A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture

A Taytsh Manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish studies and for the study of modern Jewish culture. Saul Noam Zaritt calls for a shift in vocabulary, from Yiddish to taytsh, in order to promote reading strategies that account for the ways texts named as Jewish move between languages and cultures.

Yiddish, a moniker that became dominant only in the early twentieth century, means “Jewish” and thus marks the language with a single identity: of and for a Jewish collective. In ...