Drop the Goldberg name you co-opted, Whoopi — you don’t deserve it

[Kamaji]

Drop the Goldberg name you co-opted, Whoopi — you don’t deserve it

By John Podhoretz
February 1, 2022

Decades ago, when the performer Caryn Johnson decided her name wasn’t interesting enough and dubbed herself Whoopi Goldberg instead, it wasn’t because Goldberg signified “whiteness.”

Through the years, she’s offered many weird and contradictory explanations for her change in moniker, but it might have seemed at the time that a black person sporting the surname Goldberg would be especially eye-catching and noteworthy (especially in conjunction with that wild first name) because it would represent the proud ownership of her outsider status. She wasn’t trying to blend in. She was doubling down — on race.

Note, please, that Caryn Johnson didn’t become Whoopi Rockefeller. No. She knew that by becoming Whoopi Goldberg, she would be choosing to flaunt in every way possible the fact that she was a minority person in a majority-white country. The “Goldberg” was the cherry on top.

You see, in the early 1980s, when Johnson became Goldberg, it was still commonly understood that Jews were a people apart. We were apart due to facts of history, due to discrimination and hatred based on our very being and — for those who practiced the faith rigorously — due to the way we ate, dressed, celebrated the Sabbath and prayed.

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Forget that Hitler called the Germans a “master race” and that according to classic Nazi doctrine, Jews constituted a “subhuman Asiatic race.” You see, Whoopi told Stephen Colbert as she tried to clean up the mess she had made early in the day, “I think of race as being something I can see.”

That’s nice that she thinks about it that way. But it’s monumentally ignorant, stupid and almost jaw-droppingly offensive. Six million people literally died because that wasn’t how the people who killed them thought about race. And as for the “something Whoopi can see” doctrine, let’s remember that Hitler’s goal was the extermination of all Jews on the planet — and then as now, there are millions of Sephardic Jews with skin hues that would not classify them as “white.” Even Whoopi wouldn’t “see” them that way.

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Source:  https://nypost.com/2022/02/01/drop-the-goldberg-name-you-co-opted-whoopi-you-dont-deserve-it/