Strange Readers, Plausible Narratives, and Racial Recognition

Having written the bulk of Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question over six years ago, it is a great honor to read the responses of four colleagues whose own work I deeply respect. Each of these scholars has provided much food for thought about what the book actually says and does. Since I do not disagree with anything they have written, in what follows, I briefly comment on a few of their points that particularly touched me and use the occasion to reflect on the origins and future of Racial Fever.

One of the big questions I had while writing the book was whether it would interest anyone who was not already engaged with the fairly esoteric intersections of the scholarly material (Jewish studies, religious studies, racial theory, psychoanalysis, history of science). The book came from a deeply personal space—but perhaps this is true of all books (why write if it does not somehow wrench something from our insides and outsides that can’t be addressed in any other way?). And much of my discarded writing reflects what was going on in and around me while writing: conversations and conflicts with my parents; thoughts about my non-Jewish then-boyfriend and what it might mean for our futures if we were to get married or have children together (both of which have since occurred); and meditations on the sights of the cities where the book was conceived and written. In 2000–2001, the book forced itself on me while I was living in Berlin, Germany, where Jewishness—its inflections, implications, and origins—seemed far more fraught (and more interesting) than it is in the United States. I wrote most of the book while living in Brooklyn, New York, where my daily interactions shaped the more obvious narrative about European Jewishness: in addition to young urbanites, I regularly passed Hassidic families with minivans, Afrocentric bookstores, and Black Hebrew Israelites hawking their informational pamphlets and historical treatises on their version of ancient Israel.¹ All of these experiences (and more) shaped my thoughts on the conditions of racial fever, both my own and others’.

Given this background, I was thrilled to read Judith Weisenfeld’s own stories about recognizing (diagnosing) her own racial fever: not simply the recognition that one is of a particular race (or races), but just as strongly, the mismatches between how others recognize us and how we think about ourselves. Loitering near the Hassidic man who searches the crowd for potential Jews, Weisenfeld is never recognized by the Hassid as a possible (Jewish) candidate, but as she acknowledges, her irritation at not being recognized is itself a symptom of racial fever. On the flipside, Weisenfeld knows that she would be recognized as a fellow traveler by one or more of the Black Hebrew Israelites who also stand on street corners in New York City looking for possible “candidates” to re-incorporate into peoplehood. In Weisenfeld’s words, “The biblical Hebrews were African people . . . and it is their heartfelt desire that peoples of color experience ‘the return of the repressed’ and recognize their place in the chain of transmission and the power of solidarity that such knowledge affords” (8).

John Jackson speculates that he might be “the only strange reader” who thought about Racial Fever in connection with various Black Hebrew groups. I am grateful and excited that there is at least one reader as strange as the author. Jackson’s own work seems to get at the heart of what drew me to Freud’s theory of memory, race, and Jewishness: his forthcoming work on the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem will no doubt shed light on how Jewishness (or Hebrewness) is mnemonicized and how race and religion cannot be so neatly separated. While some speak of our age as a postracial age, Jackson’s work gets at the “flipside to academia’s current postracial fetishizations, an off-ramp carrying us to a place where racial deconstruction is less heuristic finish line than anxious starting block,” and where we must acknowledge the ways in which race is “one of the modern world’s...