No, Whoopi, the Holocaust Doesn't Fit Your Narrative

Less than a year earlier in January 2022, Goldberg (nee Caryn Elaine Johnson) made similarly inaccurate statements. On “The View,” she insisted that the systematic killing of six million Jews by Adolf Hitler, who was obsessed with dilution of German Aryans by the Jews, was not about race. Rather, it was white-on-white crime, a white man’s “inhumanity” to white men.

While the media raged over her wildly inaccurate reading of history, Whoopi doubled down. In a subsequent appearance on late-night TV (where she had clearly been dispatched to clean up the damage), Whoopi calmly re-stated her original opinion, that the definition of race is something that can be seen.

Her appearance on late-night TV came after she tweeted a perfunctory apology for her initial comments. Ironically, in the tweet, she said had been informed and now understood that Hitler annihilated the Jews because he deemed them to be an inferior race.

Clearly, she didn’t understand.

In the Times interview, Whoopi went back to dismissing the idea that Jews are a race. Here, she deferred to the opinion of her best friend, who is Jewish: 

When the Times’ interviewer pushed back against Whoopi’s understanding of race and the Holocaust, the actress became indignant. Recalling the outrage she sparked with her original comments, Whoopi implied that Jews have “white privilege”:

Watch David Baddiel disprove Whoopi's inaccurate statements on Jews, the Holocaust and racism: 

Hitler rose to power after World War I when Germany was licking its wounds from its defeat. The Nazi party blamed the Jews for Germany’s wartime humiliation.

While in prison for instigating a failed coup against the German government in 1923, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. There, he laid out his views of the Jews as an inferior race threatening the purity of the Aryans.

In 1924, the Nazi party received three percent of the vote. By 1930, Germany was in an economic crisis. In 1932, the Nazis become the largest faction in the parliament, elevating Hitler, as head of the party, to power.

On January 30, 1933, Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

In less than two months, on March 9, 1933, organized attacks on Jews began across Germany. Two weeks later, the Dachau concentration camp opened to imprison Hitler’s political opposition. Dachau later became part of a network of camps used to systematically wipe out six million Jews between 1933 and 1945.

By April 1933, Germany had ceased functioning as a democracy and became a full-fledged police state. It was then that, of all the prisoners rounded up in Dachau, the camp began (surreptitiously) murdering Jews.

The mentally and physically disabled were the second group to go. As with Jews, people in this category were considered a threat to Aryan genetic purity and targeted for mass murder. The killing of the disabled (the “T-4” program) started around 1940, seven years after Hitler began killing Jews.

By 1941, the T-4 program was publicly known. Outcry forced the Nazis to officially end the program. In a year, an estimated 70,000 disabled Germans and Austrians – men, women and children – were gassed or killed by lethal injection. However, the program secretly continued through the war, killing an estimated 200,000 between 1940 and 1945.

Three months after Hitler’s ascent to power, racial laws against Jews were passed. Following an April 1, 1933, general boycott against Jews, the first law was passed. The law barred Jews from the German army and from jobs in the civil service, the judicial system and public medicine. Public burnings of books authored by Jews took place throughout Germany.

By September 1935, the “Nuremberg Laws” had stripped the “inferior” Jews of their citizenship. The Nuremberg Laws defined citizenship as “exclusively a national of German blood.” Since Jews were not of “German blood,” marriages and “extramarital intercourse” were forbidden between “Jews and citizens of German or racially related blood.”

Jewish actors were subsequently dismissed from theaters and Jewish authors’ works were rejected by publishers. As noted by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Center, “ … scientists and physicians were involved in the theoretical underpinnings of the racial doctrine.”

Whoopi might be interested to know that top German legal scholars looked to America for justification of their racial laws against Jews. They were fascinated that America, a liberal country committed to equality, was able to make racial distinctions that science was unable to find.

In 1934, 30 states in America “forbid mixed marriages between white and colored races.” As noted by Kenan Malik in an article titled, “Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust remarks drew on a misguided idea of racism,”

“Every US state, another [Nazi] lawyer, Roland Freisler, pointed out, had a different definition of what constituted ‘colored.’ Why, he wondered, should not German law also simply distinguish between Aryans and coloreds? ‘Every judge,’ he reasoned, ‘would reckon the Jews among the coloreds, even though they look outwardly white.’”

Although we know the end of this horrific story, Whoopi seems to have forgotten its beginning.

As Malik documents, even the Nazis understood that racial distinctions were a construct devoid of scientific backing. This is why their legal scholars were looking to America during the era of Jim Crow as a way to justify their discrimination against Jews.

Hitler, who was not even Aryan himself, understood that scapegoating Jews as an inferior race was a convenient vehicle to rid the world of the morality of the Jews, his main goal (as he outlined in Mein Kampf). He sought to accomplish this goal by ridding the world of Jews themselves.

When the Times interviewer pointed out to Whoopi that the Nazis considered Jews a race, Whoopi said she rejected their definition.

Yet that’s the point. Whoopi’s focus on the Holocaust as “white-on-white crime” illuminates “the amnesia that exists about the historical use of racial categories,” as Malik correctly notes.

“Race has never been simply about black and white … It’s a concept that has been used to deem certain people biologically incapable or unworthy of being equal … Defining a group as a distinct race became a means of justifying the practice of unequal treatment – that is, of racism. And of genocide, too,” Malik writes.

Whoopi is looking at the Holocaust through the current, misguided lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT), in which Jews are seen as white, and thus privileged, due to their economic success.

According to CRT, Jews cannot be victims of racism.

“It’s a perspective that has led some on the Left to become blind to antisemitism. It’s also led many, like Goldberg, to deny the relationship between racism and the Holocaust,” states Malik.

“This is what should really trouble us about Goldberg’s views – that someone who acknowledges the depth of the tragedy and wants to educate people about the Holocaust should so misunderstand it. Goldberg’s comments tell us something about the way we look at racism (and at Jews) in the present. They also tell us something about what we’ve forgotten about racism in the past.”

Whoopi’s definition of race is based on society’s current standards, just like the Nazis was. Both are a function of cultural and moral relativism. Neither has absolute standards or is rooted in objective truth.

The Nazi’s definition of race proved to be a horror to the world in general and to Jews specifically. Whoopi’s and CRT’s obsession with whiteness is pointed in the same dangerous direction. 

Based on her history, the second part of her apology appears to be sincere, the first part not so much.

Calls are already coming for her de-platforming. Yet Whoopi’s understanding of the Holocaust through the prism of today’s CRT-based race theory is based on ignorance, not malice.

Cancellation is not the answer; education is. Forced and insincere apologies may serve to forestall the former, but they usually mean that the latter will not take place. Ironically, it is ignorance like Whoopi’s that fosters the anti-Semitism she so rightly decries.