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This has been an eye-opening stretch for Jews across the United States. It started with a neo-Nazi protest in Orlando, and it ended with national outrage about ignorant and disrespectful comments by Whoopi Goldberg on "The View," where she stated that "the Holocaust isn't about race," but amounts to "white people doing it to white people, so y'all gonna fight amongst yourselves." Families at dinner tables in Jewish—and many non-Jewish—homes spent time discussing Jewish history and whether Jews are, or are not, in fact a race.
The Jewish community is justifiably hyper-sensitive about the topic of the Holocaust. More than one-third of world Jewry was murdered by the Nazi regime. So, flippant comments about the topic raise the ire of the Jewish community—and good people from around the world.
As many commentators have jumped to explain, Whoopi's claim that "the Holocaust isn't about race" is simply false. The very basis of the Holocaust was Hitler's theory of Aryan racial supremacy, set forth in his manifesto Mein Kampf and expounded upon in his Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and in various other writings and speeches. In short, Nazi ideology categorized (non-Jewish) Germans as members of the "superior" Aryan race, and Jews as a subhuman race. Under Nazi control, Jews in Germany were first excluded from citizenship and civil society through a series of ever-escalating laws. Eventually, of course, the Nazis systematically murdered six million Jews.
So when Whoopi Goldberg says "the Holocaust isn't about race," she is just wrong.
Still, the underlying question lingers: Are Jews a race?
This is a difficult and hotly contested question. There is no debate that Judaism is a religion. It is a religion that began when God revealed himself to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, after their liberation from bondage in Egypt. The basis for Judaism is found in the five books of Moses—the Torah—and subsequent scriptural writings. But, under Jewish law, there is only one relevant question for determining if someone is Jewish (holding converts aside): Is your mother Jewish? If yes, you are Jewish. So, Judaism is certainly a religion, but it is so much more than that—as implicitly defined by Jewish law itself.
Jews are also an ethnicity, and a people. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, "Ethnicity refers to the identification of a group based on a perceived cultural distinctiveness that makes the group into a 'people.'" Jews are a people who came from an ancient land in the Middle East called Judea (modern-day Israel, including what some call the "West Bank.") Later spread to the four corners of Earth, Jews meticulously kept our traditions, practices and cultural identity—whether in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa or the Americas. Of course, the Jewish people always kept a strong connection with the Land of Israel.
Today, there are Jews of almost every race. There are Black Ethiopian Jews, Jews from every country of Latin America, Indian Jews, Eastern European Jews and of course there are Jews from all across the Middle East—Israel, Yemen, Morocco, Syria, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere. In fact, in the modern State of Israel, the majority of Jews are not "white" (or Ashkenazi) at all; they are Mizrahi Jews—descendants from the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa.
But, still—what is a race? How is a race determined?
These are questions often debated by academics. But academic squabbling aside, the issue with Whoopi's comments is that they perpetuate ahistorical lies about how the Nazis viewed the Jewish people, minimize the Holocaust by over-generalizing it to "inhumanity" and "white people fighting against white people," and highlight the lack of education in our country about the Holocaust. This gross lack of education, coupled with the rise of far-right extremism and far-left antisemitism, is a recipe for disaster.
To make matters worse, the new conversation about the Jewish people's identity and history is being led by a non-Jewish actress—who ironically chose a Jewish last name as her stage name—who is now attempting to squeeze the Jewish experience into her myopic, progressive view of the world.
To conclude, a word to Caryn Johnson (a.k.a. Whoopi Goldberg): To say the Holocaust was not about race shows your ignorance, and unfortunately the ignorance of many. You say that, instead, the Holocaust was about "inhumanity." To help you understand why you are mistaken, when the disgusting, hate-filled terrorist Dylann Roof killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, it was not merely an issue "inhumanity." Saying so would be offensive, and would remove the real reason as to what drove Roof to perpetrate such a heinous atrocity. Instead, for Roof, it was about pure, unadulterated racism: A racism that the Jewish people will stand up and fight against, by your side Whoopi, every single day.
Gabriel Groisman is the mayor of Bal Harbour, Florida, and an attorney at LSN Partners, which is based in Miami. He is a Jewish community leader and a leading voice in the global fight against antisemitism. Find him on Twitter: @gabegroisman.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
