In 1946, two years after Jewish attorney Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe crimes committed against the Jewish people in Nazi Germany, The United Nations General Assembly recognized his definition and outlawed genocide as an international crime against humanity. Lemkin, himself a Holocaust survivor, had combined the Greek word genos, meaning “race,” with the Latin suffix-caedo, meaning “to kill” to create a term that would specifically refer to the mass murder of a race of people.
And yet, this simple truth was entirely lost on Whoopi Goldberg, who last week repeatedly insisted to her TV audience on The View that the Holocaust is “not about race.” On John Colbert, she elaborated on her reasoning, arguing that the Holocaust wasn’t truly racial because the fighting was “white on white.”
In denying the component of race that was fundamental to the Holocaust, Goldberg is guilty of Holocaust inversion, a modern-day manifestation of antisemitism that has slipped into the mainstream zeitgeist and been echoed by celebrities and influencers to their millions of social media followers. Contemporary antisemitic tropes are especially dangerous in progressive circles, often reiterated unknowingly or cloaked in the language of social justice.
What Goldberg fails to understand is that antisemitism is an ancient hatred that has morphed through the ages to suit the needs of any given society. As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks eloquently observed, “In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were hated because of their race. Today they are hated because of their nation-state, the state of Israel. It takes different forms, but it remains the same thing: the view that Jews have no right to exist as free and equal human beings.”
The idea of “White Jews” is one such anti-Jewish canard that has perniciously seeped into cultural, academic, and political institutions and is now regarded, in many cases, as moral orthodoxy. The phrase is as twisted as it is destructive. Six-million Jews, including 1.5 million children, were murdered in the Holocaust, for the very reason that they were considered not White i.e., non-Aryan, and thus an inferior race. As writer Seth Frantzman noted, “Jews persecuted by the Nazis for being ‘wandering Jews’ would have been shocked to find themselves now defined as ‘White’ after being persecuted for being non-White.” It is worth pointing out that there were also Jews of color killed in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
In Israel, more than half of its Jewish citizenry are Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews of color, indigenous to the Levant or North Africa, and aesthetically indistinguishable from their Arab brothers and sisters. There is also a sizable Black Jewish population, primarily from Ethiopia. But even portraying Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe as “White” is an insidious offense because today, in America, being associated with “Whiteness” confers the assumption of power and privilege. Those who have power and privilege are viewed as oppressors. White Supremacists, for example, are oppressors of both Black and Jewish people. For Jews to be absorbed into the same category as their enemy is perverse. As one Black journalistexplained, “What a lot of Black people don’t know is that to many, Jewish folks are not considered White. And despite skin tone, if your people’s history features years upon years of state-sanctioned, culture-based violence, propaganda, and othering, I doubt you’d identify as akin to your oppressor.”
The label “Jewish privilege” is equally as repugnant and damaging, precisely because being “White” or “privileged” did not save six million Jews from being brutally slaughtered. Nor did it save those socio-economically well-off Jews of Squirrel Hill who were mercilessly murdered at Pittsburg’s Tree of Life Synagogue four years ago. And despite Israel being a nation made up primarily of Jews with Middle East origins, Israel is frequently portrayed by progressives as a “White supremacist” country. Anti-Israel activists have even re-fashioned the term “Jewish supremacy,” coined by neo-Nazi David Duke, to refer to the Jewish state. This is grotesque Jew hatred, plain and simple. “It is part of an agenda to prevent Jews from being Jews, and affix different labels to them,”says writer Seth Frantzman.
Jews, who barely make up two percent of the U.S. population, have overwhelmingly suffered the majority of religious hate crimes in America for decades. 60 percent of American millennials and Gen Z today are unaware that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, with 34 percent believing the number of victims has been exaggerated, and 20 percent believing that Jews themselves were responsible for their own genocide.
Despite these alarming statistics, Jews are frequently disqualified from being worthy of social justice advocacy. Jews, and particularly Israelis or those who identify as Zionists, have been excluded from progressive movements ranging from the Woman’s March to Black Lives Matter events on account of Jewishness being maliciously cemented into wealth and Whiteness. As the great Hannah Arendt once said, “wealth without political power is a recipe for hatred.” Jews who are wealthy in America simply do not fit into the simplistic concept of power that we are taught today in anti-racist seminars and DEI training.
Jews pre-date western civilization, and thus, Judaism does not fit into a western lens. It is both a religion and an ethnicity, a culture and a tradition, a nation and a people. Prior to the American civil rights movement, racism was globally understood as referring to a race of people, not necessarily their skin color. The American definition narrowed this down and limited the problem of racism to White dominance over Blacks. Now, Americans are falsely taught that racism does not exist except in the form of a Black person discriminating against a White person. Projecting an Americanized definition of racism onto other parts of the world leaves Jews vulnerable to antisemitic attacks, as it assimilates the hatred that is unique to Jews into the un-related, though equally concerning issue of Black equality. As tempting as it is, American racial politics should not be projected onto other global struggles, certainly not onto the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany or onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to law professor David Bernstein, the idea that the Holocaust was “White on White crime” is a sign of “intellectual decay” that has led to Jews being both rejected and targeted, particularly on college campuses. One Oberlin Jewish student recalls being disparaged multiple times by her progressive peers who argued that “the only reason people care about the Holocaust is because it happened to White people,” while a Kosher food co-op was told they couldn’t serve “ethnic” food because Jews aren’t ethnic, but rather White.
Jews are tired of having their identities policed and socially engineered from both ends of the political spectrum, viewed as non-White, non-Christian globalists by the antisemitic right, and White, wealthy exploiters of the poor or of Palestinians by the antisemitic left. Once the nuanced and diverse ethnic and racial identities that comprise the Jewish people are flattened into an Americanized construct of Whiteness, Jews no longer register as legitimate victims who continue to be marginalized in society. Instead, they are elevated to the top of the racial caste system and seen as deserving of our hostility and hatred. It is easy, once this happens, to rationalize violence against any minority group.
Though she has apologized, Goldberg’s indirect branding of Jews as being on the wrong side of history, complicit with the oppression of Black people, must remain a teachable moment. Goldberg is an influential figure in the cultural and entertainment community, who uses her voice to shape people’s opinions on critical matters. It is imperative for her to understand that views such as these do not just hurt. They kill.
Karys Rhea is a writer and researcher living in Brooklyn. You can follow her on Twitter @RheaKarys