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Originally posted by Cindysphinx:

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Originally posted by piqué:
Whoopi Goldberg's ignorance is an embarrassment to the show. And in itself is a very strong argument in favor of teaching "Maus" in public schools.

It is terrifying that someone in her position is so ignorant of what the Holocaust was about. If we don't have a larger population educated about persecution of the Jews, it makes it that much easier for it to happen again.

The network needed to make a strong public statement repudiating her ignorance. The media dust-up is good. It shines a bright light on a larger problem of lack of awareness. It produced conversations like these, which make all of us think.

Thanks for posting the links. I’ll take a look.

But it seems over the top to suggest that anyone who starts off with a different understanding is ignorant.

That sweeps in a whole lot of people, especially when you said that the phrase “the Jewish race” is problematic.

Do you see why a person who has been told the “the Jewish race” is offensive might conclude that Jewish people do not wish to be considered a race?

And this feels like a situation where we are eating our young. Whoopi got the most important parts right. The Holocaust was yet another example of mans inhumanity to man, it was motivated in large part by hatred of Jews, it happened, and it is important. That she was unaware of how Hitler chose to frame it up is not unforgivable.

Of course it isn't unforgivable. There are two subjects here: one is the specifics of Whoopi Goldberg, whose "different understanding " is, in fact, ignorance. Ignorance is not "bad" in and of itself. It is a correctable condition. It just means she didn't know. And her statements and apologies make it clear that that is all it was. Of course that is forgivable.

The other subject is the larger implications of this incident. It implies that many, if not most good-hearted Americans don't know much about the Holocaust. That, IMO, is a dangerous situation, especially in these times. When you don't understand something, it is much easier to not recognize when that something is happening again. And when something like this goes unrecognized, it gets out of control. This is why Jews say "never again" and teach their children to pay attention.

As for your comments about the confusion over Jewish race, the links I posted address that.

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Originally posted by CHAS:
German children (not sure how many) are taken to Dachau and other camps.
That should make it real.
I would favor something similar in this country. Things like the massacre in Tulsa could also become part of what is taught.
Will not be holding my breath.

When I was in Germany I was curious about what the modern German attitude is to the Holocaust. I didn't talk to many people about it. The few I did talk to were defensive. They rightly pointed out that plenty of other countries had committed similar atrocities.

They are to be commended for teaching their children about this deeply shameful chapter in their history. It has to be hard to face.

The U.S. is light years behind them in this regard. This country has never fully faced up to the atrocities committed here, be it the massacres of indigenous tribes, the enslavement of Africans, or the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII.

America's conscience is a hot mess. Mature societies face themselves and the wrongs they have committed and atone for them. We have a lot of growing up to do.

I've read a bit more. To me, it sounds like Whoopi Goldberg did eventually make a heartfelt apology and wants to better her understanding. In that light, if I were running the world, she would not get a two week time out... rather The View would spend those two weeks bringing in experts on the Holocaust, genocide, persecution, hate, fascism, and 20th century European history to discuss and debate those issues. Then we could all learn something.

Being put in time out and being told to "sit in the corner and think about what you did" doesn't help anything. I know. I've sat in that corner. It just gives one an opportunity to hone one's bitterness and plot revenge.

I see my comments are solicited here - was trying (desperately) to remove what should have been an inch of snow, only it completely froze underneath. Pfui!

Hope I can back out of my drive for a few urgent errants and so have little time for thoughtful comments, experiences.

Just to submit to Cindy a few comparative experiences.

I was brought up in a super anti-Semitic town (less so now) New Canaan, CT. I was THE only girl in my Jr High who didn't have a turned up nose (no, the daily pinching upward didn't help, nor did growing my bangs over the part where the curve started.)

This was before ethnic looks were in in the slightest (no model in Seventeen had anything but "cute" noses - granted, there wasn't a single one who was in the slightest tinted either. N.B. My Jr High years were probably before most of yours.)

It was easy to persuade my parents to let me have a nose job at 16 and when it wasn't a great job, my "complex" remained.
And so - onward with repeat surgery. (Likewise, my brother with his classic shnozz, had THREE nose jobs! And I swear it grew back. LOL. )

Look up the movie "Gentleman's Agreement" which depicts WASP antisemitism in the day ( and which was modeled after MY TOWN!)
Kind a Jewish version of "Guess Who's Coming for Dinner."

I did NOT like hearing slurs among my classmates, even though they didn't have a clue what "Jew" meant. Especially when teachers chimed in with nasty laughs. Not all of them, but even ONE leaves an indelible impression on a kid. (I just lied about my "ethnicity" until I came out of the closet, roughly at the time of the Eichmann trial. My own father was so ashamed he changed his name from Isaacson to Saxon and failed even to tell his children. (Of course, most of Hollywood in those days had changed their names too!)

Even so, we weren't able to pick and choose our neighborhoods in New Canaan - or join the elite Country Club. (Dad finally confessed to me that he knew of someone whose entrance there had been refused because "someone from college THOUGHT he remembered he had a Jewish grandfather!" Ha!)

