The Unique Hatred Towards Jews Is Escalating At Breakneck Speed

It's hate on the Right, and ignorance from the Left fueling incredibly dangerous antisemitism that is threatening to get completely out of control.

by Ben Cohen

In February, Whoopi Goldberg caused a stir after she was suspended from “The View” for suggesting that the Holocaust was not about race. “Let’s be truthful about it because [the] Holocaust isn’t about race,” Goldberg said. “It’s not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.”

Apparently Goldberg learned almost nothing from the debacle that outraged Jews, millions of whom lost family members during the Nazi’s insane campaign of racial genocide. During an interview with The Sunday Times last week, she inexplicably doubled down on her argument.

“My best friend said, ‘Not for nothing is there no box on the census for the Jewish race. So that leads me to believe that we’re probably not a race,’” Goldberg told The Times.

Goldberg also expressed her view that the Nazis were not primarily killing people on the basis of race and that their decision to do so was made later. The Times interviewer told Goldberg that the “Nazis saw Jews as a race,” leading Goldberg to triple down on her assertion. “Yes, but that’s the killer, isn’t it? The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying?” said Goldberg. “It wasn’t originally [about race]. Remember who they were killing first. They were not killing racial; they were killing physical. They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision.” 

After being called out Goldberg has (again) apologized for her comments saying that “In this time of rising antisemitism, I want to be very clear when I say that I always stood with the Jewish people and always will. My support for them has not wavered and never will.”

Ignorance fuels hate

I do not think Whoopi Goldberg is an antisemite or harbors any hatred towards Jews. There are far, far worse offenders who are actively encouraging violence against Jews, like Kanye West. But her comments reveal an incredibly worrying trend in American politics that need to be addressed. I covered some of this in an essay earlier this year describing the toxic effects of radical identity politics, specifically as it relates to being Jewish. But I fear the problem is getting worse and a deeper understanding of Nazism, antisemitism, ethnicity and race is needed before something terrible happens.

It is notable that Goldberg’s new statement came after Kanye West’s antisemitic crusade where he pledged to go “Defcon 3 on Jews”. It came after Donald Trump had dinner with West and rabid antisemite Nick Fuentes, and after multiple reports on dramatically rising antisemitism in the US. Reported NPR at the beginning of December:

According to the Anti-Defamation League, 2021 was the highest year on record for documented reports of harassment, vandalism and violence directed against Jews. The watchdog group has tracked these incidents since 1979, and it says 2022 will look a lot like last year.

These record breaking numbers present as part of a consistent, five year upswing in the number of antisemitic incidents, unprecedented in the ADL's three plus decades of data collection.

By making these fact free, highly ideologically tainted statements, the truth is that Whoopi Goldberg is making matters much, much worse during these incredibly dangerous times.

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Nazism was all about race

Firstly, let’s discuss Goldberg’s statement that Nazism “wasn’t originally” about race. Nazism was (and is) specifically about race. It is a political philosophy based on the supremacy of the Aryan race, with its roots traceable to mid 1800’s philosopher Comte Arthur de Gobineau, who published an essay titled “Essay on the Inequality of Human Races”. As a paper from The Shoah Resource Center at The International School for Holocaust Studies notes:

Before Gobineau, racism was mostly a subject for scientists. He turned racism into a cultural and political issue, by saying that the deterioration of the modern age resulted from the mixing of superior and inferior races. He divided humanity into the black, yellow, and white races, and claimed that only the pure white, or Aryan, race was and could be truly noble.

Antisemites used racist theory to prove the morality of their hatred of Jews. Houston Stewart Chamberlain pitted Germans against Jews in his writings. Germans were seen as the highest cultural achievers and the saviors of humanity; Jews were a "bastard race" of greedy, inferior foreigners who lived in the midst of Europe, but behaved differently than their neighbors. Both groups had entered history at the same time, and thus had to compete to the bitter end for domination.

In fact, all of human history was a struggle between the races, and the Germans were fated to destroy the Jews. Other antisemites blamed Jews as the middle class that devoured money and kept others in poverty. The Nazis sharpened political racist philosophy for their own purposes and turned theory into practice in their attempt to destroy all of European Jewry. Racism was a major element in Nazi ideology; the Nazis were able to "justify" their horrible actions by making the Jews seem less human

The Nazis absolutely did engage in a campaign to sterilize or eradicate anyone that they believed to have mental or physical disabilities. But what Goldberg doesn’t appear to know is that Jews with disabilities were targeted specifically for early extermination. Writes Kenny Fries in the New York Times:

At the Karl Bonhoeffer psychiatric hospital in the Berlin suburb of Wittenau, where the exhibition “A Double Stigma: The Fate of Jewish Psychiatric Patients” was held, I learned about, as the exhibition title suggests, how Jewish patients were doubly stigmatized by being separated from other patients, denied pastoral care, and were cared for not at the expense of the Reich but by Jewish organizations. Jewish patients were singled out for early extermination; by December 1942, the destruction of the Jewish patient population at Wittenau was complete.

Adolf Hitler declared his beliefs about the “Jewish Question” publicly in 1919, stating that the ultimate goal should be their “removal”:

In the statement, he [Hitler] defined the Jews as a race and not a religious community, characterized the effect of a Jewish presence as a “race-tuberculosis of the peoples,” and identified the initial goal of a German government to be discriminatory legislation against Jews. The “ultimate goal must definitely be the removal of the Jews altogether.”

