Jewish Identity — Whoopi!
To begin with the obvious, Whoopi Goldberg is a national treasure, one of the greatest entertainers of all time, and a significant voice for truth and justice. Her comments about the Holocaust (that it was “not about race”) were well-intended, but indeed disingenuous and mistaken, as she has now acknowledged in multiple sincere apologies. Her mistake was commonplace. People make the same mistake all the time, because Jewish identity is so confusing. (For The Atlantic, Yair Rosenberg skillfully nails the problem in a few neat paragraphs, but I’m going to ramble about it for a while.)
I live with the effects of this confusion. I am Jewish, and quick to describe myself as such. Partly, this is because of the long history of Jews having to deny being Jewish in order to survive. I know I’m lucky that I don’t have to deny it, and that makes me want to acknowledge it. Beyond that, I’m proud of the history of Jewish-American achievement, especially in art and entertainment. One reason I like being Jewish is that it connects me to so many of my heroes. I’m Jewish — you know, like the Marx Brothers and Stephen Sondheim!
Another thing I have in common with my Jewish heroes, and with a majority of American Jews, is that we are not religious — Jewish people, rather than followers of Judaism. Phrases like “culturally Jewish” and “ethnically Jewish” are tedious but useful. Tom Lehrer once said that in his household “god was primarily an expletive,” and being Jewish had “more to do with the delicatessen than the synagogue.”
So I’m quick to describe myself as Jewish, but also quick to add, “but I’m not religious,” even though nobody asked. This is because I’m not religious, which is very much a choice, and one I feel strongly about. I don’t want to be mistaken for something I’m not. Many people hear “I’m Jewish” as the equivalent of “I’m Christian” (which does imply religiosity), while I mean it more along the lines of “I’m Black” (though Jewish isn’t a color) or “I’m Chinese” (though Jewish isn’t a nationality).
I used to bristle whenever I heard myself described as “white.” If that was the only box for me to check on a survey, I checked “other.” I felt that Jews were not really “white people” in the American sense. Partly, this was because the mainstream acceptance of Jews in America is still a fairly recent phenomenon; and partly, it was because I felt unconnected to the history of “white people” in America. Only recently, thanks to our evolving racial dialogue, have I come to realize that I benefit from white privilege regardless of whether my ancient ancestors were specifically Anglo Saxon. To disown that fact would be to deny that I have an advantage not available to people of color, even if I feel more connected to them in the saga of American history. So now I check “white” instead of “other.” It doesn’t tell the whole story, but then, what does?
Yair Rosenberg writes that “well-meaning people have trouble fitting Jews into their usual boxes. They don’t know how to define Jews, and so they resort to their own frames of reference, like ‘race’ or ‘religion,’ and project them onto the Jewish experience. But Jewish identity doesn’t conform to Western categories…because [it] predates Western categories.” Rather than fitting neatly into our concepts of race, nationality, or religion, Jewishness “is an amalgam of all these things — more like a family (into which one can be adopted) than a sectarian Western faith tradition — and so there’s no great way to classify it in English.”
With antisemitism on the rise, along with every other kind of racism, this is an important conversation — but a challenging and complicated one, because of this very confusion about Jewish identity. In order to meaningfully engage with these ideas, one has to confront concepts which are anathema to many Americans: that religion is not an immutable characteristic; that “white” is not a coherent ethnic identity; that ethnic identity is not the same thing as national origin.
And then there’s the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the specific subject of Whoopi Goldberg’s remarks, which were made during a conversation about the banning of Maus by a school board in Tennessee. I’m often surprised by the misconceptions people have about the Holocaust. Goldberg demonstrated one, that it was “not about race,” but others have been repeated in the conversation about the conversation. We keep hearing that six million people were killed in the Holocaust — Goldberg said this, too — but it’s dramatically incorrect. Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, along with seven million non-Jews. I’m always stunned by the “six million people” error; does it come from an unconscious desire to keep the number lower, or from a resistance to the idea that Jews were not the Nazis’ only victims?
Suspending Whoopi Goldberg from The View for two weeks does absolutely nothing to advance or clarify any of this. If anything, it will make people less inclined to seriously discuss the Holocaust on television, and the misconceptions will remain, and the defensive gut reactions will harden into code, and the real conversation will never take place.
