Abstract

What does race feel like? That is to say, what does race make people feel? What does it feel like to be told your identity and social destiny are bound up with how others feel about you? And what does it feel like when you are told race no longer applies to you, but others still feel the same way about you? This is a book that traces the haunting feelings that constitute race as a structural, social, and psychic experience in modern European history by focusing on the case of Jewish racialization. Taking a theoretical cue from W. E. B. Du Bois’s question in The Souls of Black Folk, “How does it feel to be a problem?,” Ghost People queries the affective experience of racial formation and explores the ways feeling and emotion have colored the lives of different people in social, political, and psychosocial dimensions. From the nineteenth-century Jewish Question and the racialization of Jews in Europe to the construction of Judaism as a religion and the disavowal of racial categories in liberal secularism, this book asks after the enduring problem of race for Jewish identity and for how Jews have remained haunted by the specter of race in the modern world.