Reflections on A Taytsh Manifesto

I’m prefacing this review by noting how hard it was to write. Ordinarily I love to be challenged by new ways of understanding the complex and intertwined semiotics of the Yiddish ecosystem, a field in which I have long been deeply invested. In reading A Taytsh Manifesto, I appreciated the reminder of just how intertwined Yiddish is with its adjacent cultures, and how Zaritt applies his “taytsh” framework to iconic but lesser studied forms of Yiddish cultural production: the genre of the monologue, shund as popular entertainment, and vulgarity in American popular culture.

And yet, as a proposal for a new roadmap for Yiddish studies, A Taytsh Manifesto brings to the fore a whole list of thorny and painful issues relating to the post-October 7 rupture in which we presently find ourselves. When — no matter where you stand — at least some of your community of fellow Yiddishists stand somewhere else, it’s hard to feel empowered by the forward-looking stance implied by Zaritt’s ambitious 10-point manifesto. A manifesto, after all, declares a platform that, at least in theory, ushers in a new and better era. Underpinning every manifesto is an optimism about what can be, and an implicit promise to deliver. Zaritt’s bilingual manifesto is followed by the lines:

This manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish studies and for the study of modern Jewish culture. I propose a shift in vocabulary, from Yiddish to taytsh, in order to promote reading strategies that account for the ways texts and performances named as Jewish move between languages and cultures. The central conceit of this manifesto is a challenge to the very name of the Yiddish language (1).

I am reminded of the complex and oft divisive history of Yiddish manifestos, most famously, perhaps, the 1920 manifesto that launched the Inzikhist (Introspectivist) movement’s flagship literary journal as a radical reorientation of Yiddish (cited in Zaritt’s previous monograph):

The world exists and we are part of it. But for us, the world exists as it is mirrored in us, as it touches us. The world is a non-existent category, a lie, if it is not related to us. It becomes an actuality only in and through us. ^{1 1} Saul Noam Zaritt, Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody (Oxford, 2020), 75.

I cannot help but wonder about the intended object—both audience and aim—of Zaritt’s single-authored manifesto in 2024. Does it implicitly purport to speak for a new generation of scholars engaging with Yiddish, or for Yiddish studies as a whole? Is the intent to foster dialogue among scholars? Or is it, in the footsteps of the In Zikh manifesto of a century ago, meant to shake up a complacent Yiddish academic world through a radical reorientation?

Perhaps the issue I’m having is that the world has been on fire for far too long and this does not feel like the moment for proclamations. The timing of the book, a year after October 7, is unfortunate in this respect, with the Yiddish milieu and beyond so deeply fractured and polarized. I am not persuaded that we need the intervention of the term “taytsh” to name “the translational condition of Yiddish culture” (point 1, ix), or to delineate the other features of Yiddish that Zaritt proposes. Because of the multilingualism of virtually all of its speakers historically through the present, Yiddish has inevitably been underpinned by interlingual and intersemiotic translation processes, and this is reflected in the fields of philology, literature, translation studies and sociolinguistics, screen studies or others. Reading Yiddish multidisciplinarily in relation to other languages, cultures, or context has been foundational to its scholarship.

Zaritt’s framework of “Jew theory” likewise reflects what has long been happening on the ground in Jewish Studies. The extreme interdisciplinary of the fields that loosely comprise it and the comparative study beyond the Jewish context (as seen in the dizzying array of content at the Association for Jewish Studies annual conferences) even now exemplify his call: “the field of Jewish Studies needs more taytsh, an encouragement to move beyond cultural ownership and toward cultural cohabitation” (154). Zaritt’s proposition that “the word ‘Jew’ should motivate a revision of its wide associations—from autochthonous self-definition to complex and shifting stereotype—that allows for a robust refiguration of its implication within and alongside a wide variety of constructs” (155) speaks to a pre-October 7 ideal, which we might aspire to in the future. However, this vision also raises the deep-rooted question of the limits of “Jewish Studies” as a way of reading that universalizes Jews to an extreme within a mode that has historically marginalized them. 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.