What should we make of Whoopi Goldberg’s comments to Janice Turner of The Times?
The actress was suspended from her American talk show early last year after suggesting that the Holocaust was white-on-white violence and nothing to do with racism.

She issued an apology. But now she has told The Times that the Holocaust wasn’t originally racist, because “they were not killing racial; they were killing physical”.

The first and most obvious lesson from this is that we should stop pushing people to make apologies that they don’t actually mean.

We have turned public apologies into a sort of performance, a hoop through which people must now jump. They are now divorced from whether people are sorry for what they have said, whether they have actually changed their mind.

In fact, it turned out that the actress was sorry that she was in trouble, she was sorry that people were cross with her, but she wasn’t remotely sorry for what she had said. Making an apology the first thing we call for after an unpleasant or, in this instance, grotesque remark is a mistake.

The second lesson is that even very intelligent people, as Goldberg clearly is, with liberal intent and experience of racism, can be frighteningly ignorant about the Holocaust.
Her comment that the Holocaust didn’t start with race is so ridiculous it is hard to know where to start.

Then there was the amazing comment that “you could not tell a Jew on a street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was the point I was making.”

Even if this was ever true of Jews, it was certainly untrue after the Nazis made my Mum sew a big yellow star on her coat. It is astonishing that Goldberg doesn’t appear to know this.

We certainly have a long, long way to go educating people about the Holocaust, and about antisemitism.

The third lesson is that interesting points can emerge from people’s ignorance and nonsense, things we should consider and discuss. And Goldberg did pose one worthwhile question.

She asked Turner why we should accept the Nazi view that Jews were a race. “Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they are saying?”
It is certainly true that many German Jews rejected the idea that Jews should be seen as a race. Judaism was a religion, they said. And Goldberg is right, the Nazis, the killers, did change that perspective.

Many Jews who did not appreciate it before did subsequently realise that the ties that held us together as a people are more than just religious ones.

But it is monumentally insensitive of Goldberg to fail to see and thus to deny the way Jews now feel about this. We have learned (once again) that we can be killed because of ancestry and it is a lesson we can’t unlearn. So it was insensitive, yet still an interesting point for us to consider.

I think Turner captured her interviewee’s next mistake best, and thereby provides our fourth lesson.

She thinks that Goldberg has trouble seeing racism except through the lens of African-American experience.

This makes Jews just one more kind of white, which is a very crass way of looking at things, of erasing thousands of years of Jewish experience, not least because many Jews are people of colour.

Such narrowness is disappointing in someone as talented as Goldberg. And it is contributing to a tragic split in the coalition that Jews formed with civil rights activists during the Martin Luther King years.

But let’s not make the same mistake as Goldberg. Let’s not think that this coalition can only be put back together by African Americans changing. Let’s play our own role here too.

Let’s be more alert, more sensitive, less crass than we complain she has been. Let’s try and learn more about the black experience of racism in America and the rest of the world.
Let’s make sure we appreciate how people of colour feel, particularly in places where they are in a minority.

We have every right to argue that people should try and understand what has befallen Jews. But we must with equal insistence learn about other people’s experience of racism.

When my grandfather, Alfred Wiener, founder of the Wiener Library, retired after a lifetime as the archivist of the anti-Nazi movement he gave an interview to the JC in which he said that you cannot combat antisemitism while ignoring other manifestations of racism.
His grandson thinks he was right.

Daniel Finkelstein is Associate Editor of The Times