PhD (Jewish Theological Seminary)

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. 

Zaritt’s 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. 

Zaritt second book, A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, appeared in October 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. 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. 

Other publications 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, the future of Jewish American literary study, and the relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish; and a tribute to the late scholar of Hebrew Alan Mintz. More of his writing can be found at In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. 

Zaritt is also involved in several digital projects. Shund.org, launched in August 2023, 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 project is the result of a collaboration with Matt Cook, Digital Scholarship Program Manager for Harvard Library. Zaritt also helped launch In geveb, an open-access digital journal of Yiddish studies publishing since 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. After serving as founding editor-in-chief and then co-editor of the peer-review section, Zaritt remains a member of the editorial board.

Zaritt’s research has been supported by fellowships at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University, and the American Academy in Berlin (where Zaritt is a 2025-2026 Berlin Prize fellow).

At Ohio State, Zaritt teaches courses on modern Jewish culture, with an emphasis on Yiddish and the history of Jewishness in the United States, on topics ranging from the history of Jewish humor to the Yiddish short story.