Sunoverbeach wrote:If I understand correctly, and feel free to hammer this Lutheran boy if I fug it all up, but the Jewish ethnicity is descended from the Hebrews and Israelites. The predominant religion of this ethnicity is Judaism. Not all of Jewish descent practice Judaism, and not all who practice are of Jewish ethnicity.
The comment was that the Holocaust was not about race. It was about race, though I don't believe Hitler was overly cautious about separating practicing from ethnic Jews in the process. Gypsies (Roma & Sinti) were also thrown into the mix.
In addition, black people were isolated/imprisoned, sterilized, and murdered, though the effort doesn't seem as organized an extinction plan as the aforementioned groups.
The whole discussion came about because a TN school banned Maus, a critically acclaimed graphic novel detailing the experiences of the author's parents in German occupied Poland. It's an awesome read and much harder hitting than what you would think from a comic book.
you shouldn't get hammered for that.
I may be wrong as well about Jews/Judaism but most of us that I've known (maybe all) look at it as a maternal bloodline, not a race.
It's said that members of the Lost Tribes are the black Ethiopian mountain people found with an ancient Ark of the Covenant...still practicing ancient Judaism for maybe 2,000 years...since air- lifted into Israel and now experiencing discrimination, a subject for another thread.
The Jews in Germany and most of those in Europe were far and away white, but to ascribe any logic to Hitler's theories and plans is to be ignorant about the subject. He "separated" Germans in his sick idea of being descended from an Aryan master race.
He also supervised the massacre of millions of Russians...they don't come much whiter than that.
Back on topic...SOB is correct. I saw Whoopie's comments, there was more than one, when pushed on her claim that the Holocaust wasn't about race she followed with "it was about Man's Inhumanity To Man"... a universal theme in many stories describing the worst behavior of human beings, and attaching the Holocaust to that. Quite a distance away from minimizing it.
Her clarification did not diminish the horror, it did move it from a discussion of horrendous racial acts to an intra-racial (is that a word?) act of horrendous acts, but not saying less horrendous in any way. The Holocaust was not minimized, just viewed under a different lens of what category it falls. Debatable, but not the stuff haters of her are promoting to make a political point.
And since the subject was the banning of Maus in TN, Judaism entered the discussion. It expanded from there.
Most of us would prefer to be judged (before being executed) by our body of work rather than an isolated phrase taken from a paragraph. I've been unaware of anti-semitic activities in her past, I'm feeling like she hates hate wherever it's ugliness is found.
But like most, I don't know all that much about her beliefs, just basing it on what she presents in public and that I happen to see.
