I’m not that familiar with the show “The View,” but of course I know of the famous Whoopi Goldberg. It always was kind of fun and entertaining to have my very Jewish surname adopted by a famous comedian.
Last Monday, in context of a conversation on the show Goldberg hosts, she said some pretty surprising things. Whoopi is a friend to the Jewish people, and so while I am sure no ill will was intended, nonetheless, words matter and the spread of such basic misinformation must be addressed.
Never mind that for Jews in America, Colleyville is still very fresh in our minds, precipitating many Shabbat table conversations about the fast-changing experience of American Jewry, such as approaching weekly Shabbat shul-going with anxiety.
Whoopi said, “The Holocaust is not about race. No. It’s not about race.” Yes, there was a second repetition for emphasis. I admit, those words did make me blanche. When the motherlode of racist events of the 20th century, with a casualty number of six million slaughtered, is erroneously being re-invented, it is disturbing, to say the least.
In response to one of her colleagues, she doubled down, misrepresenting the Holocaust again as “white people doing it to white people [referring to Jews and gypsies], y’all go fight amongst yourselves.”
What was the Holocaust, according to Whoopi, about? “Man’s inhumanity to man” and “It’s about how people treat each other, it’s a problem.”
How people treat each other? While how people treat each other is indeed the necessary seed of kindness and fairness, of a healthy society — you know, teaching children good manners and good character, greeting the mailman, supporting someone different from yourself yourself, “how people treat each other” is not commensurate with mass murder on the level of genocide!
I watched the brief segment, so I could hear Whoopi’s remarks in context.
We are not talking about clueless or malevolent Holocaust denial here. Whoopi clearly confronts the fact that six million Jews were slaughtered. She clearly stands back at its horror.
Therein lies the rub.
It seems we are in a new phase of Holocaust interpretation. Whoopi is not the first person to neutralize the Holocaust or de-emphasize the very Jewishness in its full tragedy, horror and essence.
The handicapped, the gypsies and the homosexuals were also targets of maniacal Hitler and his psychopathic vision for white supremacy and the “perfection” of the white human species that he called the master race, the Aryan race. But we all know the simple fact that the primary target Hitler feared and wanted to clean Europe of was the Jewish people.
No point going into the ugly details of the Nazi comparisons of Jews to rodents and other things. I don’t need to justify that the Holocaust was Jewish or about race. No need to mention the mounting culture of anti-Semitism in Europe, which was a prelude to the final solution. No need to talk about Hitler’s own book Mein Kampf, in which he writes about his preoccupation with race, of the superiority of the German race, of purity of race, of the Aryan master race, of how the Jew was the counterpoint to all that. Race was the crux of Hitler’s ideology!
The signature event that embodied race horror — the event whose language was replete with references to “superior race” versus “inferior race” — defined the core of the Holocaust for Hitler. If an event that is the definition of race gone wrong is now to be transmitted without reference to race, or by muting the race factor, then no discussion about race in any context can be taken seriously.
The current discourse — deemed de rigueur by those who would de-Judaize the Holocaust — is strikingly ironic. When it comes to the seemingly scrupulous, rigid and controlling language that prescribes what is acceptable to say and what is not, suddenly, in conversation about the Holocaust, we have a contrast. To say “all lives matter” is considered wrong, tone deaf and even . . . racist . . . in the context of Black Lives Matter. But when it comes to the genocide of Jewish lives, the Black Lives Matter rejection of generalizing is inverted. Suddenly, to dilute the specific Jewish dimension of the Holocaust — simply to stand against hate (never mind Whoopi’s more specific remarks) — is deemed progressive.
This is profound intellectual hypocrisy.
Whoopi apologized. Immediately. I sincerely believe her, that she meant no harm. I accept her apology.
She also said something along the lines of “she meant no hurt.”
Whoopi, from one Goldberg to another, between us, I was never hurt. I was embarrassed for you. I was more shocked and appalled by your distortion of basic history than hurt.
More importantly, I was concerned for the accurate transmission and integrity of historical Jewish memory.
This is not pedantic.
Survivors are dying out.
It is our job as Jews, and it is everyone’s job, to recall and characterize the horror of the Holocaust for what it was.
It was a world war. Tens of millions of people suffered. Eleven million innocent civilians from a continent died. Countless millions suffered starvation. But only one people were targeted with the goal of elimination and extinction. Why? For being Jewish, of the “inferior race.” The Holocaust was the systemic murder of the Jewish people.
Enough with these flattened conversations that reduce people to black and white. It’s not the only division or definition of things. Not only does this not honor the complexity of who Jews are, and of who many others are, it can even lead to dangerous distortions of history.
We inherited the crushing legacy of the Holocaust.
Our job, at the very least, is to pass on its truth to history.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
