Reviews

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.

Jan 08, 2025

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.

Jan 08, 2025

Rather than providing a phenomenological theory of taytsh, Zaritt’s program concentrates on replacing what he justifiably identifies as a normalizing paradigm of Yiddish with a problematized paradigm of taytsh.

Jan 08, 2025

Notwithstanding its thoughtful grounding in recent work in the field, 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.

Jan 08, 2025

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.

Jan 08, 2025

Zaritt calls for scholarship that starts from the premise not of the fundamental integrity of the language and culture, but rather from the assumption that what we have grown used to designating by the term “Yiddish” more accurately (though one might suggest in Zaritt’s spirit, never “properly”) names a set of contingent interactions, and that the constitution of that set, even if always incomplete, is the task of scholarship to come.

Jan 08, 2025

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.

Jan 08, 2025

Ayelet Brinn’s comprehensive account of the gender dynamics that shaped American Jewish culture during its formative years reminds us that revolutions, especially those that have to do with gender, are never finite or complete. With exquisite prose and nuanced analysis of a wide array of sources, A Revolution in Type offers a timely and forceful contribution to the study of Jewish history, culture, and gender.

Dec 16, 2024

The stories in this collection are an invitation to reexamine what Israeli literature is: to expand the category of Israeli literature beyond just the Hebrew language and in so doing to disrupt expectations about that literature.

Dec 12, 2024

A valuable feature of Avreml Broide is the chance it offers to take a deep dive into the world of twentieth century radical left activism to understand essentials of the CPUSA as an American subculture.

Nov 20, 2024