This was over 20 years before the Final Solution was put into place. While the Nazis were not using mass death as a tool to remove Jews from Germany previous to 1941, they were still killing them and forcing them to migrate. Removing Jews from Germany was a central aim of the Nazis, and they were committed to doing so using any means at their disposal. I find it extraordinary that Whoopi Goldberg does not know this. It is one thing to spout uninformed political opinions on daytime TV, but when you really don’t have a solid grasp of history, it is probably a good idea not to freewheel it when speaking about something as significant as the Holocaust.

Left wing denialism

The next part of Goldberg’s ignorance on Jewish identity and ethnicity comes from her declaration that her (presumably Jewish) friend told her that “there no box on the census for the Jewish race. So that leads me to believe that we’re probably not a race”.

This flies in the face of all available evidence that Jews are an ethnically distinct minority with a very specific history. This isn’t us taking our cues from “the oppressor”, but from historic and biological evidence.

I took a 23anMe test a couple of years ago and the results show that I am roughly 50% Ashkenazi Jew. My Jewish ancestry is traceable to countries like Ukraine, Belarus and Poland where Jews fled to in the Middle Ages from places like Spain, Germany, Austria and Hungary. The genetic ancestry company states that:

Ashkenazi Jewish people settled in Central and Eastern Europe in the late Middle Ages, but their modern descendants remain genetically more similar to other Jewish populations than to their European neighbors, reflecting shared western Asian origins.

As hard as this might be for someone steeped in left wing identity politics, this means that despite my skin color, I am an ethnic minority distinct from other white Europeans. I am as ethnically Jewish as Barack Obama is black.

Why is Goldberg so insistent on challenging this?

Schrodinger’s whites

Upon closer inspection, the “whiteness” of Jews is a highly subjective topic. As Jewish author David Baddiel notes, “Jews are not quite white either: they are Schrodinger’s whites, white or non-white depending on the politics of the observer.”

To most white Christians, Jews are not white. To Whoopi Goldberg and left wing identity politics adherents, they are white. It is a lose-lose situation in the same way that Kanye West can blame his spectacular downfall on the Jews because he was right all along.

It is incredibly tiring to have to defend this position to people who purport to want to help minorities. Yes, Jews are often very successful with high levels of education and disproportionately high representation in a number of highly paid professions. Yes many Jews support Israel’s appalling behavior towards the Palestinians, and many Jews are racist (I know a few of them). But they are still targets for discrimination, so much so that they are now the most targeted community in the US. In New York City last month, hate crimes against Jews surged an astonishing 125%.

The Left appears to believe that we are not worthy of protection because a) we have white skin, b) money, and c) support Israel (none of which is always true — I have very dark skinned Jewish friends, most of my family grew up without much money, and most of the Jews I know have very serious issues with Israel).

I do not equate Whoopi Goldberg’s historic and ideological ignorance with right wing antisemitism. Right wing antisemitism is violent and incredibly dangerous. But I believe Goldberg and other left wing ideologues are perpetuating dangerous myths and historic nonsense about Jews. My feelings on this aren’t just based on comments from figures like Goldberg, but from my own direct experience interacting with other liberals. Many of them are well meaning, but have become so immersed in the left’s new political orthodoxies on identity that they genuinely don’t regard antisemitism as a real problem. Because if Jews are white, what are they complaining about?

I have lost count of conversations I’ve had with other liberals who think I’m overplaying antisemitism, or haven’t experienced it myself — which is in some ways a form of antisemitism.

The virus without a vaccine

Former head of the ADL and Holocaust survivor Abraham Foxman described anti-Semitism to The Atlantic as “an ancient virus without an antidote or vaccine.”

“We’re living in an environment today that is more user-friendly to the virus,” he continued, “a time of incivility, lack of tolerance, no respect for the truth. And with it comes politicization, polarization, frustration, anger, hate—all the elements that fuel the virus.”

Pinchas Goldschmidt, the exiled chief rabbi in Russia recently warned the Jewish population there that they should escape while they still can. “We’re seeing rising antisemitism while Russia is going back to a new kind of Soviet Union, and step by step the iron curtain is coming down again. This is why I believe the best option for Russian Jews is to leave,” he told the Guardian.

To anyone with a familiarity with Russian history, this isn’t surprising. But his comments about America highlight just how bad antisemitism around the world is getting.

“For many years, Jews in the US believed that it was an exception, that whatever happened in Europe and other countries could never happen there,” Goldschmidt said. “But over the past three years there have been more attacks on Jews there than in Europe.

“What is changing is the political system is much more polarised but also the discourse has been upended by social media. The polarisation we’re seeing has made antisemitism much more acceptable.”

Working together

I have no idea what it is like to be a black person in America, to be subjected to appalling racism because of the color of my skin. I have no idea what it means to be an Asian woman living in fear of violent attack because I “brought Covid to America”. I would never presume to tell anyone what their own experience is, particularly when it comes to prejudice and racism, and I’d like to help if I can. But I can’t for the life of me understand why this courtesy is not extended to Jews. And if you think I’m exaggerating, ask any Jew you know and they’ll tell you the exact same thing.

I appreciate Whoopi Goldberg’s apology and renewed commitment to fighting antisemitism. Let’s hope she doesn’t make the same mistake three times in a row though, as it is getting increasingly difficult to figure out who are allies are. Because right now, we really need them.

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