What Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust remarks can teach us about antisemitism

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• Judy Woodruff:

  The history of the Holocaust has been part of school curriculums for decades, but how it is taught and how much Americans really know about the mass genocide of European Jews and other minority groups has changed in recent years.

  Concerns about that very issue were triggered this week by remarks from Whoopi Goldberg. The comedian, actress, and talk show host made the comments Monday on ABC TV's "The View." Goldberg and her co-hosts were discussing a school district's book ban on a graphic novel about the Holocaust, "Maus."

  Here is some of what Goldberg initially said during her conversation.

  Whoopi Goldberg Co-Host, "The View": The Holocaust isn't about race.

• Woman:

  No.

• Whoopi Goldberg:

  No, it's about race.

  (CROSSTALK)

  Joy Behar, Co-Host, "The View": Well, they considered Jews a different race.

• Whoopi Goldberg:

  But it's not about race. It's not about race.

• Joy Behar:

  Well, what is it about?

• Whoopi Goldberg:

  Because you — it's about man's inhumanity to man. That's what it's about.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Those remarks were widely condemned, and, in response, a number of experts detailed the Nazi's racism against Jews.

  The next day, Goldberg invited the head of the Anti-Defamation League on the program to explain the historical record. And she apologized.

• Whoopi Goldberg:

  I said that the Holocaust wasn't about race, and it was instead about man's immunity to man.

  But it was indeed about race, because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race.

  Now, words matter. And mine are no exception. I regret my comments, as I said. And I stand corrected. I also stand with the Jewish people, as they know and you all know, because I have always done that.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Afterward, ABC suspended Goldberg for two weeks.

  The episode has raised larger questions. And we want to spend a few minutes looking at those.

  Ethan Katz is the co-director of the Berkeley Antisemitism Education Initiative, and he is an associate professor of history and Jewish studies at U.C. Berkeley.

  Ethan Katz, welcome to the "NewsHour."

  First of all, what was your reaction to Whoopi Goldberg's initial comments that the Holocaust was not about race?

• Ethan Katz, Co-Director, Berkeley Antisemitism Education Initiative:

  Thank you for having me on the show.

  This was a shocking thing for someone to say, someone who is well-educated, someone who has many, many Jewish friends and has for decades.

  And so the Holocaust was all about race, right? The historical record of the Nazis is so clear they thought they were fighting a race war primarily against Jews, also against Slavs, and Roma and other groups.

  And so to make this statement reflects tremendous lack of historical, sort of basic knowledge about the nature of the Holocaust and also the nature of anti-Semitism as primarily a racial hatred of Jews because it sees Jews as a racial, biological group.

  You can't change your race, whereas people can convert religiously, right? But the Nazis didn't care if you had grown up Christian. If you had three or four Jewish grandparents, you were Jewish, and you were supposed to be annihilated.

• Judy Woodruff:

  I'm wondering, Ethan Katz, how many people you think there are out there who believe that the Holocaust was not only an attempt to eliminate the Jews because of their religion, but also because of their race?

  I'm asking because there was a poll done we know of just a couple of years ago showing a surprisingly high number, large percentage of young people aged 18 to 39. Almost a quarter of them didn't have a clear memory of what the Holocaust was about.

  What's your sense of the public's understanding of all this?

• Ethan Katz:

  Right.

  So, that study from the Claims Conference from the fall of 2020 is very disturbing in terms of the numbers of people who didn't know how many people were murdered in the Holocaust. One in 10 under 40 had never heard the word Holocaust before, they said.

  So, I think we are in a moment of diminished public consciousness about the Holocaust. Probably the 1990s, with many anniversaries from World War II, with the opening and growth of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, was perhaps the height moment. And now we're in a moment where it is certainly disturbing.

  And the problem is that you cannot understand the nature of anti-Semitism without understanding that it was racial from the beginning and that the Holocaust was about race and that, for American Jews today, their experience of anti-Semitism is still profoundly shaped by that.

• Judy Woodruff:

  I think we — those of us who are having this conversation, who are listening to it understand the answer to this, but why is it important that people know this history?

• Ethan Katz:

  The history of the Holocaust is a history that tells us so much about what can happen when we do not understand how to coexist with different groups of people, right?

  And it's something that happened in what was supposed to be the most sophisticated part of civilization in the middle of the 20th century. So it's partly important just because it tells us that, if we begin to exclude people because of their race, or their religion, or how they look, that those can be taken to such destructive ends.

  But it's also important specifically with regard to anti-Semitism, because no one could ever think about exclusion of Jews the same way again. So if you want to understand why the American Jewish community responds the way it does to certain perceptions of anti-Semitism today, one of the fundamental reasons is because small kinds of exclusion that had existed for centuries led to an attempt to annihilate all Jews and the murder of six million Jews.

  And people said, well, we have to stand up to all the small things now, because we know where it could lead.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Do you think that these conversations we're having right now around race could change the way we think about anti-Semitism, and vice versa? I mean, should we be thinking about the two things in a more, I guess, interconnected way?

• Ethan Katz:

  Yes, that's a great question. And I think we do need to, right?

  One of the challenges and one of the things that was exposed in this episode, I think, with Whoopi Goldberg is that we are in this really important moment of racial reckoning. And it has exposed the fact that the position of Jews racially in America is highly complex.

  Most Jews in America are Ashkenazic, more than 80 percent. That means that we are primarily white-skinned, white-presenting. But most Jews in America don't think of themselves as simply white full stop, because of their ethnic distinctiveness, because of the long history of persecution of Jews that has been done in racial terms that we have spoken about here.

  And, unfortunately, we're also in a moment where there is a growing movement of white nationalists who not only don't see Jews as white. They actually see them as the primary catalysts in what they depict as a race war against whites.

  And, at the same time, making it all the more complicated, the fact is, like other people who have white skin, Ashkenazic Jews in America have benefited from not looking brown or Black, and are trying to come to terms with that.

  So, all those things are going on at the same time. And we have to find a way to think about that complexity.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Important conversations, for sure.

  Ethan Katz, thank you very much for joining us.

• Ethan Katz:

  Thank you so much for having me.

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