The View Suspends Whoopi Goldberg After She Said The Holocaust Was “Not About Race”

Whoopi Goldberg has been suspended from The View for two weeks following her recent remarks about the Holocaust. On Feb. 1, ABC president Kim Godwin addressed the daytime talk show host’s “wrong and hurtful comments” and explained why the suspension was necessary. “While Whoopi has apologized, I’ve asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments,” