Whoopi Goldberg makes an apology on "The View."
Washington CNN  — 

Whoopi Goldberg’s claim earlier this week that the Holocaust wasn’t about race was baffling and shocking. An apology followed, along with a two-week suspension – but the controversy has forced deeper questions about the history and evolution of race and identity in the US.

Goldberg made her comments during a conversation about a Tennessee school board that removed Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel series “Maus,” about the horrors and trauma of the Holocaust, because of alleged concerns about “rough, objectionable language” and nudity.

Swiftly, various groups pointed out as false the actor and comedian’s assertion that the genocide of 6 million Jews had nothing to do with race.

Art Spiegelman's "Maus"

“Racism was central to Nazi ideology. Jews were not defined by religion, but by race. Nazi racist beliefs fueled genocide and mass murder,” the US Holocaust Museum wrote in an apparent subtweet.

The Auschwitz Memorial Twitter account directed Goldberg to a “seven-chapter online course” about the Holocaust.

To better contextualize the events of the past week, I spoke with Emily Tamkin, who’s a senior editor at The New Statesman and the author of two books: 2020’s “The Influence of Soros: Politics, Power and the Struggle for an Open Society” and the forthcoming “Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities.”

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

When you heard Whoopi Goldberg’s comments, what were your thoughts?

My first reaction was that I think that she’s probably one of many people, specifically one of many Americans, who thinks this. And I say that because I think that the US has a very specific conception of race and racism. And people can, without ill intention, assume that that construct is held across time and space – that because this is what racism has always meant in the US, it’s necessarily been understood the same way elsewhere.

But while racism is real and has real implications for people, it, like race, is shaped around society – and by society.

I think that it’s important to recognize that her comments were coming from a place of ignorance, not hatred. That distinction matters, and I hope that we can keep it in mind in these discussions.

Why do many Americans appear to struggle to understand the relationship between antisemitism and racism? Does it have anything to do with the history of race here?

If you go back to the 1790 Naturalization Act, the criterion for naturalizing as a US citizen was Whiteness. I think that some people think that Jews “became White” in the postwar period and as we moved into the suburbs and through the GI Bill. Many American Jews did move into what we think of as mainstream American suburban life at that time. But most American Jews, for most of American history, have been legally coded as White.

Now, there were exceptions. For example, there was a stipulation in the state of Maryland’s constitution until 1826 that said that Jews cannot hold public office. And there were instances of antisemitism throughout that period, particularly at the turn of the century, when more and more Jews from Eastern Europe started coming over and there was an influx of immigrants. But most American Jews have enjoyed Whiteness under the law.

If you look at my great-grandparents, under the census around the turn of the century – the early 1900s – they were recorded as White. Also around that same time, there were many more Jewish immigrants coming in, and that was actually an issue, because the status of American Jews as White was challenged, because here came people who were far greater in number and further culturally removed, and they thought of themselves as ethnically distinct. And the US didn’t really have a framework to process them, because it thought in terms of Black and White.

Now, interestingly, you had Jewish thinkers and some communal leaders at that time who were very intentional about defending Jews as White. Why? Because they understood that in the US, Whiteness brings with it rights and privileges. That remained true, by the way, even though in the ’20s, immigration legislation was passed that restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.

That’s the US context. You had this one understanding of racism really shaped around White and Black, and people, many of whom came from somewhere else where the thinking was different, were being slotted into that. Meanwhile, an ocean away, you had Nazi Germany, where the construction was just different, where Adolf Hitler was writing very specifically about the “German race” and the necessity of racial purity and the superiority of “Aryan blood.” And, by the way, it wasn’t only Jews whom Hitler thought of as racially distinct. He also drew a distinction between Germans and Slavs. We might look at all that and say, “They’re all White people.” But, again, it was a different context, so the understanding of race was different.

Recent discussions have raised the question of the Whiteness of Jews. What I’d say to that is, one, not all Jews are White, but also, in my day-to-day in the US, I go about as a White woman. If we were in Europe in the early 20th century, I would’ve been understood differently.

The Tennessee school district’s decision to pull Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” exists in the same environment in which laws are empowering school districts across the country to ban a variety of books related to identity and histories of oppression. What do you make of all this?

I think that it’s really important that the ban of this book is considered within this broader context. You have “Maus” being banned. You have the report out of Southlake, Texas, where a school leader said – a superintendent later apologized – that if you teach about the Holocaust, then you also need to teach “opposing” views. Which: I don’t even know what that means. You have Toni Morrison’s work being banned. You have LGBTQ books being challenged.

To me, what stands out is that you have school board members and legislators and parents saying: “Well, we just don’t want our kids hearing this language at a young age.” And: “We want our kids to be proud of the US – to be proud of their history.” All of this made me remember that when I was around 9 years old, somebody drew a swastika on a bathroom stall at my school. I’m sure that my parents didn’t want me to encounter that when I was 9. I’m sure that your parents would’ve liked for you to encounter racism later in life than you did. I’m sure that the children who are working through their sexuality or whose parents are members of the LGBTQ community have questions and would like to have access to materials.

I’m not equating being Jewish in the US with being Black in the US or with being gay in the US. I’m saying that there’s so little regard for anything that challenges the feelings of White Christian straight America – and so little regard for the feelings of any other parents or their children. I don’t think that that’s conducive to educating kids, and it’s certainly not conducive to teaching history, because what this discussion really gets at is the fact that these are complicated, messy issues, and that history is nuanced – but that learning it is what will help us grapple with the world around us today.