Are Jews a Race?

[Mosby]

Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust comments reflect how Jews don’t fit into Western boxes

By Yair Rosenberg
FEBRUARY 01, 2022


Yesterday, celebrated actor and TV host Whoopi Goldberg caused a minor meltdown on ABC’s The View when she asserted that the Holocaust “isn’t about race.” Later that day, she joined The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and expanded on these remarks in an uncomfortable exchange, insisting that “the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people.”

As countless commentators pointed out, this line of thinking is profoundly mistaken. The Nazis were obsessed with race and defined the Jews as their racial inferiors, which is how they justified exterminating them. This is why the Nazis targeted anyone with a Jewish grandparent, regardless of whether the person identified as Jewish or not. Nazism was a blood-based doctrine of racial supremacy, and its consequence was the genocide of the Jews. The very term anti-Semitism, which casts Jews in racial terms, was popularized by a German anti-Jewish activist who wanted to give his hatred a scientific sheen. Race is a social construct, and this is how it was constructed in Nazi Germany and much of Europe.

To her credit, Goldberg apologized last night on Twitter, and then again this morning on The View, alongside Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League, who talked through the issue with the panelists.

Goldberg is not an anti-Semite, but she was confused—and understandably so. In my experience, mistakes like hers often happen because well-meaning people have trouble fitting Jews into their usual boxes. They don’t know how to define Jews, and so they resort to their own frames of reference, like “race” or “religion,” and project them onto the Jewish experience. But Jewish identity doesn’t conform to Western categories, despite centuries of attempts by society to shoehorn it in. This makes sense, because Judaism predates Western categories. It’s not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief. (Einstein, for example, was proudly Jewish but not religiously observant.) But it’s also not quite a race, because people can convert in! It’s not merely a culture or an ethnicity, because that leaves out all the religious components. And it’s not simply a nationality, because although Jews do have a homeland and many identify as part of a nation, others do not.

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https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61f992de9277230021ae11f7/are-jews-a-race-whoopi-goldberg-holocaust/

[mucifer]

1. I honestly worry about Black and Jewish tensions from these discussions. I wish we could unite more.

I don't agree with Whoopi Goldberg. What she said made me very uncomfortable. I really don't like the "who suffered more" argument that comes out of this.

Let's all fight the people who hate us all together and not point fingers at each other.

[mahina]

2. This

All day.

[IrishAfricanAmerican]

3. Amen!

[JudyM]

9. Well said, mucifer.

I watched her on Colbert last night and was disappointed. Her explanation struck me as similar to, as someone said yesterday, an “all lives matter” situation. “White on white” was her subtle downplay of it, or that’s how it seemed to me.

We need to unite against hatred, not divide ourselves.

[PXR-5]

4. We are all members of the Human Race.

[no_hypocrisy]

5. I'm from a Jewish family.

We viewed the Holocaust as extreme religious persecution, not because Jews are a "race".

OTOH, it was the Nazis who thought in terms of race: They were Aryan and persecuted "lower races" and not just Jews. Romani (Gypsies) and Slavs.

And BTW, a lot of Nazi ideology of extermination came from the eugenics movement here in the good ole USA.

[Beastly Boy]

6. Context is key

Last edited Tue Feb 1, 2022, 09:57 PM - Edit history (1)

The idea of race in Nazi Germany is very different from the idea of race in contemporary America. Clearly, Whoppi's remarks were informed by the latter, and those same remarks showed profound lack of awareness of the former.

In the US, race has been largely defined by one's skin color and anatomical features. There are reasons for this being the case, enslavement of people of color by European colonists being among the major ones. Without getting into further details of how race came to be defined in the US, I suspect that Whoopi's remarks were informed exclusively, or mostly, by her experiences as a black woman in the US. It is likely that she never came across the very different definition of race that was used in Nazi Germany, a definition that explains why Holocaust was all about race.

Unlike the US, race in Nazi Germany was defined in much more elaborate and much more confusing categories than the "one drop rule" being the American standard. To a Nazi, races were not defined exclusively by skin color and facial features, although the lowest race category in the Nazi hierarchy consisted exclusively of Africans, African Americans and aboriginal people of Australia and Oceania. Then things get really confusing for an average Nazi. I am not sure of the exact boundaries of the next lowest race category, but I think it included nearly all Asians, most inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, Slavs, Gypsies and Jews. Curiously, not the Japanese. Then came the Mediterranean race of the Southwestern Europe, and ruling over all of them was the Arian race of the Northern and north-western Europe, the Master Race of the nazi propaganda, which, curiously, also included the Japanese. Never mind that a Pole looks more like a German than a Brit and is whiter and more blue eyed than a Finn!

This Nazi hierarchy of races literally defines Jews as a race. It is a historical fact. A fact that unfortunately is being lost on many Americans, black and white. Perhaps even some Jews sprinkled in.

[applegrove]

7. Race is not scientific. There are stickers and splitters. The number of races varies by who

the teller is. So ask peoples themselves. If someone says they are a race, listen to them.

[MyMission]

8. I always check "other" for race

Because I'm not white, and they never offer Semitic as a race. Years ago I learned Jews had not always been considered white. Many country clubs denied membership to Jews and blacks.
Just because "they" decided to count Jews as part of the white race, doesn't mean I want to be counted among them.

On the census I always write in Human as my race. I am a hereditary jew, a Levite. I am member of the tribe. I don't think of us as a race; we are a people. The article makes some good points about our history.

[Cobalt Violet]

10. Curious why this group is under the "religion and Spirituality" forum and not "Race and Ethnicity"?

Maybe that should be changed.

[Behind the Aegis]

11. Curious why this is your question in your first post to the Jewish group?