We’re All Whoopi Goldberg Now Who sounds off in ignorance? These days, who doesn’t? By Rebecca Sugar
“Who speaks with presumed authority and moral superiority but next to no knowledge? In our culture, that would be everyone with a Twitter account, an iPhone, a classroom full of students, an election coming up, or a TV show. Our entire culture is marinated in people mindlessly mouthing off simply because they have an audience. Everyone is Whoopi Goldberg in his own small way.”
It was a bad moment when Whoopi Goldberg asserted on “The View” that the Holocaust wasn’t about race but about “man’s inhumanity to man.” Her comment, limited by her understanding of the American black-white binary of race, was historically uninformed. Hitler identified Jews as an inferior race and specifically targeted them for extermination. Nazi ideas were deeply influenced by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82), who believed Germanic “Aryans” were superior to all other whites and nonwhites alike.
Adding to Ms. Goldberg’s confusion, and to the anger her words have generated, was her assertion that Jews were and are “white.” In fact, Jews aren’t a race as the term is commonly understood today. The majority of Jews in Israel are of Middle Eastern origin. Minorities are Indian, Ethiopian and Chinese as well as European. Ms. Goldberg mislabels Jews as racially homogenous, unconsciously echoing the poisonous anti-Semitic rhetoric that seeks to vilify Jews as white oppressors.
Ms. Goldberg’s offense isn’t that she is an anti-Semite, it is that she is a self-important celebrity with a platform. Like many others in her position, she takes that not as a responsibility but as an opportunity. She speaks because she can, not because she has something informed to say. What she has read or understands about the Holocaust, about racial ideas in 19th- and 20th-century Europe, or about the Jews in general is likely not much. Yet somehow she was enthusiastically ready to educate her co-hosts and her audience about a subject on which she couldn’t write a serious two-page essay.
Who does this? Who speaks with presumed authority and moral superiority but next to no knowledge? In our culture, that would be everyone with a Twitter account, an iPhone, a classroom full of students, an election coming up, or a TV show. Our entire culture is marinated in people mindlessly mouthing off simply because they have an audience. Everyone is Whoopi Goldberg in his own small way.
Viewers who tune in are to blame too. No one mistakes Ms. Goldberg for Bernard Lewis. But they tune in for her history lessons anyway, and she is all too happy to provide them.
Hitler might have destroyed the great Yiddish-speaking Jewish civilization of Europe, but its wisdom has survived. Perhaps Ms. Goldberg, and all of us, can learn something from this Yiddish proverb: The wise man, even when he holds his tongue, says more than the fool when he speaks.
Ms. Sugar is a writer and philanthropic consultant in New York.
Comments are closed.
