-uncertain future, is heavily marked by a queer temporality. While José Esteban Muñoz has theorized queerness as “not yet here” (Munoz 2009), a frame Zohar Weiman-Kelman refigured as the queer expectancy that marks Yiddish women’s poetry (Weiman-Kelman 2018), Edelman’s No Future looms large, demanding that queers give up trying to appeal to nationalist futures (Edelman 2004). What would it look like to embrace the spectral or undead temporality of Yiddish as a condition of taytsh—to embody the living Yiddish “death drive” as a refusal to fall into nationalist triumphalist logics that incessantly push back against these ghostly characterizations and cling to the imagined claim to authenticity, respectability, and autonomy?

Finally, reading Taytsh as a Talmudist particularly interested in the influence of Talmudic discourse on Yiddish language, literature and culture, I am compelled not to limit the scope of taytsh’s relevance to Jewish culture in modernity. I would argue that Shomer’s characterization of the “Yiddish reading public [as one] for whom translations and ‘original’ works have the same value” (48) is an articulation of a Jewish reading posture that long predates modern Yiddish literature. Taytsh is, and has always been, precisely the vehicle for accessing the “original.” We might recognize all Jewish language outside of Biblical Hebrew as both the vehicle for creative meaning-making and always, already, translation. Before khumesh-taytsh was targum—the Aramaic equivalent of taytsh, meaning “translation” and “Aramaic.” It is perhaps no coincidence that alongside Yiddish, referred to as taytsh according to its translational character, Aramaic, which rivals Yiddish in terms of its lifespan as a spoken Jewish language, was also referred to itself as translation, targum.

The profundity of “taytsh” or “targum” lies not so much in the fact of their translational figuration of language and culture, but rather in their laying bare the device of that translational character which may indeed condition all language and culture. In other words, it is the reveal embedded in these Jewish terms which mark them as queer. In their theorization of drag as “gender parody,” Judith Butler underscores this crucial move. “[Drag] does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original… [G]ender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin…[thus depriving] hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities” (Butler 1990, 188). Similarly, the taytsh or targum model is not a claim to translationality as a unique feature of Jewish culture, but rather a queer orientation which undermines all claims to nationalist originality and authenticity as parodic. Already pushing my own research inquiries in new directions, A Taytsh Manifesto is a welcome appeal for a long-overdue theoretical reorientation sure to spur a proliferation of new research in Yiddish and “Jew-ish” studies.