You should have invited a guest with more familiarity with either daytime talk shows aimed at women or with shock jocks geared toward men. To really get into the heart of the Glibness Industry you have to talk about Oprah and Howard Stern, who both have hundreds, if not thousands, of now embarrassing moments throughout their public careers and yet today command more respect as broadcasters than during the peak of their popularity. The evolution of their public images reveals a lot about the trajectory of politics over the past forty years.
I thought that Goldberg is Jewish herself? Was her crime *not* to conceptualize racism in the same way that white Jews conceptualize it?
Whoopi clearly needs to watch some documentaries and/or read the literature about the early 20th century Eugenics movement that defined Jews as a 'race' for the sole purposes of defining who is supposedly genetically superior or inferior...but her faux pas does open up the question about who defines racism. Clearly modern America believes it isn't the blacks who are typically the primary victims of it.
> About her stage surname, she claimed in 2011, "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," and "I just know I am Jewish. I practice nothing. I don't go to temple, but I do remember the holidays."[17] She has stated that "people would say 'Come on, are you Jewish?' And I always say 'Would you ask me that if I was white? I bet not.'"[17] One account suggests that her mother, Emma Johnson, thought the family's original surname was "not Jewish enough" for her daughter to become a star.[17] Researcher Henry Louis Gates Jr. found that all of Goldberg's traceable ancestors were blacks, that she had no known German or Jewish ancestry, and that none of her ancestors was named Goldberg.[13]
The backstory of her name is clearly apocryphal, but largely irrelevant to the religion she herself embraces or identifies with. Blacks claiming white ancestry or a particular religious affiliation as a means of survival or a tool to get ahead in America is not new.
In Whoopi's case, what is most germane to the point is that the modern academic consensus of racial historians is that "race" is an artificial social construct designed primarily to keep black Americans in their place as a caste of subservient untouchables, and in Europe the pseudoscientific classification of Jews as a separate race has long been discredited, just like it has in America....It was a pseudoscience invented in Medieval Europe to keep Jews, Gypsies/Roma and other 'undesirables' from assimilating with the dominant culture whenever possible.
Is Judaism a religion or a race? If Judaism is a race, can you simultaneously be "white" and a Jew? Of course you can. Why not black and a Jew? The Falasha/Beta Jews of Ethiopia are certainly not white. Anyone in America stirring up the melodrama around Whoopi should be prepared to discuss the role of race in Israel, I bet the blacks there would argue that Israeli citizenship and embracing Zionism are not sufficient to protect them from being subjected to the same kinds of racism that white Christians have subjected black Christians to for centuries.
Well it's both, and also neither. Jews predate and don't neatly fit into the Western concepts of race and _personal_ religion. It's not exactly an ethnicity either, there being Jews of several different ethnic backgrounds. [Of course there has been historical oppression based on placing Jews as a race, religious group, and/or ethnicity, but that's for the convenience of the oppressor.] In some ways, it's maybe best to think of Jews as a tribe? There is a tribal religion, and a shared cult, but individual practices vary, and there are plenty of atheist Jews.
That response seems to me a bit of a tangent. I didn't (and don't) claim that no one can be both black and Jewish, for instance. I simply quoted evidence bearing on your factual question of whether Whoopi Goldberg's Jewish. She's said she "just know[s]" she's Jewish, despite being apparently neither Jewish by ancestry nor by religion ("I practice nothing"). That seems to me to settle the matter, assuming Wikipedia's right on the facts.
And surely if we're reducing the WG controversy to just one point ("the" point), it would be that WG's original claim (that the Holocaust was not about race, but about man's inhumanity to man) was at best obtuse and only correct in a narrow, pedantic sense.
I don't classify "Jews as a separate race" either; at the same time, it's obvious to me that people routinely treat Jewishness as an ethnicity, and we conventionally call ethnic discrimination racism. Tutsis and Bosnian Muslims aren't races either (racially they're simply blacks and whites) but no serious person denies that the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides were racist. It's confusing that we refer to both narrowly ethnic bigotry and wider race-based bigotry as racism, but we do.