It was definitely a feeling of "one drop of Jewish blood was enough". When I was 13, and had my very best friend over for the night, I told her I had a big secret to tell her. I couldn't get up the nerve to tell the truth until dawn was breaking. It says a lot, that she didn't feel the magnitude of the info was a letdown.

Not long before this era, the strict quota for Jewish admissions to universities continued. Dad told me he was beaten up walking to elementary and upwards schools. (He got even with the champion antiSemite, A. Hitler, to a degree by piloting a B24 and bombing Berlin. I'm sure he was acutely aware, however, that if he'd been shot down - and survived - he'd have been sent to a camp, not just treated as a POW.).

My experience reminds me of several light-skinned blacks whose white looking kids had their backgrounds hidden from them (the whole trying to 'pass' bit). Seems to me they had Creole background - often the kids only found out when they happened upon parental birth certificates where they were IDed as "colored".

Cindy, being Jewish (JOOWISH. It even sounded ugly to my brothers and me) in my youth - where I was brought up especially - was a serious birth defect.

I think everybody knows by now that "race" doesn't even have a scientific definition, but as an experience, it sure carried a stigma when I was being brought up. All the more since it was so soon after the Holocaust. Surely, you can identify with some of my experiences even if identification was less obvious (it made it all the more important to stay in the closet.)

In fact, I'll bet unless you were brought in a neighborhood excluding blacks, you and your immediate family felt A-OK - as human beings. No, you couldn't hide being black but then again, you didn't feel like you needed to. (And I'll bet when she was young, pique felt something like what you did about her uber curley hair. BTW I've really learned a lot by your description of black women's complexes to do with hair straightening. Thank you!).

Don't be so quick to exclude other people from their own "racial complexes!" Your history is fraught with lynching and more horrors (in the US, at least), but Jews have thousands of years of pogroms and world-wide rampaging haunting them.
And based on their being singled out as different - identifiably so.

I was especially sensitive about the whole Jewish shtick owing to my shame-ridden background. Our family psycho-analyst (not an unusual appendage, living in "Woody Allen country") told me not long ago, he saw the Jewish "complex" as key to all my serious family neuroses.

quote:

Originally posted by piqué:

quote:

Originally posted by CHAS:
German children (not sure how many) are taken to Dachau and other camps.
That should make it real.
I would favor something similar in this country. Things like the massacre in Tulsa could also become part of what is taught.
Will not be holding my breath.

When I was in Germany I was curious about what the modern German attitude is to the Holocaust. I didn't talk to many people about it. The few I did talk to were defensive. They rightly pointed out that plenty of other countries had committed similar atrocities.

They are to be commended for teaching their children about this deeply shameful chapter in their history. It has to be hard to face.

I have a very close friend who grew up in Germany in the '70s. He's 55 now. I asked him how it was taught in schools. He said that they were only taught to feel ashamed of Hitler, nazis, the Holocaust, and WWII, but he said it was very light on detail about exactly what they should be ashamed of.

As I understand, you cannot buy a copy of MAUS in Germany because in Germany it is illegal to display a swastika and there is a large swastika on the cover of MAUS. Spiegelman refused to let them print a version without the swastika so it could be sold in Germany.

I've read many of the more influential works about the Holocaust - starting even before college until now. Whoopie's initial comment, while understandable at one level, showed a lack of experience with what happened in the 1930's and 1940's - let alone the precursor times. I find it a bit like those on the street interviews that Jay Leno did with people who have no idea what country is on our southern border, when the war of 1812 occurred, etc. It also reflects a need for perhaps more people in the public eye like a Ted Koppel than a Whoopie.
We live in interesting times.

Amanda,
Your experiences were so like mine growing up.

We were the only Jewish family we knew of in Annapolis in 1959. I remember when another Jewish family moved to our neighborhood with kids our age, a few years later. Our two families clung to each other.

My father deeply resented the anti-semitism, he was very proud of his family and refused to be what he called a "self-hating Jew". If he encountered prejudice, his go-to line was "and that's why you envy the Jews." But he was also very status-conscious, and I know it galled him that there were places he was not welcome, for no other reason than he was Jewish. He was the president of a successful stereo company and enjoyed that status very much, and wanted all the things he felt should go along with that. The lack of social acceptance in certain circles for no other reason that his accident of birth I think truly enraged him.

None of this meant much to me for a long while. I did't look Jewish, and I was sent to a very prestigious private school where I didn't encounter anti-semitism. Until the day that my only friend from the neighborhood who also went to that school told me that she couldn't sit with me on the school bus any more. In fact she couldn't be my friend any more. Her parents had forbade it, because I was Jewish.

This was a pretty seminal event in my life. We were only 6 or 7 years old. We'd been to each other's houses, to each other's birthday parties. It deeply shocked me.

It also engendered in me the same kind of sense of shame Amanda talked about. So much so that telling anyone I was Jewish became a huge act of courage for many years after.

