" Nazi genocide of the Jews was "not about race"."

I'm not sure I agree (although you yould be surprised it I did), but not necessarily for the obvious reasons.

Jews are a strange bunch. We were, probably, a race apart. The Children of Israel, wandering through the desert were different to the tribes who lived in the region, as the ancestors came from the Fertile Crescent rather than the Levant. We remained a race until one or both of two exiles occured. The first in about 600BC and the second in about 70AD during the Roman destruction of the Second Temple. Certainly in 70AD Jews dispersed around the known world and the amicable division between Ashkenazim ('white East European Jews') and Sepahardim (Arabic, Maghreb, Horm of Africa influenced Jews). You could say that we joined two or three races and in Israel those differences are very obvious. There are Jews who are as white as a Scandanavian and others who are as black as you can get if your grandfather came from Ethiopia. They are all Jewish and from a religious perspective, I would have no problem with my children marrying either variety.  [Edit - I would have no problem anyway, but there is no difference on a religious level between them].

So are we a race? Possibly. Certainly all Jews have genetic similarlities different to others, which imply that we are a race, but we also have genetic differences which imply that we may not be.

Whatever, given the undoubted horror of the Holocaust and the inevitable trouble it was going to get her in, why would Goldberg even bring it up? especially with such a surname....

There is a joke there somewhere... A man comes up to an obviously Jewish person and smacks him arund the head.. Why did you do that? Well my grandfather drowned on the Titanic. What's that got to do with me? Iceberg, Goldberg - its all the same to me..

The whole idea of ‘race’ is scientifically nonsensical. There are far greater genetic differences within, say, the so-called African race than there are between some Africans and the so-called European race. We all know we share 96-99 percent of our DNA with our hairier primate relatives, but there’s somewhere between 20 and 50 percent that’s also shared with plants.

But humans attach too much importance to superficial differences, which may be accentuated by inbreeding in groups isolated by geography or culture, and that gives those with an interest in fomenting hatred something to work with.

So demagogues through the ages have gained support by encouraging one group to demonise a superficially different one, and the Nazis industrialised this in a particularly horrific way. So in the sense that the people killed in the Holocaust were not actually fundamentally different from the people who killed them, Goldberg is right. But given that I’ve had to offer three paragraphs of preamble before stating that, you can see it was pretty silly to use a term that the world thinks it understands, even if it doesn’t.