Whoopi

True Compass

I’ve enjoyed Whoopi Goldberg’s comedy for decades.  And I’ve been impressed with her acting, in The Color Purple and in Ghost, when she won the Academy Award.  But in the end, I know Whoopi Goldberg best from her recurring role on Star Trek, the Next Generation (yes, a Trekkie here).  She played a knowing and insightful bartender in the restaurant/lounge of the Starship Enterprise, who had a special friendship with the Captain, Jean-Luc Picard (purely platonic).  In that role, I always felt that Whoopi played herself; explaining time distortions and alien civilizations and acting as a compass pointing to truth and fairness.

And when I’ve listened to Whoopi Goldberg in panels as herself, that same compass always seemed to come through.  She was direct and clear, and was able to cut to the core of an issue and hold her ground. 

Definitions

So it was with some surprise that I heard last week that Whoopi was embroiled in controversy about the Holocaust.  In this time when battlelines are drawn on almost every issue, the Whoopi Goldberg I knew could never be a “denier”.  And she’s not.  But she has fallen into a rhetorical “trap” about the Holocaust, one that I often had to explain to high school students when I taught about that horrific chapter in history.  I hope that teachers today can still have those conversations with their classes.  But it’s understandable that some may be frozen in fear by our battlefield culture. 

It’s a bit of an esoteric conversation:  was the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jewish people (and four million others) by the Nazi death machine, a racial issue?  After all, Whoopi isn’t wrong, the Nazis were Caucasian, and most Jews were Caucasian as well.  So it was a “white on white” attack, a genocide to be sure (“mass killing of a nation or ethnic group).  But was it a “racial” genocide?

Race or Religion

Jews are not defined as a “separate race”.  After all, people can “become” Jews just like they can become Catholic, at least they can become Reformed or Conservative Jews, not Orthodox Jews.  Traditionally, Judaism was “passed” from one generation to the next through the mother (so, though I am “half-Jewish”, since my Dad was Jewish and my Mom was Catholic, I couldn’t be an Orthodox Jew.  However, the Reformed Temple would welcome me in).   

On the other hand, Jews were isolated throughout thousands of years of history.  At first it was a tribal thing in the Holy Land, but later, it was a cultural/religious law.  Jews could only marry Jews, and outsiders weren’t allowed.  On the other hand, Jews were also persecuted and often isolated by other cultures ( in the Russian Pale, or the Jewish Ghettos in European cities). There was limited interaction between Jews and non-Jews.  So there are “racial” characteristics of those who are “culturally Jewish”, whether they are religiously Jewish or not.  

So “cultural Jews” share genetic characteristics, “looks”, certain diseases, and a long heritage of discrimination.  Whoopi’s not wrong:  Jewish people aren’t “a race”.  But they are more than just a religious group, more than the Southern Baptists down the street or even the Roman Catholic Church my mother grew up in.  She was English, born of a father of Irish descent and a mother of Scottish heritage.  So she was English, Irish, Scottish; and Catholic.  

But in much of the world, Jewish people were considered Jews, who lived in England, or Ireland, or Scotland.  And that reversal in order made all the difference.

Nazi Ideology

The “racial” aspect of the Holocaust was an outgrowth of that difference, and so much uglier.  German Jews fought for Germany in World War I at a greater percentage than regular German citizens.  To those Jews, Germany was their homeland, deserving of defense.  But after the loss of the War, and the economic catastrophe that followed, the Nazi Party used Jews as the scapegoat for all the nation’s troubles.  Jews were “at fault” for losing World War I (they weren’t), and Jews were ruining the economy (they didn’t).  

The Nazi racial theory placed the German “Aryan” race, with proto-typical blonde hair and blue eyes and Nordic descent, at the top of their “racial pyramid”.  And they placed Jews as a “sub-human” race, whose existence threatened to contaminate the “Master Race” at the top.  As the Nazi’s gained power, they began to take action against German Jews.  It started as simply identifying them throughout the nation, then moving Jews out of positions of power.  It was accompanied by a national propaganda campaign to convince the rest of the German nation that the Nazi actions were “OK”.  After all, they were “just” Jews.

Nazis’ Choice

We all know how that turned out.  Of the fifteen million Jews in Europe before World War II, six million died in the Holocaust.  They weren’t the only “racial” group to be consigned to the ovens:  as many as half a million Roma were also killed.  And they were accompanied by political prisoners, the physically and mentally handicapped, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Whoopi Goldberg might be “technically” right about the definition of race.  But she missed the point.  Her definition didn’t matter in the Holocaust.  It isn’t important to the lost six million.  The Nazis were in power – and they determined that Jews were “a Race”:  one to be eliminated.  To those six million, and to those who understand the Holocaust today, that’s the only definition that’s important.

I hope Whoopi will get the message.