Whoopi Goldberg is not doing Holocaust denial. She is doing progressive antisemitism.

Her comments are very concerning, but not for the reasons that so many Jews seem upset about.

Jewish leaders have been all over the news these past few days on kind of communal PR-mission to correct Whoopi Goldberg’s comments about Jews. Unfortunately, this noble quest is making me cringe, and missing the point.

Unless you have been living on an asteroid, you will know by now that Whoopi Goldberg said on The View that the Holocaust was not about race because it was about White people killing White people. And even after she apologized and got suspended, she went on Stephen Colbert and continued to say the exact same thing.

As a result, she is being corrected all over the media and internet with well-meaning people saying that Hitler thought Jews were a race, and so Jews are a race.

True, there is a defining physiological element to Hitler’s definition of Aryan versus Jewish. But this entire response is wrongheaded and missing the real danger here.

First of all, despite Hitler, Jews are not a race. We are multi-racial and completely dispersed, There is no Jewish DNA or standard Jewish skin color. Anyone can be Jewish just by converting. The entire “Jews are targeted because we are a race” has the effect of denying our ethnic diversity, which is obnoxious to some of our own people.

Second of all, since when are we defining ourselves based on how Hitler or any other rabid anti-semite defines us? How in the world did we get here? Where our PR goal is to prove Hitler right? So many Jewish writers have debated the question over the years of what we are — a people, a civilization, a nation, maybe “just” a religion. It feels wrong for all of us to suddenly get to our feet screaming, “No! We ARE a race!”

I’m like, wait, what? What just happened?

Third of all, Whoopi Goldberg never denied the Holocaust, and did not deny that it happened to Jews. She KNOWS that Jews were the main targets. She KNOWS that the Holocaust was an awful thing. She is not denying any of those things and there is no need for that particular argument in this particular context. (Though issues of Holocaust distortion are a whole other front, but that is not this.)

So why is this Whoopi episode so alarming?

Because we have to listen closely to what she actually said.

Her point was NOT to deny that Jews died in the awful Holocaust. Her point is that Jews Are White People.

More specifically, Jews are White People just like other White People, like White Supremacists, Nazis, or other White people who……

Well, she didn’t finish her sentence.

But I know what she left out of her sentence. I’m sure many of you do, too.

We know what she was implying when she called Jews White People like All Other White People. Because some of us have been hearing this in places we wish we weren’t.

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Last May, during the Israeli war in Gaza, lots of people in the American progressive camp were angry at Israel. They argued that Israel was unnecessarily killing and harming Palestinians in Gaza. I don’t want to debate that here (although I have written about my experiences during the war with my daughter in the south giving birth under rocket fire for those interested. But later.) Let’s leave aside actual Israeli policy for this post.

The point is that in May, as a result of the war in Gaza, the American progressive camp went into overdrive with what we can only describe as an intense attack not only on the IDF but on Jews. Jews who dared to express even slightly pro-Israel stances were piled on and at times lost their jobs. A women’s writing group that I belonged to kicked out its Jewish members. Things like that.

I was dealing with this close-up. A major American organization that I was heavily involved with (that I would rather not name right now) was facing the same thing. A few of its members got together to draft a series of resolutions that unilaterally described Israel as evil, that aimed to deny Israel any military aid at all including Iron Dome, and that blamed American Jews for the deaths of Palestinian children.

The months of debate that followed were awful. There was no nuance or subtlety. Israel was evil, full stop. According to the sponsors of these resolutions, all Jews were responsible for this conspiracy to wipe out Palestinians. Jews have disproportionate control over American money. Jews have outsized political influence. And all of Israel is the result of money- and power-wielding American Jews who are hell-bent on killing Palestinians.

Let’s put aside whether some of these claims have kernels of truth. That is not the point here. And anyway, all extremism and demagoguery is based on bits of fact. That’s how it all works. So I’m not dedicating this post to arguing those points.

Back to the anti-semitic resolution process. Although these resolutions were just words on paper with little if any practical implications, we needed to discuss them in order to defeat them. And I was in a position in the organization where I needed to respond on behalf of Israelis.

The ideas that emerged from the resolution sponsors during this debate were chilling.

We heard that Jews-slash-Israelis were responsible for George Floyd’s murder. (Some Israeli special ops train some American law enforcement officials and apparently are the “inventors” of the fatal choke hold; ergo his death is on Israel and Jews.)

We heard that Jews were slave-owners and ran slave trades therefore the history of American slavery is on Jews.

We heard that African Americans and Palestinians are effectively the same. This came with an ultimatum: anyone who does not support Palestinian liberation has no business supporting Black Lives Matter, we are told. They are one and the same issue. (Again, I don’t want to get into details. But a five-minute examination of the two issues will easily demonstrate that African Americans and Palestinians do not share history, goals, culture, experiences, or even skin color. But again, that’s not the point here.)

This all-or-nothing ultimatum — that either you support all people of color who are cast as political underdogs, or you are just a right-wing racist — represented what has become a kind of Progressive Litmus Test around race and Jewishness. That is, there is only one way to be progressive — which is to take an entire range of extreme views, many of which are based on misinformation, or partial truths.

What we learned from these exchanges was that in many corners of the discussions on race in America, the primary enemy of African Americans is not just White Supremacists or racists. The primary enemy of Black people in America is The Jew.

The Jew has, in some corners, become synonymous with the White Person.

And THAT is what Whoopi Goldberg was so insistent upon.

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This is important. Because she was not denying the Holocaust, or denying that Jews have suffered. She was doing something else, that to me is even more terrifying.