Whoopi’s Immaculate Misconception

By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel

“The View” featured a discussion about a Tennessee School District’s decision to remove a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust from its middle school curriculum. Whoopi Goldberg asserted, “The Holocaust isn’t about race. No, it’s not about race.”

Goldberg made a mistake that revealed her ignorance about the Holocaust. She claimed that the Holocaust was not about “race.” As an African-American, she viewed the destruction of 6 million Jews as purely a “white” problem.

This past Monday, Goldberg bluntly asserted that the Holocaust was not about race. Joy Behar, who is Jewish, asked Goldberg, “What is it about?” Goldberg replied, “It’s about man’s inhumanity to man; that’s what it’s about,” Goldberg posited. Ana Navarro chimed in, “But it’s about a white supremacist going after Jews and Gypsies,” guest co-host Ana Navarro contended. “Goldberg then asserted, “But these are two white groups of people,” Goldberg said to her shocked colleagues.

One might ask: What type of evil action against another human being is not in the category of “Man’s inhumanity to man?” Why did she think that Hitler’s genocidal war against the Jews was no different from other acts of violence? Unfortunately, she seems to think that racial intolerance and violence is only about one’s skin’s color. Adding more fuel to her previous misguided comments, Goldberg double-downed her remarks that the Holocaust wasn’t about Jews on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, calling the Holocaust “white-on-white” crime.

One might wonder: How could somebody on a major news program such as, “The View” could get it so wrong about the nature of the Holocaust?

Ignorance. It is clear history was never one of Whoopi Goldberg’s better subjects.

Goldberg thinks that Jews are primarily “entirely white,” even though Jews come in all colors and belong to all racial groups. Hitler always spoke about “exterminating” Jews because, in his racial philosophy, the Jews were not “human” beings but were vermin to be destroyed, much like one would call an exterminator to get rid of a termite infestation.

In Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he set out to explain that the  Germans were the “master race” and that it had the moral imperative to rid its society of the “inferior” races, such as the Jews, the Roma, and the Poles. Hitler had plans to enslave the African populations once he destroyed the Jews and the other inferior races. Incidentally, in Mein Kampf, Hitler described children resulting from marriages to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the white race “by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe.” Hitler further asserted, the”Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the White race which they hate, thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate.”[1]

Hitler feared that Germany would become like France, which had become increasingly “negrified.”[2] To prevent this from occurring, Hitler initiated a eugenics program to sterilize mixed racial couples in his effort to “eradicate the Rhineland bastards.”

It is a pity Goldberg did not realize Hitler’s hatred of African peoples.

The real problem with Goldberg’s remarks should serve to remind our educators in school that we must recognize that violence against any race is not limited to those who happen to be white people committing violence against people of a different racial group. Racial violence transcends ethnicity. Any ethnic minority can become the victim of genocide and racial harassment.

Did Goldberg deserve to be suspended for only two weeks?

Actually, she deserved to be fired altogether.

Yet, despite everything that has occurred, Goldberg’s foolish comment may have done the Jewish community a huge favor:  She has put a new focus on the importance of Holocaust education in the public schools. As awful as her comments were, I think the Tennessee School Board’s decision to ban Maus is a much more severe indecency to the memory of the Holocaust victims.

Jewish leaders must act graciously in this case and utilize Goldberg’s comment to completely rethink how we teach students about the evils of racism in the schools. Racism is not only about skin-coloring; it is also about demonizing the Other because of one’s faith or ethnicity.

And for the people in Tennessee, I hope you are taking notes.

[1] Mein Kampf, volume 1, chapter XIII.

[2] Mein Kampf, Vol. II, chapter XIII.