Whoopi's conversation with Colbert unearths common misunderstandings about Jews.

I just watched the video clip of Whoopi Goldberg’s conversation with Stephen Colbert. Now THAT was educational! Not educational as in: Here is the definitive version of THE TRUTH regarding Jews, Nazis, race and racism. No, but highly educational as in: Here are some of the misconceptions that Gentiles – whether black or white – continue to have about Jews.

And it’s not just Whoopi who misunderstands who we Jews are. In his conversation with Whoopi, Stephen Colbert asserted, in speaking about “how the Nazis operated,” that “When they found out that you were of the Jewish race, that’s why they made you wear a star.” “The Jewish race”? Really???

Years ago, I led workshops in a number of American and Canadian cities, as well as in Jerusalem, which brought together Jews, Christians, and Muslims to discuss conflict in the Middle East. The conversations often addressed the question of identity: Who are the Israelis? Who are the Palestinians? Who are Arabs? And, yes, who are Jews? I found that Christians and Muslims frequently have ideas about who Jews are that are quite different from the ideas that Jews have about themselves. And that difference of viewpoint, or perhaps that confusion, shouldn’t be a mystery to anyone. Are Jews a religious group, an ethnic group, a racial group, or some other kind of people who have a collective identity? Is there any good analogy to the role of Jews in the history of world civilization?

Part of the problem is that we tend to think in categories, and Jews overlap several different categories. We Jews are not quite like other religious groups – Christians and Muslims, for example. (There are many Jewish atheists.) Nor are Jews quite like other ethnic groups. Anyone who has ever visited or lived in Israel knows that the Ashkenazi Jews most familiar to Americans constitute less than half of the Israeli Jewish population, and that population consists of many different ethnic groups and even different races.

No one has the definitive answers to these questions. Should Whoopi be scolded for saying something that the ADL disagrees with? I think not. Was anything she said mean-spirited? No, it wasn’t. Surely we can disagree with her without having to condemn her. These days we might all be better off by finding ways to disagree agreeably.