(Jewish Group) Whoopi Goldberg isn't the only one who doesn't understand antisemitism
On Monday on “The View,” during a conversation about book banning and the Holocaust graphic novel “Maus,” Whoopi Goldberg declared that “the Holocaust wasn’t about race,” because it was “two groups of White people.” Her co-hosts pushed back: Joy Behar noted that the Nazis were obsessed with race, and Sara Haines reminded Goldberg that Jews were not considered White in Nazi Germany. But that was nothing compared with the outrage online, from random Twitter users all the way up to Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League.
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Both sets of comments — first on her show, and later on Colbert’s — reflect a disturbing ideology that is growing increasingly rampant: a concerted effort to rewrite the history of the Jewish people and render the nature of antisemitism as nebulous and as nonspecific to Jews as possible. 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 categorizes the hatred against them into American considerations of what racism looks like. But Jews predate these categories (and America, as a nation) by thousands of years.
The result is an understanding of antisemitism that focuses not on the Jewish victims, but rather the perpetrators. In 2019, while I was still at “The View,” we covered an antisemitic Jersey City shooting that killed three people. The perpetrators were Black, but you wouldn’t have known it from watching the show. Behar blamed white nationalism. It wasn’t that she knew differently: It’s a live show, and she made a mistake. But the subtext was clear: The default assumption is that attacks on Jews come from white nationalists. Anything that suggests otherwise runs contrary to our conception of race and hierarchy and intersectionality, and it goes unnoticed.
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As I watched “The View” on Monday, I found myself thinking of my Oma, my Berlin-born grandmother. What she remembers most about growing up in Berlin is just how much she wasn’t allowed to do: She wasn’t allowed to go the park, the pool or have a bicycle. She wasn’t allowed into restaurants. She couldn’t go to the theater, the movies, museum exhibits or the beach. Many institutions had signs saying, “No Jews, no Dogs.” She carries the trauma of that exclusion with her to this day. As in the American South under Jim Crow, these racial discriminations were state-sponsored. And the similarities of those legal structures is one reason Goldberg’s comments stung so deeply: On Sept. 15, 1935, Nazi Germany established the Nuremberg laws, depriving Jews of German citizenship and forbidding marriage or sexual relations between Jews and Germans. They later banned Jews from voting and occupying public office. These laws were the legal basis upon which the rest of the Nazi’s anti-Jewish policies were built.
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Do be sure to read the article I posted here titled: How to spot gaslighting: 6 things that gaslighters say to manipulate you.