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Are Jews A Race Now? On Whoopi’s Suspension and Why Anti-Judaism Has Lasted Longer than Anti-Catholicism
“Once, to say Jews were a race was anti-Semitic, now to say they’re not a race is anti-Semitic. It’s crazy how history plays with us.” — Shlomo Sand
Yesterday, two things happened:
In the morning, I began writing an article about the reasons anti-Catholicism has nearly died in the US and anti-Judaism is still with us. What I wrote felt boringly academic, so I decided to scrap it.
Then Whoopi Goldberg was suspended from The View for saying the Holocaust was “not about race … it’s about man’s inhumanity to other man.” The second part of her statement should have clarified the first, but she is being thoroughly criticized by the punditocracy for the sin of— Well, no one has said exactly what her sin is. It seems to be that she does not agree with Hitler that Jews are a race.
Now, obviously, Hitler treated Jews as a race. The Nazis studied the US’s racial laws, then created their own, effectively imposing the idea of mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons onto the children of Christians and Jews. So if you think Christianity and Judaism are races, you think the Holocaust was about race. If you disagree, you see the Holocaust as an attempt at genocide committed by one group of Europeans against another…
