The Whoopi Goldberg controversy, in which she originally claimed that the Holocaust was not about racism, has a number of complexities. One of them surfaced on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert where she defended/apologized for her comments by explaining that Jews don’t suffer from racism, unlike Black people, because a Jewish person can walk down the street and go completely unnoticed as a Jew.
On one level, Goldberg is mostly right. There is no doubt that in the kind of racism that Black people encounter, the visual factor, seeing immediately the color of one’s skin, is prevalent and significant. This is not to say that there is no issue of visibleness in antisemitism— for example, Chasidic Jews are immediately recognizable and sometimes pay a price for it, not to mention other Jews who may wear a kippah or a Magen David. Moreover, Jews are diverse – there are Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi Jews, Jews hailing from all over the world. As a result, some Jews experience both antisemitism and racism based on having darker skin.
read more:
Source: The Times of Israel
URL: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-antisemitic-notion-of-the-invisible-jew/