Letter: Sorry, Whoopi: The Holocaust Was All About Race

Dear Letter to the Editor:

On two recent occasions, Whoopi Goldberg, a celebrity with a very high profile platform called “The View,” has promulgated the ahistorical fantasy that the Holocaust of six million Jews had absolutely nothing to do with race.

She has defended her ignorance with “Why listen to the killers?” And the Nazis only brought in race late in the game, so to speak. 

Of course not only is “Mein Kampf” filled with Hitler’s description of the Jews as a race, a designation he spoke of even long before the publication of “Mein Kampf“, but the Jews ALSO viewed the antisemitism of National Socialism as racial.

In fact a much stronger case can be made that the Holocaust was about race and not about religion, not withstanding Whoopi Goldberg’s gibberish to the contrary.

Nothing makes this fact clearer than the tragically prescient words of Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu and one of leading Jewish scholars of the 20th century. (Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature and chairman of the department at Dropsie College — today part of the University of Pennsylvania as the Katz Center of Advanced Judaic Studies; then professor of medieval Jewish history and Hebraic literature, also at Dropsie; then Professor of Hebraic studies at the University of Denver; Professor of Judaic Studies and chairman of the Department of Semitic Languages and Literature at Cornell University. Of course, he is best known for his magnum opus, the 1400 page “Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain“).

Yet as a twenty-three-year-old in 1933 Benzion Netanyahu wrote the following — incredibly prescient and incredibly tragic — words:

“Racial antisemitism is inviting a global war against the existence of the Jews, as a race that “poisons” human society. If racial antisemitism spreads, it will not only endanger Jewish rights but the existence of Jewish people everywhere.”

“In the face of the “Holocaust” facing the Jewish people, our role is to repeatedly remind the entire world what Germany was inculcating to its own sons. We can only crush racial antisemitism if we prove that German racism is not directed at Jews alone.  We must convince others that Hitlerism’s attack on the Jews of Germany is an attack on human society as a whole”.

(“Bibi: My Story“,  Benjamin Netanyahu, 2022, page 107-108).

So Hitler talked about race when planning the murder of the Jews and one of the great Jewish scholars of the 20th century talked about race when anticipating the murder of the Jews. 

Yet Whoopie Goldberg in her ethnic studies/critical race theory perversion of history repeatedly denies that the Holocaust had anything to do with race.

Clearly when one hears Whoopie Goldberg pontificate about Jewish history, it is best to apply Mary McCarthy’s rule when listening to Lillian Helman: assume everything she says is a lie including “and” and “the”.

Richard Sherman
Margate, Florida