By MARSHA MERCER
Loose talk often rules the day, but what we say and how we
say it still matter.
Just ask Whoopi Goldberg, who, while talking about a graphic
novel about the Holocaust that was banned by a Tennessee school board, asserted
a stunningly wrong view of history.
The Holocaust was “not about race” but about “man’s
inhumanity to man,” she said Monday on ABC’s “The View.”
When her co-hosts pushed back, she insisted: “But these are
two white groups of people,” she said. “This is white people doing it to white
people, so ya’ll going to fight amongst yourselves.”
Her comments were ignorant or misinformed and led to
immediate and widespread condemnation.
“Racism was central to Nazi ideology. Jews
were not defined by religion, but by race. Nazi racist beliefs fueled genocide
and mass murder,” the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington responded to Goldberg
in a tweet.
Goldberg quickly apologized. “My words
upset so many people, which was not my intention,” she said. “I misspoke.”
But Kim Godwin, ABC News president, while acknowledging
Goldberg’s apologies, suspended her from “The View” for two weeks, saying
Goldberg needed to think about the impact of her “wrong and hurtful comments.”
Goldberg, a longtime ally of the Jewish community, was born
Caryn Elaine Johnson in 1955. The origin of her stage name is hazy.
“The true story is that my family is Jewish, Buddhist,
Baptist and Catholic – none of which I subscribe to, by the way, as I don’t
believe in man-made religions. . . So I took the last name from a Jewish
ancestor. And I happen to be gaseous, which explains the first name, short for
whoopee cushion,” she told Reuters in the 1990s.
But subsequent research by Henry Louis Gates Jr. revealed Goldberg’s
roots traced to West Africa, and she had no Jewish forebears, Gates wrote in his
2009 book “In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans
Reclaimed Their Past.”
Goldberg’s recent comments seem to reflect an evolving
definition of race and racism as relating only to people of color, some Jewish
scholars said.
“What she said was really horrendous, but it’s not her
original idea,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center in Los Angeles, said in an interview on Talkline with Zev Brenner, a
radio program and podcast. “I don’t think she has a bad bone in her body, but
she’s parroting now a new definition that’s wrong.”
This “woke definition” of race as exclusively pertaining to
Blacks and other people of color, Cooper said, is repeated over and over,
taught in schools and has been adopted by some in the Jewish community.
But “Adolph Hitler and the Nazis were all about race,” he
said. “We were the ultimate inferior” race.
Polls show Americans in the 21st century may be
losing the shared memory of the horrors of the Holocaust, when about one third
of the world’s Jews were murdered.
Only 45% of American adults know 6 million Jews were killed
in the Holocaust, a Pew Research Center survey reported in 2020. In a separate
survey at the same time, only 38% of teens know 6 million Jews were killed.
The banned book that sparked Goldberg’s comments, “Maus” by
Art Spiegelman, tells the story of his parents in Nazi death camps. The book depicts
Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. “Maus” won a Pulitzer Special Award in Letters
in 1992.
The McMinn County School Board in southeast Tennessee voted
last month to ban the book from the 8th grade language arts curriculum
because of “inappropriate language” – eight curse words -- and a drawing of a
naked female mouse, thus missing the point of the work altogether.
“This is not about left versus right,” Spiegelman told The
Tennessean newspaper. “This is about a culture war that’s gotten totally out of
control.”
Nothing spurs readership like censorship. The “Maus” books
have sold out on Amazon and won’t be available for weeks.
For her part, Goldberg got a history lesson from which
others may learn.
“It is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis
considered Jews to be an inferior race,” she said Tuesday. “Now, words matter,
and mine are no exception. I regret my comments, as I said, and I stand
corrected.”
©2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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