Whoopi Goldberg is Half Right, But What She Got Wrong is All Important

Whoopi Goldberg knows little about the Holocaust and less about Nazi Racism, but she got half the story right.

Contrary to Nazi ideology, Jews are not a race, they are a people and a religion. There are many Jews of color, Black Jews, Hispanic Jews, Asian Jews—not just Jews who are White. The Rabbi of Central Synagogue whom a hostage-taking terrorist mistakenly believed was the key to liberating a convicted ISIS terrorist in a nearby Texas jail, is an Asian-American Jew-by-choice. One can convert to Judaism, one can choose, as many have in this generation, to become a Jew.

Under Nazi ideology, Germans stood at the peak of a racial pyramid, the master race. Those to the West of Germany in Europe fared better and were more respected than those to the East. The Nazis regarded the people to the West as superior. The Danes were considered their brethren. Not so the Slavs to the East. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the architect of the Holocaust, wrote: “For the non-German population of the East, there must be no higher school than the fourth grade of elementary school. The sole goal of this schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500, writing one’s name and the doctrine that it is divine law to obey the Germans. …I do not think that reading is desirable.”

The Germans even targeted their own, Germans of special needs—in offensive terms, “the mentally retarded, physically handicapped, mentally distraught and congenitally ill Germans” were considered “life unworthy of living,” “food wasters,” using scarce resources of the German people who could enhance the lives of their superiors. They, not the Jews, were the first to be gassed in the Tiergarten 4 (T-4) program, named for the building where the murders were implemented.

The Nazis targeted Afro-Germans, so-called “Rhineland Bastards,” the offspring of North African troops who were part of the invading French Army that married or merely impregnated German women.

In Nazi ideology—and after September 1935 in German law—the Jews were a race, defined not by the identity they embraced, the religion they practiced, or the traditions they regarded as sacred, but by the blood of their grandparents. Even priests and nuns, Protestant pastors as well, whose ancestors had converted were regarded as Jews, defined by the blood of those ancestors who had chosen a different faith. Edith Stein, a Catholic nun was murdered at Auschwitz; Eugen Rosenstock Huessy, the great Protestant theologian, had to flee to the United States. Their “crime” was not their faith nor their religion but the blood of their grandparents. The only building left standing in the Warsaw Ghetto after the Ghetto Uprising was a Roman Catholic Church, which served parishioners who professed the Catholic faith but were defined by German regulations as Jews. Jews were regarded as a cancer by Nazi ideology, a threat to the well-being of the Master Race.

In Nazi ideology, the Jews were a race, defined not by the identity they embraced, but by the blood of their grandparents.

At first, Jews were subjected to elimination by forced emigration from German society, culture and land, and then, as the Holocaust began its killing phase, Jew were to be what the Nazis termed “exterminated,” in systematic state-sponsored murder. UCLA’s Saul Friedlander, himself a survivor whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust, termed it redemptive antisemitism—in Nazi ideology, the murder of the Jews was essential to saving the German nation.

Ms. Goldberg, who seems to know little of this history, sees racism as a Black/White phenomenon, yet understands Jews are not a race, but a multi-racial people, who welcome converts. So she could not understand that in the Nazi universe, the ultimate expression of its racist policies was the murder of the Jews. Ms. Goldberg sees Jews as White and hence the issue of race cannot apply. She forgets that false racism and genocide allowed Black Hutus to commit genocide on their Black Tutsi neighbors in Rwanda or West Pakistanis to commit genocide on their East Pakistani/Bengladeshi neighbors.

The issue of race did undeniably apply to the Holocaust. German science, German universities, German doctors, many of them brilliantly trained in pre-Hitler years—often by Jews—tried their hardest to show that Jews were a race, a race that threatened the very survival of the German nation. They distorted their science and they violated the oath of their profession. Doctors presided over the selektions at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They may not have directly administered the poison Xyklon B gas (which arrived in Red Cross trucks) in the gas chambers, but were present at the gassings to pronounce the dead dead.

We should invite Ms. Goldberg to learn a bit and see that in other cultural contexts the issue of race cannot be viewed as a Black/White phenomenon.

We should invite Ms. Goldberg to learn a bit and see that in other cultural contexts the issue of race cannot be viewed as a Black/White phenomenon. Though the political, social, ideological, and legal contexts are so very different, the venom is the same.

Perhaps we should forgive her for she knows not whereof she speaks. Surely, we should educate herself to learn more. Ignorance can be an invitation to learning, an opportunity to grow. We should all aim to be smarter tomorrow than we were yesterday.

Michael Berenbaum is a Professor of Jewish Studies at American Jewish University and Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust.