Dear Whoopi: Race or no race, Jews were murdered because they were Jews

The brouhaha around Whoopi Goldberg has been hijacked by the red herring of race.

Instead of focusing on the horrific murder of 6 million Jews strictly because they were Jews, we’re arguing over whether these murdered Jews should be considered a race. Since Hitler himself saw the Jews as an “inferior race,” Goldberg has come under attack for challenging that categorization. “The Holocaust was not about race,” she said, implying in subsequent comments that the Jews shouldn’t be considered a race.

Even when she apologized on the Colbert Show, she still seemed befuddled as to why her “race” comment should draw such intense rebuke. My guess is that she probably sees race simplistically through skin color, and most Jews are not black.

But she went further when she said the Holocaust was about “man’s inhumanity to man … these are two groups of white people … it’s about how people treat each other.” 

Goldberg’s real offense, then, is not that she refused to call Jews a race, but that she refused to give Jews any special identity. “Whitewashing” Jews, in other words, erases not just our race but, even more importantly, our identity. It doesn’t matter if that identity comes from a race, a religion, a culture or a biblical lineage. Those are distractions to understanding the crime of the 20th century: Jews were murdered because they were Jews.

Should Goldberg be punished for her misguided offense? The mass outcry has already punished her; it wasn’t necessary for ABC to suspend her for two weeks. This is a teaching moment, not a punishment moment.

The suspension has added even more distraction to the original issue of race and further clouded the discussion. Race semantics aside, Goldberg needs to acknowledge the simple truth that the Holocaust happened because all Jews are members of the same tribe.

Hitler knew that better than anybody.