For as long as I’ve been aware of her, I’d always assumed Whoopi Goldberg was Jewish. Aside from the stereotypical name, there’s always been something witty and wise-cracky about her that’s meant it's never been a stretch to see her as one of the tribe. She even pretty heavily implied it in the pages of this very paper back in 2011.
So it was somewhat of a surprise to see her trending on Twitter to find that not only is she not particularly Jewish but is apparently pretty stupid when it comes to the Holocaust.
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro)
January 31, 2022
By now you’ve probably seen her now widely-lambasted attempt to explain away the Holocaust as “two groups of white people fighting" and suggesting that there was nothing racial about the attempts to eliminate the Jewish people.
After her comments went viral she offered the customary apology to the cancel Gods with a promise that the Jewish people have and would continue to enjoy her unwavering support. Great, you might think, we can mark the case of Whoopi Goldberg vs. The People closed. Another chapter in the 'big book of famous people said stupid thing' that we can all move on from.
Unfortunately for Whoopi however, her employer ABC news has seen things slightly differently and suspended her for two weeks. I’m sure some people will applaud this, saying that this sort of punitive measure is the best way to deal with views that are unpalatable and indeed deeply incorrect. But I disagree. The only way attitudes to anything ever change is through engaging with and educating the person who holds these views.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of Americans who watch The View that may also have a similarly blinkered view of the Holocaust, and suspending Whoopi Goldberg because she chose to vocalise them is not going to change their minds. It simply adds another thing to the long list of things that people think you can’t talk about. If we give any and all conversations about the Holocaust this special status where you can lose your job if you say the wrong thing, we simply encourage people to never even try and engage with the subject matter.
A big theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day was capturing the wisdom of survivors while we still can. I spoke to one, Eve Kugler, who told me as the amount of survivors inevitably decreases, the greatest threat to Holocaust education will be those who seek to trivialise it and distort it. When people are presented with those who faced the gas chamber, it's quite hard to argue with them. So it’s more vital than at any point since the end of the war to not fence off these conversations from people who could have their minds changed.
Instead of suspending Goldberg, ABC should suggest that she engage with Holocaust survivors, hear their testimony and more importantly, share it with her millions of viewers. Maybe if she was face to face with someone who’s seen humanity’s darkest days then she’d understand that it was never “two groups of white people fighting each other.”
