Thread by @RichardBSpencer

Perhaps the oddest thing about the Whoopi Goldberg controversy is the actress’s choice of stage names—“Goldberg.” To make matters even odder, Whoopi—born Caryn Johnson—truly believes that she has Jewish heritage.

According to Whoopi: “My mother did not name me Whoopi, but Goldberg is my name, it's part of my family, part of my heritage. Just like being black."

thejc.com/news/uk/whoopi…

The article mentions a less charitable theory: Whoopi chose the name as a way of getting a leg up in Hollywood and Broadway, as many Jews are successful king-makers in the entertainment industry. For what it’s worth, her star turn came in Steven Spielberg’s *The Color Purple.*

In fact, Whoopi doesn’t have any Jewish (or German) ancestry. She adopted the name in the 1970s and ‘80s, as the Holocaust was becoming salient and powerful as a symbol of suffering and persecution. Perhaps she understood her African-American heritage as a kind of “Judaism.”

In other words, Whoopi adopted the name Goldberg in the name of “philo-Semitism” or “pro-Judaism.” She saw herself as “part of the tribe” in the sense that she embodied a legacy of suffering and outsider status.

Furthermore, Whoopi’s “controversial” comments on The View were in no way an attempt to minimize or deny the enormity of the Holocaust—but in fact were an effort at making the Holocaust the moral center of the contemporary world.

Yes, yes, on one level, Whoopi’s comments were ahistorical, or just “cringe.” She seemed to be saying that The Holocaust was “white-on-white violence”; it wasn’t about “race,” since in Whoopi’s America, Jews are considered “White.”

The question of Jews “whiteness”—whether they are considered White and consider themselves White—is a prickly one. Jews are “Non-Hispanic White” according to the U.S. Census, and must navigate difficult waters, as the “assimilationist” ethic is displaced by “diversity.”

But I don’t think Whoopi’s comments drew the ire of major Jewish figures because she “retro-fitted” current racial categories onto Third Reich-era Germany. The main issue is that she doesn’t talk about the Holocaust properly, or doesn’t grasp its implicit moral lesson in full.

In contemporary discourse, the Holocaust should be frequently evoked and always remembered—but never used in a comparison or analogy. Robert Kennedy Jr. and Gina Carano (among countless others) generated outrage by comparing the Holocaust to Covid-era government mandates.

Granted, these comparisons were pretty hamfisted, but that’s not the point. At the end of the day, *nothing* can be compared to the Holocaust, not even similar 20th-century genocides.

Pro-Jewish Gentile figures, like Whoopi, Carano, and RFK, thus find themselves in a conundrum. They have imbibed the half-lesson that the Holocaust is an event of preeminent importance—maybe the negative moral center of the universe—“nothing is as bad as the Holocaust.”

However, Whoopi, et al. failed to grasp that the Holocaust is essentially and irreducible a Jewish matter. It isn’t like mask mandates (fair enough); nor can it be compared to mass killings in the Soviet Union or Cambodia. It is uniquely Jewish and must be understood as such.

When Whoopi, et al. try appling the lessons of the Holocaust in a Christian, universal manner, they get lambasted—criticized to the point of losing their jobs and status in media and Hollywood. The Holocaust can only be about the Jews; no comparisons are morally possible.

The power of Christ’s suffering, on the other hand, is that it can be universalized, applied, and experienced in one’s own life. One can see Christ in the suffering of a persecuted outsider. One can, in part, experience Christ’s travails through self-denial and loss.

Whoopi attempted to universalize or Christianize the Holocaust by describing it as “man’s inhumanity towards man.” But again, this is not the full lesson of the Holocaust, which is solely about man’s inhumanity towards Jews.

Failing to grasp this, the most pro-Jewish of Gentiles can be declared anti-Semites.