Like the rest of the world, I recently learned that Whoopi Goldberg dominated a news cycle for saying that what the Nazis did to the Jews was not about race. She was even accused of “giving comfort to those who want to wipe out the memory from historical records“! She ultimately apologized, and was suspended from The View for a couple of weeks. But I can easily see this from her perspective, and I’d like to explain why.
Let’s first be clear about some things that Whoopi absolutely did NOT say:
* The Holocaust did not happen.
* The Holocaust was not horrible.
* The Nazis did not hate the Jews.
Not at all! She just said that that hate was not based on race.
When I first heard the kerfuffle about this, I thought “Are Jews actually considered a different race?” I didn’t think so, but wasn’t sure, so I looked it up. I had to look at several pages enumerating races before finding one that even mentioned Jews, and even there it was mentioned only as a second-order distinction below race. And when I asked “Are Jews Caucasians?” I found lots of pages essentially saying “it’s complicated.” I also found a page saying that in a survey, most US Jews (note that Whoopi lives in the US) said that they considered themselves white (Caucasian). And a black person can convert to Judaism and be considered Jewish, because the term’s meaning is partly about origins, partly about religion, and partly about culture (holidays, traditions, dress, etc.).
Whoopi is a black woman, and not just a little bit black. The question of whether Jews are Caucasians may be complicated, but for her, it’s not complicated at all. She is clearly of another race, a race disparaged by some in her country, and that has surely had a significant impact on her life. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that to her the situation with Nazis and Jews seems different. Hate, yes. Awful, yes. But was it really racism?
Also, there are big reasons why many Germans hated the Jews that have absolutely nothing to do with race. For example, the church the Germans went to stupidly told Germans that lending money for interest was a sin. Well, nobody is going to lend money without interest, so Germans were strongly discouraged from being lenders. So Jews, a minority, said “Hey, we’ll lend you money!” There was lots of demand for loans, but low supply because the majority couldn’t lend, so of course the interest rates the Jewish lenders charged went up. Any economics professor would tell you that that was the inevitable outcome. So the lenders made a lot of money and the Germans resented it. But this had nothing whatsoever to do with race — it was entirely about religion; some dimwit high up in the church hierarchy set the stage for Germans to hate Jews.
And on top of that, according to the church, the Jews were sinners for charging interest on the money that the Germans wanted to borrow. More reason for the Germans to hate them!
Now it’s true that the Nazis talked about Germans being a “master race,” superior to others. But that’s just wrong; Germans are not a race. This is not controversial; it was just Hitler being a populist leader working the crowd. You don’t really get to call the people in your country a race just because you want to; political boundaries don’t define races!
Some might say that all that matters is that the Nazis thought it was about race, even if they were misusing the term. But let’s test that. There is some tension between Texans and Californians — partly political, partly cultural, and partly because they are rivals in many ways. And some Texans are not happy that a lot of Californians are flowing into Texas right now, following business moves to more favorable regulatory conditions. Nobody would say that Texans’ feelings about Californians are about race. Would it change anything if Texas’s Governor Abbott were to start spouting nonsense about the superiority of “the Texas race” and how “the California race” is dragging down our society? Is it racism now? Let’s say he gets thousands of bigots in Texas to start saying the same thing. Is it racism now? I don’t think so; do you?
Given all of this:
* the fact that Jews are not generally considered a separate race
* the fact that lots of Jews, including the majority where Whoopi lives, consider themselves to be of the same race as Germans
* the fact that being Jewish is as much about religion and culture as it is about origins
* the fact that Whoopi is quite obviously of a different race and has no doubt felt racism many times in her life
* the fact that there are big reasons having nothing to do with race why many Germans hated the Jews
* the fact that the Nazi propaganda about race was not tied to any real-world concept of race
I personally am not at all surprised that the Nazi treatment of the Jews doesn’t really seem like racism to Whoopi.
Stray Thoughts 
