Holocaust revisionism, also known as Holocaust distortion, is a tenet of Holocaust denial. Revisionism is an attempt at rewriting history, so that the genocide by the hands of the Nazis seems less horrific, and more like an invention or an exaggeration by the Jewish people.
This retelling of history has been around as long as the Holocaust itself, and its believers and defenders can be found across the world and in all walks of life. It is a dangerous hole to fall into and Whoopi Goldberg, whether wittingly or not, spouted Holocaust revisionism on national TV.
On Monday, January 31st, the hosts of The View were discussing how Maus, a novel about the Holocaust, was pulled from a Tennessee school’s curriculum. Whoopi Goldberg, one of the show’s host, cut in with her comments:
“If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it, because the Holocaust isn’t about race,” Goldberg said. “It’s not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.”
Goldberg’s co-host, Ana Navarro, tried to correct Goldberg and said that it was about “white supremacy … and going after Jews and gypsies and Roma,” to which Goldberg retorted that the Holocaust was “two white groups of people.”
"The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley,” Goldberg said. “Let's talk about it for what it is – it's how people treat each other. It's a problem. It doesn't matter if you're Black or white because Black, white, Jews — everybody."
And thus, the internet was set ablaze. Or at least the parts of the internet that I’m on, I’m not really sure how engaged non-Jews are in discourse about Judaism.
This is in no way a personal attack on Whoopi Goldberg or The View, but this is not the first time that Goldberg has come under fire for “jokes'' about Jewish people. In addition to being poorly worded, Goldberg’s statement is not true. The Holocaust was about race. Point blank.
In fact, it was so much about race that it brought about a new wave of eugenics and race science. Yes, it is about man’s inhumanity to man, but that inhumanity was based on racism, and the Holocaust was a systematic genocide based on eliminating what the Nazis deemed to be subordinate races. When we say that the Holocaust was about “two white groups of people,” we are revising the history of the genocide.
The Holocaust was not the first example of the persecution of the Jewish people. We need not look too deep in to history to know that, before the Holocaust, the persecution of the Jewish people was on the basis of religion rather than race.
In Spain, for example, when the Inquisition was occurring, Jews were given the choice to either convert to Catholicism or leave. Some people chose to stay in Spain and convert, and a few did this while secretly hiding their true Jewish identities. Others chose to leave and find a home that would not cost them their identity. This is just one of many examples of this religious-based persecution of the Jewish people. Today every Jewish person is descended, in one way or another, from a person who took a stand and decided to keep their Jewish identity and leave their home.
The Holocaust was not only about racial persecution, it was the first time that the Jews were considered a racial group and targeted for it. Before, Jews could escape ill-treatment and murder if they decided to convert out. But the Holocaust made it so that any person who had a Jewish grandparent was considered racially Jewish, and so even people that did not consider themselves Jewish were victimized. And so, to say that the Holocaust was not about race is to leave out perhaps the most important part of the tragedy.
In our modern American mindset, it is easy to see that issue of the Holocaust as a something that occurred between “two white groups of people,” but Nazi race theory categorizes Jews as a different race, and therefore subhuman. The racialization of the Jewish people still lives on in white supremacist groups today.
The Holocaust was primarily about race, no way around it. And to deny the racial factor of it is to deny why the Holocaust happened. A massive genocide - the likes of which the world had never seen before - was committed on the basis of racial prejudice. To challenge that leads down a slippery slope, one that will quickly become, and already has proven to become, a case of Holocaust denial.
The issue of race is a complicated one, especially when comparing across cultures, borders and centuries, but the racial science that the Nazis created clearly identified Jews as a race. The mass discrimination and extermination that occurred was not a group of white people randomly targeting another group of white people, it was a calculated case of racial torment, and it is imperative that it is remembered as such. “Never forget” includes never forgetting the why, not just the what.
Hadass Galili is a junior studying political science pre-law at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnist do not reflect those of The Post. Do you agree? Tell Hadass by tweeting her at @HadassGalili.