You should have invited a guest with more familiarity with either daytime talk shows aimed at women or with shock jocks geared toward men. To really get into the heart of the Glibness Industry you have to talk about Oprah and Howard Stern, who both have hundreds, if not thousands, of now embarrassing moments throughout their public careers and yet today command more respect as broadcasters than during the peak of their popularity. The evolution of their public images reveals a lot about the trajectory of politics over the past forty years.
I thought that Goldberg is Jewish herself? Was her crime *not* to conceptualize racism in the same way that white Jews conceptualize it?
Whoopi clearly needs to watch some documentaries and/or read the literature about the early 20th century Eugenics movement that defined Jews as a 'race' for the sole purposes of defining who is supposedly genetically superior or inferior...but her faux pas does open up the question about who defines racism. Clearly modern America believes it isn't the blacks who are typically the primary victims of it.
> I thought that Goldberg is Jewish herself?
About that...I'll just quote from Wikipedia:
> About her stage surname, she claimed in 2011, "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," and "I just know I am Jewish. I practice nothing. I don't go to temple, but I do remember the holidays."[17] She has stated that "people would say 'Come on, are you Jewish?' And I always say 'Would you ask me that if I was white? I bet not.'"[17] One account suggests that her mother, Emma Johnson, thought the family's original surname was "not Jewish enough" for her daughter to become a star.[17] Researcher Henry Louis Gates Jr. found that all of Goldberg's traceable ancestors were blacks, that she had no known German or Jewish ancestry, and that none of her ancestors was named Goldberg.[13]
The backstory of her name is clearly apocryphal, but largely irrelevant to the religion she herself embraces or identifies with. Blacks claiming white ancestry or a particular religious affiliation as a means of survival or a tool to get ahead in America is not new.
In Whoopi's case, what is most germane to the point is that the modern academic consensus of racial historians is that "race" is an artificial social construct designed primarily to keep black Americans in their place as a caste of subservient untouchables, and in Europe the pseudoscientific classification of Jews as a separate race has long been discredited, just like it has in America....It was a pseudoscience invented in Medieval Europe to keep Jews, Gypsies/Roma and other 'undesirables' from assimilating with the dominant culture whenever possible.
Is Judaism a religion or a race? If Judaism is a race, can you simultaneously be "white" and a Jew? Of course you can. Why not black and a Jew? The Falasha/Beta Jews of Ethiopia are certainly not white. Anyone in America stirring up the melodrama around Whoopi should be prepared to discuss the role of race in Israel, I bet the blacks there would argue that Israeli citizenship and embracing Zionism are not sufficient to protect them from being subjected to the same kinds of racism that white Christians have subjected black Christians to for centuries.
Jews, Race, and the Story of Ethiopian Jews
https://jewishstudies.ace.fordham.edu/2020/08/16/jews-race-and-ethiopian-jews/
You ask, "Is Judaism a religion or a race?"
Well it's both, and also neither. Jews predate and don't neatly fit into the Western concepts of race and _personal_ religion. It's not exactly an ethnicity either, there being Jews of several different ethnic backgrounds. [Of course there has been historical oppression based on placing Jews as a race, religious group, and/or ethnicity, but that's for the convenience of the oppressor.] In some ways, it's maybe best to think of Jews as a tribe? There is a tribal religion, and a shared cult, but individual practices vary, and there are plenty of atheist Jews.
That response seems to me a bit of a tangent. I didn't (and don't) claim that no one can be both black and Jewish, for instance. I simply quoted evidence bearing on your factual question of whether Whoopi Goldberg's Jewish. She's said she "just know[s]" she's Jewish, despite being apparently neither Jewish by ancestry nor by religion ("I practice nothing"). That seems to me to settle the matter, assuming Wikipedia's right on the facts.
And surely if we're reducing the WG controversy to just one point ("the" point), it would be that WG's original claim (that the Holocaust was not about race, but about man's inhumanity to man) was at best obtuse and only correct in a narrow, pedantic sense.
I don't classify "Jews as a separate race" either; at the same time, it's obvious to me that people routinely treat Jewishness as an ethnicity, and we conventionally call ethnic discrimination racism. Tutsis and Bosnian Muslims aren't races either (racially they're simply blacks and whites) but no serious person denies that the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides were racist. It's confusing that we refer to both narrowly ethnic bigotry and wider race-based bigotry as racism, but we do.
Small observation: the show Joe Rogan was on was called NEWSRadio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsRadio