Jan 2025
Saul Noam Zaritt. A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture. Fordham University Press, 2024. 240 pp. $35.00 [paperback]
Special Issue
A Taytsh Forum
Book forum on Saul Noam Zaritt’s A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture
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Introduction
To understand more about how this manifesto might push the field of Yiddish Studies forward, outward, inward, or backward, the editors of the peer-reviewed section of In geveb have invited a group of scholars working at the frontiers of Yiddish Studies to offer responses to A Taytsh Manifesto.
Review
Introduction to A Taytsh Forum
Josh Lambert
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
Reviews
Review
Review of Saul Noam Zaritt’s A Taytsh Manifesto
Naomi Seidman
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
Review
The Secret of Yiddish: On Reading Saul Noam Zaritt’s A Taytsh Manifesto
Tal Hever-Chybowski
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
Review
On Saul Noam Zaritt’s A Taytsh Manifesto
Jessica Kirzane
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
Review
A Few Points About Two Points
Jonathan Boyarin
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
Review
Reflections on A Taytsh Manifesto
Rebecca Margolis
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
Review
On Queertaytsh
Elya Zissel Piazza
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
Response from Saul Noam Zaritt
Article
On Names, Rupture, and Responsibility: A Response
Saul Noam Zaritt
If the manifesto is to do anything, to make anything, it will be in how others take up its charges, reformulate its conclusions, and object to its provocations. I am less interested in its mechanical application than in its ghostly afterlives. It is these possible flights that humble me.
Jan 08, 2025