Saul Noam Zaritt

Saul Noam Zaritt

Associate Professor of Yiddish Literature
Saul Zaritt

 

Research Fields: Modern Jewish literatures, Yiddish literature, Hebrew literature, Jewish American literature, popular literature, theories of world literature, translation, digital scholarship.

 

Saul Noam Zaritt studies modern Jewish writing and the politics of translation, examining how writers cross and inhabit boundaries between cultures. With a focus on Yiddish literature of the twentieth century, his research tracks how texts labeled as “Jewish”—by the writers themselves or by critics and institutions—respond to the modern demand for legibility and translatability.

 

Publications:

 

My first book, Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody was published in 2020 with Oxford University Press. The book is a study of how Jewish American writers confront the idea of world literature, investigating how writers, in English and in Yiddish, place themselves within world literature’s institutional confines, outside its purview, or, most often, in constant motion across its maps and networks. Considering world literature as both a system of circulation (in book markets, anthologies, and the distribution of prizes and awards) and a utopian republic of shared literary value, I follow Jewish American writers as they meet the demand to write not just for a national collective but for the world.

 

My second book, A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, is forthcoming in 2024 with Fordham University Press. The book calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish studies and for the study of modern Jewish culture, proposing 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. Taytsh is an older name for the language, a name that indicates the language's affiliation with German; it is also a word that came to mean translation itself—to render into taytsh is to inhabit the gap between languages. This book deploys taytsh as a paradigm that can be applied to a host of modern Jewish cultural formations. Drawing on examples from Yiddish pulp fiction, Sholem Aleichem’s monologue, popular US culture, and more, A Taytsh Manifesto develops a model for identifying, in Yiddish and beyond, how cultures intertwine, how they become implicated in world systems and empire, and how they might escape such limiting and oppressive structures.

An early draft of this project appeared in Fall 2021 as a stand-alone article in Jewish Social Studies

 

Other publications include include: an article on the popular novels of Sarah B. Smith; a reading of Avrom Sutzkever’s late style and the politics of Holocaust Literature; book reviews examining the state of Jewish and Yiddish Studies and the future of Jewish American literary study; and a tribute to my late mentor Alan Mintz. More of my writing can be found at In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.

 

Digital Projects:

 

Shund.org is a database of Yiddish popular fiction, collecting and analyzing works of entertainment literature written in Yiddish and published as books and pamphlets and serialized in the Yiddish press. The site launched in beta mode in August 2023, cataloguing the popular fiction that appears in the New York newspaper Forverts, but with plans to grow the database significantly in the coming years. The project is the result of a collaboration with Matt Cook, Digital Scholarship Program Manager for Harvard Library.

 

Ingeveb.org is an open-access digital journal of Yiddish studies that I helped launch in 2015. The journal features peer-review articles and book reviews, new translations, a forum for the exchange of pedagogical materials surrounding the teaching of Yiddish language and Yiddish culture, and a blog for multimedia essays. I was the journal’s founding editor-in-chief and served in the position from 2014–2016; I was senior editor (co-editor of the peer-review section) from 2016–2022; I’m currently a member of the editorial board.

 

Courses taught:
The Politics of Yiddish
Mainstream Jews
Jew Theory
The Yiddish Short Story: Folk Tales, Monologues, and Post-Apocalyptic Parables
Jews, Humor, and the Politics of Laughter
Ghostwriters and Ventriloquists: Postwar Jewish American Culture
Writing Jewish Modernity

 

For more on Yiddish Studies at Harvard, visit our Facebook page.

 

Contact Information

Office: Dana-Palmer House 206
16 Quincy Street, Cambridge
p: 617-495-1715
Office Hours: By Appointment Only through this link: https://calendly.com/zaritt/30min

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