The View missed the mark on Monday during a discussion about the Holocaust, when Whoopi Goldberg tried to universalize its victims to make a larger point about human cruelty.
During a segment on a Tennessee school board removing Maus from an eighth-grade curriculum, Goldberg said, “If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it because the Holocaust isn’t about race.”
She reiterated the claim: “No, it’s not about race.”
Co-host Joy Behar pushed back, noting the Nazis “considered Jews a different race.”
Goldberg continued by claiming the Holocaust was “about man’s inhumanity to man.”
“But it’s about white supremacy,” said guest co-host Ana Navarro. “It’s about going after Jews and Gypsies.”
“But these are two White groups of people,” Goldberg said.
“But you’re missing the point. You’re missing the point. The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Let’s talk about it for what it is,” she continued. “It’s how people treat each other. That’s the problem. It doesn’t matter if you are Black or White, because Black, White, Jews, Italians, everybody eats each other.”
Let’s break down the exchange.
For one, although European Jews were White, the Holocaust was about targeting the Jews because they were Jewish. It had nothing to do with skin color, but the systematic persecution of people Hitler blamed for Germany’s problems following World War I.
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Second, while the Holocaust demonstrated the worst of mankind, one must be cautious in universalizing it. While tolerance is a lesson to be learned by all, the Holocaust must also be recognized as a primarily Jewish tragedy in that it cannot be understood without learning about anti-Semitism and its history — the pinnacle of which was the Shoah, which my late grandparents survived.
Third, Navarro was in the wrong to lump the Jews with the Gypsies. While the Jews were not the only people targeted — Gypsies and other non-Aryan groups were victims of the Nazis as well — the Jews suffered far more than any other. Hitler’s Mein Kampf was a diatribe against the Jews, who were the target of the Final Solution. To put the Jews and Gypsies in the same category, as Navarro did, conflates the two groups.
Finally, Goldberg demonstrated the poison that is intersectionality. Intersectionality seeks to minimize the unique traits and experiences of cultural, religious, ethnic and other groups through making ill-informed connections. When it comes to the Jews, the intersectional school of thought ignorantly places Jews as White and therefore privileged, as opposed to a group that throughout history have been persecuted. It should be noted that not all Jews are White, though skin color is irrelevant when it comes to hatred against Jews. Anti-Semitism should receive the same outrage as other forms of bigotry. Anything less
Sean Durns, of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, which monitors and documents media bias surrounding Israel and Jews, said the segment on The View demonstrates that the Holocaust remains “misunderstood and misappropriated.”
“[This] incident is another example of ongoing efforts to universalize what was the industrialized genocide of six million Jews,” he said. “Jews, it seems, are even denied their own suffering on its own terms. It is important to note that anti-Semitism was central to both Nazi ideology and Nazi war aims. Attempts to deny or minimize this fact are as despicable as they are ahistorical.”
Less than a week after International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which The View beautifully commemorated, Goldberg and The View put forth a discussion of one of history’s darkest hours that paired trivialization with naïveté. Goldberg and the rest of the panel — with the exception of Behar and co-host Sunny Hostin — should take the time to educate themselves about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.
“Never Again” is the fight for the survival of the Jewish people through an insistence that they should never face another annihilation. That mission requires learning about the Holocaust and unequivocally combatting anti-Semitism in all its forms – whether from the far-right, the far-left, radical Islam and other sources.
Watch above, via ABC.