NY Daily News ~ By Kenneth L. Marcus, Feb 9, 2022 ~ Last week the U.S. Department of Education announced it had opened an investigation into allegations that professors advanced the racist and ethnic stereotype that Jews are “white” and “privileged” and therefore oppress people of color, ignoring centuries of Jewish discrimination and invoking an age-old and dangerous anti-Semitic trope concerning Jewish power and control. Sound familiar? Well, it should. A huge spotlight has been shined on this topic since Whoopi Goldberg was suspended from “The View” last week for insisting that “the Holocaust isn’t about race” because Nazis and Jews are “two white groups of people.” Then the Anti-Defamation League, which had criticized Goldberg, was chastised for embracing a definition of “racism” similar to hers. Let me rewind. In 2020, the ADL decided to “re-define” racism as “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” This excludes anti-Semitism, since Jews have been seen as white, off-white, non-white, white-passing or white-adjacent, but not as “people of color.” It also excludes mistreatment of Asians by other minorities. Last week, after realizing its definition actually contributed to the problem, the ADL issued a new definition: “Racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.” ADL’s new definition is better, but “interim.” Worse, ADL still defines “white supremacy” as “the systematic marginalization or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges people who identify as white.” This has the same problems as their old definition of racism. Why is this so hard? The wrong-headedness of these notions has become clear in our post-Whoopi moment. Yet they follow logically from deeply entrenched orthodoxies. In her best-selling book “White Fragility,” Robin DiAngelo insisted that “only whites can be racist,” because whites have “power and privilege” over people of color. Ibram X. Kendi defined racism as support for policies that widen racial inequality. The Goldberg variation was to apply this to the Holocaust, where its moral incoherence is clear. But the dangers can be seen elsewhere. And now we circle back to Brooklyn. At Brooklyn College, professors insisted that Jews are white, privileged, systemic racists. One student objected and was shut down. “I’m a Hispanic person of color,” she said, “and yet even I was told by faculty and administrators in the program that because I am Jewish, I enjoy the privileges of whiteness and that my skin color would not save me.” That student has since left the program because the harassment of Jewish students as white, privileged oppressors was so bad. At Stanford, Jews have been pressured to join a “whiteness accountability” affinity group, created for “staff who hold privilege via white identity” and “are white identified, may be newly grappling with or realizing their white identity, or identify as or are perceived as white presenting or passing (aka seen as white by others even though you hold other identities).” And this is not unique to academia. Major companies, including Walmart and Amex, base their corporate training on the same ideology which has now been shown to be indefensible, thanks to Whoopi and the ADL. Many government entities are embracing this same dangerous approach. This is wrong. As Ali Rattansi explained in his introduction to “Racism,” “The term ‘racism’ was coined in the 1930s, primarily as a response to the Nazi project of making Germany judenrein, or ‘clean of Jews.’ The Nazis were in no doubt that Jews were a distinct race and posed a threat to the Aryan race to which authentic Germans supposedly belonged.” Goldberg’s comments, while deeply incorrect, reflect current orthodoxies infecting schools, universities and major corporations. In rejecting her mistakes, we must reexamine the ideology that sustained them. At Brooklyn College, Jewish students should be given the same opportunities as all other students, including the right to define their identity and express their perspective. Racism means what it has always meant: treating people differently because of their race. It must be eradicated wherever it is and whomever it targets. Marcus is founder and chairman of The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which has filed civil rights complaints against Stanford University and Brooklyn College, and author of “The Definition of Anti-Semitism.” He served as the 11th assistant U.S. secretary of education for civil rights.