So how can they jump on Whoopi when she agreed with them?
How about my first question? Being on a Jewish website for a few years and I am not even sure of the answer?
Honestly, I don't think the Jews can answer it. Buy I don't think it matters.
Call it what you want, the Nazis dehumanized Jews, thought of them as less than, and killed them. Same thing the KKK did to black people. So even if Jews aren't a race, antisemites treat Jews differently as if they are a race.
Anti Jewish racism is often different to every other racism because where racists treat their victims as lies than, what often drives antisemites is that the Jews are too smart, too powerful, too controlling, etc.
The reason why it makes a difference when Whoopi says this kind of stuff is because the modern American talk makes this hierarchy of bigotry, and they never can find a place for the Jews, because Jews are privaleged, they have money. So you have black people in Brooklyn cursing out Jews for kicking blacks out of the neighborhood, and who knows what other sin, and sometimes it gets violent.
"But that's racist!" someone will cry, and then they'll say, nope, can't be racist because the Jews got money and they have it coming. In the streets of jersey City in the moments after Jews were killed for being Jews, this is what was being said.