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World

Whoopi’s whoopsy on race touches a nerve

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(JTA) She may not have meant to, but this week, Whoopi Goldberg waded into a charged discourse that has polarised the Jewish community and those who seek to discriminate against them for centuries.

The controversy began brewing on The View the daytime talk show she co-hosts, during a discussion last Monday about the recent controversy over a Tennessee school board’s decision to ban Maus, the iconic graphic memoir about the Holocaust. The genocide wasn’t “about race”, Goldberg said, it was instead about “man’s inhumanity to man”. And it involved “two white groups of people”.

The comments immediately went viral and struck a nerve, leading to what Goldberg described as a deluge of accusations of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and criticism from groups like the Anti-Defamation League.

In spite of multiple apologies, the storm reached a climax when ABC decided to suspend Goldberg from The View for two weeks “to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments”, in the words of ABC News President Kim Godwin. Jews across the political spectrum, including many who objected to Goldberg’s original remarks, criticised the decision to suspend her.

Was the Holocaust about race?

“Race” is notoriously difficult to define. Is it, like Goldberg claimed, a group of people with shared physical characteristics? Can other social, economic, and anthropological classifications factor in?

Jews have long debated whether they are a “race” or something else. Judaism is a religion, practiced by people of all varieties and races across the globe. But Jews don’t have to be practitioners to regard themselves or be accepted by other Jews as Jews. The Jewish tradition of “matrilineality” – defining as Jewish a child born of a Jewish mother – points to a biological definition of Jewish identity. But Judaism also accepts converts.

Taken all together, these various understandings have led Jews to regard themselves (and others to regard Jews) variously as a people, a nation, a tribe, a family, and a faith – sometimes in various combinations, sometimes all at the same time.

But Hitler, like many antisemites before him, specifically – and repeatedly, in writings, laws, and speeches – labelled Jews as a physically impure Slavic-descended race, in contrast to what he termed the blonde, blue-eyed, genetically pure German Aryan race. Nazi propaganda promoted pseudoscientific ways to supposedly identify Jews – by the size of their nose and lips, or the shape of their heads, among other things.

Hitler was obsessed by what he considered the biological fact of Jewish identity, and wrote that the Final Solution was inspired in part by his drive to create a more “pure” and singular human race, rid of “Jewish” and other impurities.

The Nazis drew on a tradition of “racially” stereotyping Jews that scholars have traced at least to 1000 CE. The long, hooked-nosed trope, for example, appeared in everything from medieval paintings to fictional characters, like the villain Shylock from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. So, Jews were persecuted as a “race” by their neighbours in Europe and elsewhere for centuries before Hitler outlined many of his ideas in Mein Kampf in a jail cell in 1925.

In her next-day apology on The View, Goldberg said the Holocaust was “indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race”.

Are Jews white?

Goldberg also stumbled into an ongoing debate within and beyond the Jewish community: Are Jews “white people”?

Behind the question is another stereotype – that a Jew is a person with white skin, descended from European ancestors. In other words, an average Ashkenazi Jew.

In reality, the Jewish community is considerably more diverse than that. The majority of Jews in North America may be Ashkenazi Jews with roots in Eastern Europe, but Jews also descend from ancient communities in Ethiopia, India, China, and beyond. Sephardic Jews come from communities in Northern Africa and what is now Spain and Portugal, while Mizrahi Jews come from the Middle East, including once vital communities in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, and other countries.

Thousands of Jews come from mixed-race and interfaith backgrounds, so even many Jews with Ashkenazi roots aren’t white. Estimates of the proportion of US Jews who are Jews of colour range from 6% to 15% depending on the study and definition.

Still, even as more recognise Jewish diversity, stereotypes persist. White supremacist, hypernationalist and other far-right streams, stemming from the post-2016 rise of the “alt-right”, see Jews as toxic “others”, regardless of what they believe or practice. And on the other end of the political spectrum, some left-wing progressives lump all Jews in with a largely white oppressor class.

With that last name, is Whoopi Jewish?

The extra thick layer of irony underlining this controversy is that it involves a celebrity who wasn’t born Jewish, but who adopted a Jewish stage name because of what she has described as her positive feelings toward Jews and Jewish culture, not for religious reasons.

Why does any of this matter?

Because so many antisemites and European ultra-nationalists are intent on denying that the genocide of the Holocaust happened, or insist that it has been exaggerated, Jewish groups are adamant that the facts of history not be distorted, intentionally or not. Such “accidental” distortion, many argue, can be antisemitic in effect, even if not in intent.

Others suggest that Goldberg’s comments reflect an emerging ideology that’s trying to downplay the historic persecution of the Jews. As Daniella Greenbaum, a former producer at The View, wrote in The Washington Post, “It’s an ideology that tries to turn Jews into white people, that tries to erase Jewish vulnerability and oppression, to squeeze Jews who have light skin into modern American categories of race and ethnicity, and which also myopically categorises the hatred against them into American considerations of what racism looks like.”

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