My current book project seeks to name the affective dimensions of racial formation, which I localize in the example of racializing tropes of Jewishness. Showing how ideas of race are not limited to skin color or visual signifiers of racial embodiment, but emerge through a broader spectrum of racial attributes and characterizations, disavowals and anxieties, the book shows how the history of race is animated by a particularly spectral affective economy. In the history of race's affective economy, I try to focus on the sense of "Jewishness" that was ciruclated in the later 19th and early 20th centuries as one particular affective vehicle for concretizing the unseen threats and horrors attached to racialized peoples and bodies. Jewish racial affect thus intersects with and diverges from other localized racial formations, as of Blackness (as well as Redness, Yellowness, and Brownness). Exploring affect as a kind of relational conduit for these intersections and divergences, I show how racial affect has also been internalized by racialized groups and affectively inhabited by them. I consider the very different experiences of this internalized racial affect, for example, in the collective memory of Jews and Black folks in the post-Holocaust world and in the "afterlives of slavery," where the anxieties and traumas of race continue to haunt in different ways. I look to the example of German Jews in the Weimar and Nazi periods, trying to show how the racial affect of Jewishness was first named, felt, what it meant, and how it shaped Jewish hopes and dreams as well as anxieties and fears in a world that had constituted “Jewishness” as so ineradicably severed from accounts of humanness, citizen subjectivity, and moral and religious inclusion.  In sum, I aim to take seriously the role that "race" has played in Jewish self-conceptions, for better and for worse. 

Hermann Cohen and the Crisis of Liberalism: The Enchantment of the Public Sphere (Indiana University Press, 2019) - Finalist, 2019 National Jewish Book Award

Covenantal Thinking: Essays on the Philosophy and Theology of David Novak (University of Toronto Press, 2024)

Ghost People: Race, Religion and the Affective Sources of Jewish Identity (Oxford University Press, 2024)

American Academy of Religion

Association for Jewish Studies

German Studies Association

Society for Jewish Ethics

Hermann Cohen Gesellschaft