Zaritt teaches about modern Jewish culture, with an emphasis on Yiddish and the history of Jewishness in the United States. Past courses have included:

Mainstream Jews
Why is it that Jews and discussions of Jewishness appear with such frequency and with such prominence in US culture of the twentieth and the twenty-first century? This seminar discusses the ways that images of the Jew—philosemitic, antisemitic, and everything in between—recur in the American mainstream. Through analysis of film, television, music, comics, and other mass media, we track the multiple and contradictory portrayals of Jewishness in the popular American imagination.

Jews, Humor, and the Politics of Laughter
This course examines the question of Jewish humor, exploring the concept of therapeutic joking, the politics of self-deprecation, and strategies of masking social critique behind a well-timed joke. Rather than reach some essential definition, we instead investigate literature, stand-up comedy, film, and television of the twentieth and twenty-first century in order to 1) think together about the theory, mechanics, and techniques of comedy and humor and 2) ask how and when a text or performance gets labeled Jewish, by whom and for what purposes.

Ghostwriters and Ventriloquists: Postwar Jewish American Culture
This course takes ideas of the “ghostwriter” and the “ventriloquist” as a lens through which to read postwar Jewish American culture. How does “ghosting” compensate for trauma and loss? Through analysis of postwar texts and films in English and Yiddish, this course studies how specters of the past function both as arbiters of cultural value and as reminders of the discontinuities and traumas of the Jewish American present.

The Politics of Yiddish
This course traces the shifting politics attached to Yiddish from its early modern beginnings as a language of translation between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures to its postwar vacillation between a language of mourning and nostalgia, Jewish American humor, Hasidic isolation, and contemporary Jewish radicalism.

The Yiddish Short Story: Folk Tales, Monologues, and Post-Apocalyptic Parables
Who are the storytellers of Yiddish literature? Where did their stories come from? Why did the short story become the central genre of modern Jewish literary culture? This course explores the genealogy of the Yiddish short story from the hasidic folk tale to the modernist sketch, from the monologues of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer to the haunting narratives of Yenta Serdatsky and Der Nister.