On Saul Noam Zaritt’s A Taytsh Manifesto

In a session of a seminar I attended at JTS during my second year of graduate school at Columbia, I sat across from Saul Noam Zaritt while David Roskies guided us, and other students, in a Yiddish discussion of the In zikh manifesto. I remember the admiration we all felt for the assertiveness of the document, itself a self-contained accomplishment of writing, setting aside the poetry it addressed. Working within an established form of stridency and audacity – the manifesto – this work followed the proscribed form of rebelling against the established tradition to outline a new path forward, and it did so with panache. I am tickled, to say the least, to see Zaritt, all these years later, launch his Taytsh Manifesto as a challenge to the field of Yiddish Studies, and Jewish Studies more broadly – a call to overturn ways of thinking that have characterized the establishment Zaritt (and I) came up through. Because Zaritt’s arguments about Yiddish literature are attentive to literary forms and how they become containers for facilitating cultural and linguistic interminglings, borrowings, and reshapings, it seems worthwhile to dwell a moment on the unusual form of Zaritt’s scholarship: the manifesto.

Zaritt’s Taytsh Manifesto is a slippery object. It is a statement of continuity with the Yiddish past – linked to the political stridencies expressed by Yiddish speaking activists who were avid readers of the Communist Manifesto and other such documents, as well as to Yiddish’s avant-garde manifestos like that of In zikh. In placing himself in this tradition, Zaritt is standing in the footsteps of Yiddish writers who asserted “We’re Yiddish because we write in Yiddish,” that the language was capacious enough that it could contain a wide range of self-expression that did not need to be deliberately Jewish in character, setting, theme – it did not need to be explicitly about Jews, that it could bear a commitment to political or aesthetic aims that were universal in scope and ambition. In aligning himself with this stance, with its strong precedent in Yiddish writing, Zaritt nonetheless breaks from certain norms within Yiddish Studies. In particular, he argues against the way that the field foregrounds questions such as “How is this text Jewish?” and “What does this text have to say about Jewish identity?” when other questions might be more productive, though they would do less to shore up nationalisms at work in Jewish Studies programs and classrooms. In this way, Zaritt enacts the form in which he is placing his academic work, allowing it to yield a stance of rebellion. 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.

Zaritt argues that scholars should turn their attention toward the instability of Jewish culture. For Zaritt, understanding the language and its culture in its mediating and fungible glory requires scholars to turn their attention to understudied, undervalued Yiddish writing. It is notable that Zaritt weaves an analysis of women writers such as Sarah Smith and Yente Serdatsky into his analysis without the express purpose of reclamation or recovery, but taking as a given that women’s writing is a worthy object of study and that the fact that women wrote in Yiddish is obvious enough that it need not be spelled out. This in itself speaks to the way that Zaritt’s work crashes the shores of Yiddish Studies atop a wave of translation and recovery efforts that make such theorization possible, and that helped to create a sense of urgency and necessity to building theories of Yiddish Studies that critique inherited ideas of literary value – if only to allow space for women’s writing that did not adhere to standards set by male critics. What interests Zaritt about this writing, however, is not necessarily its gendered component but its genre (though of course genre is deeply related to gender because of existing expectations for how women and men should write, where they could be published, and who their readers might be).

Zaritt seeks to lift up texts — by women and men alike — that can be characterized as having cultural entanglements, texts that he describes as having “proximity to an explicit act of translation” because of borrowings of cultural vocabulary and narrative structure. Such texts do not have grand national ambitions, but seek to show the contradictions and impossibilities of their moment on an individual level, to make creative, productive use of the “ongoing precarity of Yiddish.” Such texts include those that occur largely in English, in which Yiddish appears as part of code-switching humor. According to Zaritt, an analysis of such texts does not require building them up into a unified edifice as evidence for a singular idea of Jewishness or Yiddishishness, but instead taking each text in turn as a richly situated Yiddish object that is the product of multicultural and multilingual environments.

While the above description might not seem on the face of it so radical as to deserve its own manifesto, Zaritt insists that he is indeed theorizing against the grain. Rather than seeing such literature as building blocks toward a proper national literature, Zaritt asks us to view such texts as valuable in and of themselves, pointing not toward a shared collective future but a fragmented collective present. Only then, Zaritt insists, will we see Yiddish for what it is, rather than for what many writers and critics throughout its history – including the present-day Yiddish Studies his manifesto pushes up against – deeply wanted it to be.