Posted on 02/08/2022 6:19:44 AM PST by Kaslin
In 1946, two years after Jewish attorney Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe crimes committed against the Jewish people in Nazi Germany, The United Nations General Assembly recognized his definition and outlawed genocide as an international crime against humanity. Lemkin, himself a Holocaust survivor, had combined the Greek word genos, meaning “race,” with the Latin suffix-caedo, meaning “to kill” to create a term that would specifically refer to the mass murder of a race of people.
And yet, this simple truth was entirely lost on Whoopi Goldberg, who last week repeatedly insisted to her TV audience on The View that the Holocaust is “not about race.” On John Colbert, she elaborated on her reasoning, arguing that the Holocaust wasn’t truly racial because the fighting was “white on white.”
In denying the component of race that was fundamental to the Holocaust, Goldberg is guilty of Holocaust inversion, a modern-day manifestation of antisemitism that has slipped into the mainstream zeitgeist and been echoed by celebrities and influencers to their millions of social media followers. Contemporary antisemitic tropes are especially dangerous in progressive circles, often reiterated unknowingly or cloaked in the language of social justice.
What Goldberg fails to understand is that antisemitism is an ancient hatred that has morphed through the ages to suit the needs of any given society. As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks eloquently observed, “In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were hated because of their race. Today they are hated because of their nation-state, the state of Israel. It takes different forms, but it remains the same thing: the view that Jews have no right to exist as free and equal human beings.”
The idea of “White Jews” is one such anti-Jewish canard that has perniciously seeped into cultural, academic, and political institutions and is now regarded, in many cases, as moral orthodoxy. The phrase is as twisted as it is destructive. Six-million Jews, including 1.5 million children, were murdered in the Holocaust, for the very reason that they were considered not White i.e., non-Aryan, and thus an inferior race. As writer Seth Frantzman noted, “Jews persecuted by the Nazis for being ‘wandering Jews’ would have been shocked to find themselves now defined as ‘White’ after being persecuted for being non-White.” It is worth pointing out that there were also Jews of color killed in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
In Israel, more than half of its Jewish citizenry are Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews of color, indigenous to the Levant or North Africa, and aesthetically indistinguishable from their Arab brothers and sisters. There is also a sizable Black Jewish population, primarily from Ethiopia. But even portraying Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe as “White” is an insidious offense because today, in America, being associated with “Whiteness” confers the assumption of power and privilege. Those who have power and privilege are viewed as oppressors. White Supremacists, for example, are oppressors of both Black and Jewish people. For Jews to be absorbed into the same category as their enemy is perverse. As one Black journalistexplained, “What a lot of Black people don’t know is that to many, Jewish folks are not considered White. And despite skin tone, if your people’s history features years upon years of state-sanctioned, culture-based violence, propaganda, and othering, I doubt you’d identify as akin to your oppressor.”
The label “Jewish privilege” is equally as repugnant and damaging, precisely because being “White” or “privileged” did not save six million Jews from being brutally slaughtered. Nor did it save those socio-economically well-off Jews of Squirrel Hill who were mercilessly murdered at Pittsburg’s Tree of Life Synagogue four years ago. And despite Israel being a nation made up primarily of Jews with Middle East origins, Israel is frequently portrayed by progressives as a “White supremacist” country. Anti-Israel activists have even re-fashioned the term “Jewish supremacy,” coined by neo-Nazi David Duke, to refer to the Jewish state. This is grotesque Jew hatred, plain and simple. “It is part of an agenda to prevent Jews from being Jews, and affix different labels to them,”says writer Seth Frantzman.
Jews, who barely make up two percent of the U.S. population, have overwhelmingly suffered the majority of religious hate crimes in America for decades. 60 percent of American millennials and Gen Z today are unaware that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, with 34 percent believing the number of victims has been exaggerated, and 20 percent believing that Jews themselves were responsible for their own genocide.
Despite these alarming statistics, Jews are frequently disqualified from being worthy of social justice advocacy. Jews, and particularly Israelis or those who identify as Zionists, have been excluded from progressive movements ranging from the Woman’s March to Black Lives Matter events on account of Jewishness being maliciously cemented into wealth and Whiteness. As the great Hannah Arendt once said, “wealth without political power is a recipe for hatred.” Jews who are wealthy in America simply do not fit into the simplistic concept of power that we are taught today in anti-racist seminars and DEI training.
