Star Trek, the Next Generation (yes, a Trekkie here).\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>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).\u00a0\u00a0In 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAnd when I\u2019ve 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Definitions<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cdenier\u201d. And she\u2019s not. But she has fallen into a rhetorical \u201ctrap\u201d 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\u2019s understandable that some may be frozen in fear by our battlefield culture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s a bit of an esoteric conversation:\u00a0\u00a0was the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jewish people (and four million others) by the Nazi death machine, a racial issue?\u00a0\u00a0After all, Whoopi isn\u2019t wrong, the Nazis were Caucasian, and most Jews were Caucasian as well.\u00a0\u00a0So it was a\u00a0\u201cwhite on white\u201d attack, a genocide to be sure (\u201cmass killing of a nation or ethnic group).\u00a0\u00a0But was it a \u201cracial\u201d genocide?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Race or Religion<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Jews are not defined as a \u201cseparate race\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0After all, people can \u201cbecome\u201d Jews just like they can become Catholic, at least they can become Reformed or Conservative Jews, not Orthodox Jews.\u00a0\u00a0Traditionally, Judaism was \u201cpassed\u201d from one generation to the next through the mother (so, though I am \u201chalf-Jewish\u201d, since my Dad was Jewish and my Mom was Catholic, I couldn\u2019t be an Orthodox Jew.\u00a0\u00a0However, the Reformed Temple would welcome me in).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the other hand, Jews were isolated throughout thousands of years of history.\u00a0\u00a0At first it was a tribal thing in the Holy Land, but later, it was a cultural\/religious law.\u00a0\u00a0Jews could only marry Jews, and outsiders weren\u2019t allowed.\u00a0\u00a0On 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.\u00a0\u00a0So there are \u201cracial\u201d characteristics of those who are \u201cculturally Jewish\u201d, whether they are religiously Jewish or not.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So \u201ccultural Jews\u201d share genetic characteristics, \u201clooks\u201d, certain diseases, and a long heritage of discrimination. Whoopi\u2019s not wrong: Jewish people aren\u2019t \u201ca race\u201d. 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in much of the world, Jewish people were considered Jews, who lived in England, or Ireland, or Scotland.\u00a0\u00a0And that reversal in order made all the difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nazi Ideology<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The \u201cracial\u201d aspect of the Holocaust was an outgrowth of that difference, and so much uglier.\u00a0\u00a0German Jews fought for Germany in World War I at a greater percentage than regular German citizens.\u00a0\u00a0To those Jews, Germany was their homeland, deserving of defense.\u00a0\u00a0But after the loss of the War, and the economic catastrophe that followed, the Nazi Party used Jews as the scapegoat for all the nation\u2019s troubles.\u00a0\u00a0Jews were \u201cat fault\u201d for losing World War I (they weren\u2019t), and Jews were ruining the economy (they didn\u2019t).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Nazi racial theory placed the German \u201cAryan\u201d race, with proto-typical blonde hair and blue eyes and Nordic descent, at the top of their \u201cracial pyramid\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0And they placed Jews as a \u201csub-human\u201d race, whose existence threatened to contaminate the \u201cMaster Race\u201d at the top.\u00a0\u00a0As the Nazi\u2019s gained power, they began to take action against German Jews.\u00a0\u00a0It started as simply identifying them throughout the nation, then moving Jews out of positions of power.\u00a0\u00a0It was accompanied by a national propaganda campaign to convince the rest of the German nation that the Nazi actions were \u201cOK\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0After all, they were \u201cjust\u201d Jews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nazis\u2019 Choice<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t the only \u201cracial\u201d 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\u2019s Witnesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whoopi Goldberg might be \u201ctechnically\u201d right about the definition of race.\u00a0\u00a0But she missed the point.\u00a0\u00a0Her definition didn\u2019t matter in the Holocaust.\u00a0\u00a0It isn\u2019t important to the lost six million.\u00a0\u00a0The Nazis were in power \u2013 and they determined that Jews were \u201ca Race\u201d:\u00a0\u00a0one to be eliminated.\u00a0\u00a0To those six million, and to those who understand the Holocaust today, that\u2019s the only definition that\u2019s important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I hope Whoopi will get the message.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
True Compass I\u2019ve enjoyed Whoopi Goldberg\u2019s comedy for decades.\u00a0\u00a0And I\u2019ve been impressed with her acting, in\u00a0The Color Purple\u00a0and in\u00a0Ghost,\u00a0when she won the Academy Award.\u00a0\u00a0But in the end, I know Whoopi Goldberg best from her recurring role on\u00a0Star Trek, the Next Generation (yes, a Trekkie here).\u00a0\u00a0She played a knowing and insightful bartender in the restaurant\/lounge of … Continue reading “Whoopi”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWhoopi : Our America - Essays on Politics and American Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Whoopi Goldberg was in a Holocaust controversy last week. 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