By The FirstNew York Post columnist and former Presidential speechwriter John Podhoretz says it’s time for Caryn Johson (Whoopi’s real name) to drop the “Goldberg” —”you don’t deserve it,” he writes.
“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,” Podhoretz writes.
“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.”
“Ascribing commonalities between Jews and non-Jews is historically nonsensical, considering that Jews make up an astonishingly homogeneous and tiny tribe of people who survived nearly two millennia on this Earth without a homeland to call their own. That was understood when Johnson became Goldberg.”
“But it’s two generations since then. It’s obvious that a 2022 version of young Caryn Johnson would not choose the name Goldberg to gain that extra frisson of non-white pride.”
“In fact, Whoopi Goldberg should just drop the Goldberg now. There are dozens of survivors of the Holocaust who bear the name — and an untold number who died in the Shoah with it. Caryn Johnson stains them both.”
Read the full op-ed over at the New York Post:
