Managing Misinformation
The blaze has subsided since Whoopi Goldberg insisted the Holocaust “isn’t about race,” but the embers are still burning. Goldberg’s comment started a firestorm during a January filming of her television show The View on ABC. The comedian-turned-daytime-television-host then doubled down on her remark and called the Holocaust an example of white-on-white violence. Although ABC suspendGet More Articles—Subscribe Today!
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The apostle Paul did say that the Jews were a race; he was a Jew. Jewishness is not based on color: There are many shades of Jews from blonde and blue-eyed to tan, to black, to Asian, etc. due to the dispersion of the Jews all over the world. Jewishness is based on their religion and culture. In the Old Testament the Jews were supposed to marry within their tribe and genealogies were kept very carefully. In the Bible ancestors of the Jews were noted. Marrying a gentile (non-Jew) was usually not permitted since most of the gentiles were idol worshippers in the Old Testament.
Whoopi Goldberg was going with the Anti-Defamation League’s 2020 redefinition of racism as “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” By this redefinition (from the original “the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another” or “a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics”), she understood Hitler as not being racist. The ADL now says that racism occurs “when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.”