Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust comments a few weeks ago highlight a worrying trend that is becoming increasingly widespread in mainstream discourse.
On The View, co-host Whoopi Goldberg stated that the Holocaust wasn’t about race, but rather it was about “man’s inhumanity to man” and that it was between “two groups of white people.” While attempting to apologize on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, she instead doubled down on her statements and said that the Nazis had lied and actually had issues with ethnicity and not with race.
She eventually made what appeared to be a more authentic apology on the daytime show. Goldberg said she regretted her words and that she “stands corrected.”
However, the incident highlighted a worrying trend that is becoming increasingly widespread in mainstream discourse. Whoopi didn’t come up with this idea by herself. This is a narrative that once would have been unheard of, but now is becoming widely accepted by people who aren’t even antisemitic. Jews are not seen as a minority but rather as white, which means they are powerful and cannot be “real victims.”
Over the last few thousand years, Jew-hatred has taken many different shapes and forms. Some forms of antisemitism have been more overt and pronounced, while others have been more subtle. However, they all share the same prevailing theme – a deep hatred of Jews.
The antisemitism du jour distorts and erases Jewish history to reflect a narrative that is driven by political agendas - one that is intent on erasing Jews and delegitimizing their rights. When unhinged lies become gospel, it emboldens antisemites and provides a cover for their attacks against Jews. Without the truth, the Jewish people’s rights and safety are under threat.
This isn’t the first time antisemites have attempted to erase Jewish historical truths. The early Christian church claimed that the Jews were responsible for Deicide when it was actually the Romans. The Soviet regime was one of the pioneers of Holocaust distortion and rejected that the Nazis targeted Jews. A more recent example is the denial of the Jewish historical connection to the land of Israel.
This was illustrated when in the same week as Whoopi’s comments, Amnesty International published a report claiming that Israel is an apartheid state. The report, which is chock full of lies, doesn’t once mention Palestinian terror or Israeli security considerations, nor does it recognize the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancient homeland. Amnesty made sure to omit these facts to ensure that the world perceives Israel as a colonialist, apartheid state so that it can legitimize BDS and attacks against Israel.
Even more disturbing, an increasing number of Jews have fallen prey to this false narrative. Jewish progressive organizations like IfNotNow, J Street, and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) promote a revisionist history that denies the Jewish people’s indigeneity to Israel and perceives Zionists as white colonialists. They don’t even recognize their own history.
In George Orwell’s dystopian fictional society of 1984, he says, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
Let’s be clear about the Jewish story - the Jewish people are not victims. We are a people that thrived despite the persecution and oppression we have faced. We are a resilient nation that loves life, a people rooted in faith and traditions. We cannot allow the haters to erase our history and take control of our heritage of nearly 4,000 years. We must learn about our remarkable story of who we are and where we come from so that we can ensure the world knows the truth.
Mark Twain famously asked in his essay ‘Concerning the Jews,’ “The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
Our secret is and has always been our commitment to remembering our extraordinary past, treasuring our traditions, and passing them on to future generations. When we remember, we can ensure the world never forgets.
Elisheva Aarons is the digital director for United with Israel. As a dynamic and perceptive digital marketer, Aarons creates and implements successful strategies to promote the truth about Israel.
This op-ed is published in partnership with a coalition of organizations that fight antisemitism across the world. Read the previous article by Yifa Segal.