Whoopi Goldberg’s words recently on The View with regard to Jews and the Holocaust were ignorant, but she is not anti-Semitic. Her words should be treated as an opportunity for education, not vitriol.
What is needed here is clarity. People often don’t know the definition of race and speak as if they do. Some Jews don’t even understand we are not a race. Races are peoples who are categorized by hereditary physical traits. Nothing less than that. Nothing more than that. The purpose of this category or any category is to recognize difference as value and to listen, learn and embrace it.
We can choose what race we identify with and consider ourselves so, such as in the case of Barack Obama who had a white mother and a Black father. But the reality of his mixed race is immutable. You can’t change yourself from being mixed race or Black or white to any other race.
However, Jews can renounce their Judaism and alternately, anyone can become Jewish. We most often inherit our Judaism, but our genetic markers are not always indicators. Therefore Jews are not a race. There may be certain common physical characteristics that may or may not be inherited, but the Jewish people are not categorized by them nor should we be.
Black people may have certain common physical features that may or may not be inherited, but they should not be categorized by any of them, except by having Black skin. And of course, this is a striking statement since Jews were depicted with huge noses and as a physically ugly monstrous subhuman “race” in the 1930s and 40s. So that’s a start to understanding a discussion about race and Jews and the Holocaust.
Many Jews may think of themselves as white but we are really a three-pillared peoplehood, organized around an ancient heritage based on the Hebrew Bible and religion, land and nation, and culture. We come in skin colors that range from light to dark depending on where we hail from around the world. I really liked when a Jewish author in the Daily Beast described himself as ‘ivory.’
So people need to understand the Holocaust was about race, not because Jews are a race, but because Hitler defined Jews as an inferior race. Millions of others were killed during this war of genocide that murdered people with disabilities, gay people, gypsies, political nationals and more. But the Jews were the starting gate target of the Final Solution, a plan created by the Nazis to eliminate all Jews from the earth.
This plan took 90 minutes to create. Why? Because Jewish hate was an easy sell. Unfortunately, it still is in too many parts of the world and increasing in this country. Jews make up about 2% of our population. Between 50-60% of hate crimes last year were classified as anti-Semitic. The problem lies not with who we think we are but who others presume us to be and are how much they are permitted to define us.
So last week on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert Whoopi continued on with her utterly ignorant attempt at differentiating the Jewish and Black experience according to Jewish privilege because Jews can slip by discrimination unlike Black people, because Jews are white. While it may be true in some respects that the Black color of a person’s face suffers its own unique kind of discrimination, it is important to realize that the Germans had no problem rooting out Jews no matter that vast numbers of Jews became embedded and assimilated into German culture over the course of hundreds of years.
Still, Whoopi kept on with how hard the Germans had to work at finding Jews because they were white. It’s a sorry day when Black people and Jews have to fight over who suffers more discrimination and have to somehow cancel each other out to prove the point and remain ignorant in the process.
We Jews have a long way to go to authentically understand the plight of Black people in this country. Likewise, it’s important for Jewish and non-Jewish public figures to educate themselves and have conversations with Whoopi and so many like her who need clarity and knowledge in order to build understanding.
(Amy Brenner Mitz lives in Sugar Hill and is an ordained cantor.)