Review of Saul Noam Zaritt’s A Taytsh Manifesto

As a manifesto, A Taytsh Manifesto is tightly linked to the time and place of its conception; as an academic monograph, it arrives after a slight delay. 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.

A Taytsh Manifesto emerges from “the translational turn” and “the diasporic turn” in the humanities; A Taytsh Manifesto finds its genre and energies in the history of Yiddish modernism, which also participated in international trends even as it espoused a now-suspect nationalist ideology.

A Taytsh Manifesto rejects the notion of “a Jewish language,” thus making room for non-Jews and unstable forms of Jewishness; A Taytsh Manifesto finds a name and a warrant for such conceptions in pre-modern and Hasidic Yiddish.

As a manifesto, A Taytsh Manifesto emerges from and speaks to a collectivity in ferment; as an academic monograph, it reflects the views of a single author and the neoliberal economy of the academy.

A Taytsh Manifesto is a Yiddish (and English) manifesto and thus has a genealogical link to the manifestos of the interwar period, beginning with the 1919 yung-yidish manifesto in the first issue of their little magazine, born of a night of drinking, youthful protest, and the support of bourgeois parents, and continuing a year later with the Inzikhist manifesto that declared, “The world exists and we are part of it. But for us, the world exists only as it is mirrored in us, as it touches us.” Eitan Kensky and Saul Noam Zaritt, author of A Taytsh Manifesto, cofounded In geveb, with the support of David Roskies and the Naomi Foundation (no relation), as an online journal headed by and serving “committed young scholars of Yiddish,” existing “in [the] web” and dedicated to “weaving together the voices and texts of Yiddish’s past, present, and future.”

A Taytsh Manifesto calls for “local affiliation” alongside “global disjunction,” the rearticulation of taytsh “within and against its neighboring discourses.” In a similar manifesto (not marked as such), Daniel Boyarin champions “diaspora as a kind of cultural situation in which a group of people . . . are doubly situated (culturally) at home and abroad as it were, located in their doikayt [here and now] but also culturally bound to similar collectives that are in other places (and perhaps other times as well), for the nonce Yiddishkayt [Jewishness].” In geveb embodied the local solidarity of doikayt in the Black Lives Matter era. The question of how to write “Black Lives Matter” on protest signs “names a moment” (as Zaritt writes) “in which it is unclear who exactly might be speaking and to whom, in which vernacular inscrutability mingles with the possibility (and failure) of universal communication.”

It can take many months for academic books to be published. For A Taytsh Manifesto, this year included October 7, 2023, and the violence of its aftermath; by October 12, Sholem Berger, a regular contributor to In geveb, had composed Nisht; on February 15, 2024, In geveb published “New Yiddish Poetry from the Israel-Gaza War.”

Zaritt writes, “Taytsh marks a responsibility to those others that already constitute its porous, shifting boundaries.” The Yiddishist (taytshist) left is now occupied not with local allyship but (rightly) with the politics of Israel/Palestine. Socialism, the Bund, Yung-yidish, doikayt, diasporism-beyond-antizionism can now appear to be lost worlds, distractions, alibis.

Zaritt writes about not telling (again) the anecdote he frequently tells in response to the question of how he chose to study Yiddish, the (fictional) story of a coin-toss decision about whether to study Yiddish or Arabic as a Hebrew student that ends when “the coin landed on Yiddish and there was no turning back.” Reflecting on how he happened to invent such a tale, Zaritt writes that it “deflects tensions surrounding Yiddish and instead posits conflict between Hebrew and Arabic. . . Every time I tell this story, I reject Arabic and assume Hebrew to be the language that needs no justification at all, relying on a Zionist language hierarchy that reproduces a settler-colonialist model. Needless to say, I do not want to use this story here.” The “real” story is vulgar family lore, “vernacular intimacy.” And yet, the story in which Arabic is rejected for Yiddish comes back carrying its rejection, for Zaritt and for others (including me), who flipped that same coin.

In an age of political statements, A Taytsh Manifesto is a manifesto; a manifesto embraces contradiction, vulgarity, poetry, rhythm, and pain; it speaks in riddles, short sentences, and dramatic proclamations. Beware the statement.