“As countless commentators pointed out, this line of thinking is profoundly mistaken,” Yair Rosenberg writes in his Atlantic newsletter, Deep Shtetl. “The Nazis were obsessed with race and defined the Jews as their racial inferiors, which is how they justified exterminating them.”

Rosenberg and Adam Serwer explore the “racial fictions” that Goldberg—and many others—perpetuate.

• Are Jews a race? “Jewish identity doesn’t conform to Western categories, despite centuries of attempts by society to shoehorn it in,” Yair writes. “This makes sense, because Judaism predates Western categories.”
• Goldberg’s perspective is distinctly American. “The Nazi Holocaust in Europe and slavery and Jim Crow in the United States are outgrowths of the same ideology—the belief that human beings can be delineated into categories that share immutable biological traits distinguishing them from one another and determining their potential and behavior,” Adam explains. “They are branches of the same tree, the biological fiction of race.”

Further reading: Goldberg made her initial comments during a discussion about Maus, which has been banned from some school curriculums in Tennessee. Bans like these are targeting the history of oppression, the professor Marilisa Jiménez García argues. And Molly Jong-Fast asks, where is the cancel-culture outrage over banning books?