Whoopi Is Right

But the whole argument is stupid

Sometimes it’s almost fun living in a moronic culture. I loved the film “Don’t Look Up” where the American response to a comet about to destroy the planet was to ignore it and focus on fun things like the sex appeal of the astrophysicists. The Right of course responded to the killer comet, even as it was visibly hurtling to the earth, by pledging to not look up at the sky and thereby avoid acknowledging the pandemic, I mean climate change, I mean the comet.

That brings me to the Tom Brady news. The other night the networks barely had time for COVID, war over Ukraine or anything else because of endless analysis of the retirement of the greatest QB in history.

I’m all for coverage of professional sports. One of my sons works on air for ESPN four hours a day and that makes us proud and happy. Sports like other aspects of entertainment culture provide a great escape from the horrors of the pandemic, climate change, the rampant racism and economic inequality of “the greatest country on the planet” and the fascist beast (literal and metaphorical) on its way to destroying our “democracy.”

But the endless focus on the retirement of a 42 year old athlete zillionaire is absurd. Neither Babe Ruth nor Lou Gehrig nor Hank Aaron or any other athlete in history was celebrated this way upon their retirement. Of course, there was no cable or internet.

Oh well, that’s America. And at least Brady seems to be a decent, albeit empty, kind of guy. Sure he’s apolitical and not engaged in trying to rescue this country from its descent into madness. But why does he have to? He does his job brilliantly. If only our politicians did theirs even competently.

Today brings more stupidity. The actor and comedian Whoopi Goldberg has been suspended from ABC for two weeks for saying that the Holocaust was not the result of racism because both the Germans and their Jewish victims were white. It was rather a crime against humanity.

The Jewish organizations went insane. How dare she say that? European Jews were the ultimate victims of racism. Time for her to grovel, apologize and make some big contribution to the ADL or the American Jewish Committee or the Wiesenthal Center or one of the other organizations that, like Al Sharpton, look for opportunities to joyfully fundraise every time a rich celebrity misspeaks.

Except she didn’t misspeak. Jews are white. Germans are white. Until now I have never heard the organized Jewish community refer to the Holocaust as racism. In fact, Jewish organizations are famous for insisting that the Holocaust is unique, antisemitism is unique, and analogies to other crimes against humanity are off limits.

And not all acts of genocide are based on racism. Was the Rwanda genocide racism? Or the Bosnian genocide? Or the Armenian?

And don’t quote Hitler’s views of the Jews. Yes, he considered us not only a separate race but not human at all (untermenschen). But once you are reduced to citing Hitler you are lost.

Jews never, ever, claim we are a separate race. As recently as two weeks ago when the attack on the synagogue in Texas took place, Jews rightly pointed to it as another manifestation of the anti-semitism that has risen like a rocket in this country in recent years, most fueled by the right.

And still, no matter how you define racism, the average African American endures more hate in a week than American Jews do in a year. I’m 74. I grew up in small town America (five Jews in my high school class) and I have never experienced anti-semitism. My kids haven’t either. Nor have my grandkids.

Of course, my wife’s parents, Holocaust survivors, sure did and it wasn’t manifested by a media star saying that they were victims of racism. They weren’t. They were victims of one of mankind’s oldest and most homicidal hatreds, not about their skin color but about their ethnicity and religion. That is what we need to teach our kids. Any group can be victims of hate, no matter what their color or the color of their oppressors. Look at Northern Ireland.

I sure wish those using their group’s suffering as a PR or fundraising gimmick would just shut up. Fight racism. Fight antisemitism. Fight all forms of hate. And stop exploiting it.