Because I didn't look Jewish I was privy to lots of antisemitic slurs that probably otherwise wouldn't have been voiced in my presence. My father taught me to speak up. The Holocaust was still very recent in those years and we had family who had been involved in resettling Jews who had been in the death camps. It was emphasized to me that the only way that "never again" would be possible is if we spoke up, if we never let anti-semitism go unchallenged. From him and other members of the extended family I received a particular point of view deeply set in the experience of being Jewish diaspora. Great pride in being Jewish, but also a great sense of injustice, which all my life has led me to feel in alliance/solidarity with other persecuted minorities--especially African Americans, Native Americans, and homosexuals (we had a few in the family). I think I missed my calling as a civil rights lawyer.

My younger brothers did look Jewish, and got most of the direct hits from the other kids in the community. They were taunted and cursed on the school bus. Once, when all three of us were on the bus to day camp, the kids ganged up on my brothers, throwing things at them, taunting them, calling them dirty Jew. I stood up and addressed the entire bus and asked them what they had against Jews. "They killed Jesus!" they yelled back at me. "Well," I said. "Jesus was a Jew."

Utter pandemonium ensued. "He was not!" they screamed.



Anyway, it is time to go feed the horses.

Who really knows what Whoopi meant when she originally said what she said. I do know that when I read her original comments, my first interpretation was that she wanted to make the semi-smug point that only white people "do" genocide, and the Holocaust was not racially motivated because it was white on white violence. That really was my first reaction, based on reading and taken wholly out of context. I think she was ignorant of the distinction between race and ethnicity personally. I'd also bet $100 that if you went out on the street and asked 100 random people the difference between race or ethnicity, 70% wouldn't be able to answer clearly. I'd almost be willing to double down and say that if you asked people if Jews were a race, the majority would say yes.

Then it sounds like she received a "stern talking to," and revised race to ethnicity, which is technically correct. But that's really splitting hairs at that point. I also agree that the Holocaust (or any massacres) are examples of hate. I mean, duh.

She is guilty of breaking a basic rule of common sense: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

I agree that this would have been a great opportunity to have a discussion about hatred in our society, but I have little faith that it would: a) happen; and b) not devolve into arguments about whose atrocity was worse.

Or maybe it's just the end of a long week and I need to go relax and have dinner.

Thanks, pique. Yes, we've exchanged childhood memories and the added detail gave me even more insight (though you didn't even mention your curley hair sensitivity which you overcame - thought Cindy would identify).

FWIW whether or not "race" is a valid construct, Ashkenazi Jew is a genetic reality as 23 and me shows clearly.

Consider how many very light-skinned "black" persons (even ones who may have gone through a phase of "passing" perhaps encouraged by families - e.g., the kids of a Creole parent(s)) have completely come "out" in adulthood when the whole story came clear. Bearing them in mind, I'd think Cindy would find it easier to empathize with Jews being singled out negatively - and as a physically identifiable group.

Would she deny the black-identifying (formerly "passing") racial hybrids their right to black identification? A surprising number have later devoted their adult years to Black causes - perhaps a way of making up for years of closeted living. (Speaking as a dual Israeli-American citizen. Guess I switched from New Canaan to Old Canaan. )

The Black experience (including degrees of identification with the Black "Journey") is very different from the Jewish one, but there IS overlap. (I'm just reminded that the start to Black history Month landed on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.)

FWIW I returned in-between from my errands, and edited my original effort.

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Originally posted by Nina:
Who really knows what Whoopi meant when she originally said what she said...I do know that when I read her original comments, my first interpretation was that she wanted to make the semi-smug point that only white people "do" genocide...

Speaking of which, I've been VERY struck by news stories in the last year alone, of ghastly stories of genocide within African and Asian groups. The issue that was brought home to me, was how UNTRUE it is that genocide is white on white.

Can't come up with the examples (and don't care t google to get the tribal and national names), but there are on-going horrific black on black genocides, sometimes with one tribe going with machetes and whatever on another, because of their slightly different ethnicities in their context. They can readily identify their differences which to us Westerners are indistinguishable.

Likewise, E. Asian groups having at each other - ones which I am embarrassed to admit that per the stereotype, they all look pretty much the same to me. (As if the majority UN members dissing Israel, had the faintest clue what a Jew is!)

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Originally posted by Amanda]
Can't come up with the examples (and don't care t google to get the tribal and national names), but there are on-going horrific black on black genocides, sometimes with one tribe going with machetes and whatever on another, because of their slightly different ethnicities in their context. They can readily identify their differences which to us Westerners are indistinguishable.

Earlier I mentioned the Tutsi and Hutu. I think they are the ones you’re thinking of.

Why wouldn't there be same-race genocide among non-whites? We are all human beings, no matter how different our outward appearance, all have the potential for the full range of human behavior.

Amanda my hair still drives me crazy, though it isn't so frizzy in arid Montana. No haircuts during the pandemic but I may have to chop it all off a la Cindy.

Yes, the Holocaust is all about race. Eugenics, etc. "Race theory" was at the heart of the it.

One ironic detail is the ADL sort of agreed with her.

Since 2020 they maintained a definition of ‘racism’ on their website that would not consider Hitler’s treatment of the Jews as racist.

Yes, the ADL.


Whoopie’s comment made them change it.

https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/a...m/article-695487/amp

Rrom pique:

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Utter pandemonium ensued. "He was not!" they screamed.