After all, her name is Goldberg

 It's understandable.  To African Americans, Jews are obviously white unless, like Sammy Davis, Jr., they aren't.  Nearly ninety years after the dawn of the Third Reich, it's hard to wrap your brain around the notion that they were considered racially distinct from the wholly fictitious "Aryan race."  But since race itself is a fictitious way of dividing Homo sapiens according to arbitrary criteria, the whole thing soon takes on an Alice In Wonderland quality.  

Yes, the Nazis destroyed synagogues on Kristallnacht.  Yes, thugs stripped men in the street to check for circumcision.  Yes, rabbis were singled out for special abuse.  Jew-hatred had been around for centuries, based on Jews' rejection of Jesus and promoted with special savagery by the Catholic Church.  But the idea of "Jewish blood" and racial difference is a product of modernism; Hannah Arendt and others point to the French Revolution as its starting point.  Jews made up less than one percent of Germany's population in 1933, and many were converts or irreligious people who considered themselves fully assimilated Germans.  The new government disagreed. 

Americans forget, if they ever knew, about Jewish quotas at elite colleges; Jews being targeted by the modern Ku Klux Klan along with Catholics and immigrants; Jews shut out of professions like the law or academia; Jews kept out of many neighborhoods by covenants that forbade homeowners to sell them houses.  Often it was prudent to change your name, which is how Caryn Johnson became Whoopi Goldberg.  What she couldn't change was the color of her skin.  Race has always primarily meant blackness in America.  The 1619 Project will fill you in.

I don't know why Ms. Johnson chose that particular name, but it's memorable and it messes with people's expectations.  (Laurence Fishburne once said he wished he had become a doctor just to see people's faces when they walked into his office expecting a Jewish specialist.)  Long before the talk show she was an edgy young comedian who specialized in making people uncomfortable, which is the best thing comedians do for us (the way history teaching is tending, they'll soon be the only ones).  She and Ted Danson once shocked the Friars Club (which prides itself on its vulgarity) when he appeared in a blackface skit written by Goldberg and laced with "N-words."  She's pretty fearless.

But it's no longer 1993.  Now we have prominent members of a major political party invoking the Holocaust as a display of ignorance and hate about once a day.  We also have people happily conflating/confusing criticism of Israeli government policy with anti-Semitism, which is intellectually dishonest and politically dangerous.  So Whoopi Goldberg can spend her unanticipated two-week vacation reading up on the crime of the twentieth century.  I hope she will see that any minority anywhere -- Roma, Lakota, Uyghur, Rohingya, Tutsi, Kurds, Jews, African Americans -- can become the scapegoats of a failing government and an ignorant populace.  It's always about race.