Jews pre-date western civilization, and thus, Judaism does not fit into a western lens. It is both a religion and an ethnicity, a culture and a tradition, a nation and a people. Prior to the American civil rights movement, racism was globally understood as referring to a race of people, not necessarily their skin color. The American definition narrowed this down and limited the problem of racism to White dominance over Blacks. Now, Americans are falsely taught that racism does not exist except in the form of a Black person discriminating against a White person. Projecting an Americanized definition of racism onto other parts of the world leaves Jews vulnerable to antisemitic attacks, as it assimilates the hatred that is unique to Jews into the un-related, though equally concerning issue of Black equality. As tempting as it is, American racial politics should not be projected onto other global struggles, certainly not onto the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany or onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to law professor David Bernstein, the idea that the Holocaust was “White on White crime” is a sign of “intellectual decay” that has led to Jews being both rejected and targeted, particularly on college campuses. One Oberlin Jewish student recalls being disparaged multiple times by her progressive peers who argued that “the only reason people care about the Holocaust is because it happened to White people,” while a Kosher food co-op was told they couldn’t serve “ethnic” food because Jews aren’t ethnic, but rather White.
Jews are tired of having their identities policed and socially engineered from both ends of the political spectrum, viewed as non-White, non-Christian globalists by the antisemitic right, and White, wealthy exploiters of the poor or of Palestinians by the antisemitic left. Once the nuanced and diverse ethnic and racial identities that comprise the Jewish people are flattened into an Americanized construct of Whiteness, Jews no longer register as legitimate victims who continue to be marginalized in society. Instead, they are elevated to the top of the racial caste system and seen as deserving of our hostility and hatred. It is easy, once this happens, to rationalize violence against any minority group.
Though she has apologized, Goldberg’s indirect branding of Jews as being on the wrong side of history, complicit with the oppression of Black people, must remain a teachable moment. Goldberg is an influential figure in the cultural and entertainment community, who uses her voice to shape people’s opinions on critical matters. It is imperative for her to understand that views such as these do not just hurt. They kill.
Whoopie.... the karen
....really Caryn Johnson...
What I don’t understand is people saying “Jewish” is a race?
Some jews are white and some aren’t.
It's Whoopi. Look at what she actually said, no more no less. Because there surely is no more to it.
Whoopi Goldberg is not a thinker. She's not, say, a Camille Paglia. She's an African Grey.*
*a parrot with an uncommon ability to imitate speech.
I think the author meant Stephen Colbert.
I wonder if all of her brain damage was caused by eating out of dumpsters during her younger years.
Whoopi was playing the ‘victim Olympics’ and blacks are always the winners.
The CRT black-version has blacks as the victims and ‘whites’ as inherently evil. To not admit being evil is ‘white fragility.’
It’s the first step toward genocide and far more dangerous than mere offense.
https://museeholocauste.ca/en/resources-training/ten-stages-genocide/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_stages_of_genocide
I’m not going to bash you for that comment, but provide you the context. Nazi Germany in the 30s after Hitler came to power believed that all true Aryans were the master race. Anyone else was sub human. Out of that mindset began the Final Solution where Jews, Gypsies, chek, Russian, etc, must be eliminated. Race is not just skin color, it’s belief in superiority of your culture and features.
What I don’t understand is people saying “Jewish” is a race?
Here is the definition of race:
“race
rās
noun
A group of people identified as distinct from other groups because of supposed physical or genetic traits shared by the group. Most biologists and anthropologists do not recognize race as a biologically valid classification, in part because there is more genetic variation within groups than between them.”
Jews have distinct genes that are identified with their ethnic group and no other, making them a race.
Race does not depend on specific physical characteristics, even to the point where anthropologists don’t even consider it a valid classification.
Technically unless one views jews as another race which I don’t she was sorta correct
But race did impact WWII
The Nazis wrote extensively of the master race and lesser races like Jews and Slavs and Roma and so on
The Japs thought they were the superior oriental race and we thought they were a more savage race than us with some degree of accuracy in my opinion
Opinions on race and ethnicity is the human condition worldwide
Judaism is a religion
Jewish is an identity
It’s not a race
Nearly all except some adoptees are white
Bullshit
Biologist speak from both sides of thier mouths
They deny race yet can identify a bones 1000 years old by racial classification
These are the same sorts who embrace terms like non binary
Race sure matters when it’s deferring reward to anyone non white
As far as I know they’ve never been able to identify old bones by race, just species or sub-species which is not the same thing.
I don’t think even Hitler called Jews a different species.
But I agree that the way race is used today is entirely a political term that’s used to do what humans usually do: take advantage of other people.
No they call it identifying ethnicity since they do not believe in race anymore since it’s unfashionable unless conferring status to non whites
Here’s someone not in denial
https://medium.com/forensic-anthropology/what-can-be-read-in-bone-remains-a81fb7562fde
I believe they exagerate their ability to identify race by simply looking at the physical characteristics of bones. DNA analysis is a different matter of course.
The example of them getting it very wrong was the Kennewick man skeleton. They result they came up with from physical characteristics was a European who looked like Patrick Stewart. When DNA analysis became available years later, it was clearly native American remains.
So, you can identify race or ethnicity with genetics, but it is not always obvious just by looking at someone. Sometimes it is.
No. Whoopie is a professional negress.
She’s Black, black for a living.
That is what I always thought, ie.. Jewish is a religion not a race.
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