Whoopi Goldberg Apologizes Again For Holocaust Comments As ‘The View’ Hosts ADL Leader – Update

Tom Tapp
·4 min read
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UPDATED, 8:42 AM: Whoopi Goldberg apologized again on The View this morning for her comments that the Holocaust was “not about race.” Saying that she “misspoke” Monday, Goldberg said on-air today that the Holocaust “is indeed about race, because Hitler and the Nazis considered the Jews to be an inferior race. Now, words matter — and mine are no exception. I regret my comments, and I stand corrected. I also stand with the Jewish people.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, was on the talk show Tuesday morning. “There is no question that the Holocaust was about race,” he told Goldberg and her co-hosts. “That is how the Nazis saw it as they sought the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people across continents, across countries, with deliberate and ruthless cruelty.”

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He said The View should consider adding a Jewish host to replace Meghan McCain, who left the show last year.

Read details about Goldberg’s comments below.

PREVIOUSLY, January 31: While discussing the controversy over a Tennessee school district banning Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning and somewhat graphic graphic novel Maus in schools, Whoopi Goldberg said today on The View that the Holocaust was “not about race.” She got immediate pushback from the show’s other hosts and, shortly thereafter, from the Anti-Defamation League, the Auschwitz Memorial and the Holocaust Museum.

“If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it,” Goldberg said. “Because the Holocaust isn’t about race. No, it’s not about race.”

Co-host Joy Behar asked Goldberg: “Then what was it about?”

“Man’s inhumanity to man,” Goldberg shot back. “These are two white groups of people.”

“No @WhoopiGoldberg, the #Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people – who they deemed to be an inferior race,” wrote ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on Twitter. “They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering 6 million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous.”

The U.S. Holocaust Museum wrote, “Racism was central to Nazi ideology. Jews were not defined by religion, but by race. Nazi racist beliefs fueled genocide and mass murder.”

The Auschwitz Memorial tweeted a chart that outlined the Nazis’ “pseudo-scientific division of people into races, forming a basis for the racial policies of Nazi Germany.”

Late tonight, Goldberg expressed “my sincerest apologies” on Twitter.

“On today’s show,” she wrote, “I said the Holocaust ‘is not about race, but about man’s inhumanity to man.’ I should have said it is about both.”

She then quoted Greenblatt’s tweet asserting that the Nazis justified their horrific acts by considering Jews “an inferior race.”

To that, The View co-host wrote, “I stand corrected.”

She continued, “The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never waiver. I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused.”

See the exchange on The View today below.

Erik Pedersen contributed to this report.

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