The question “are Jews white?” is a considerably loaded one, but most reasonable people would agree that the Nazis who created the Nuremberg Laws and devised the so-called “final solution to the Jewish question” considered the six million Jews who died in mass shootings, gas vans, and at extermination factories like Auschwitz-Birkenau to be of a different race. The United States Holocaust National Museum’s resource page refers to the Holocaust as being “driven by racist ideology” and details how around two of every three European Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
Following the February segment, Goldberg was temporarily suspended by ABC and The View for two weeks. Her comments aired just a few weeks after a crazed gunman in Fort Worth, Texas held hostages inside a synagogue for 11 hours. She later semi-apologized in a since-deleted tweet, saying that “As Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League shared, ‘The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people–who they deemed to be an inferior race.’ I stand corrected.”
She added: “The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never waiver. I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused.”
In remarks at a 2011 charity event, Goldberg reportedly called her adopted last name “wonderful for starting conversations,” and said, “I just know I am Jewish. I practice nothing. I don’t go to temple, but I do remember the holidays. Religion is a lot of work, it’s exhausting.”
This latest chapter emerged from an interview Goldberg gave with the Times of London, promoting the movie Till, in which she plays the grandmother of the slain teen Emmett Till. She is also one of the film’s producers. When the conversation came back to whether being Jewish was a racial or religious distinction, the interviewer said that to the Nazis, it certainly was racial. “That’s the killer, isn’t it?” Goldberg responded. “The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying?”
She added, “Not for nothing is there no box on the census for the Jewish race. So that leads me to believe that we’re probably not a race.”
She continued, saying that “you could not tell a Jew on the street,” which is a starkly untrue thing to say about the time of Nazi occupation, in which Jews were forced to wear an identifying yellow star on their clothing.
Goldberg referred to the initial controversy by saying that “you would have thought that I’d taken a big old stinky dump on the table, butt naked.”
Jordan Hoffman
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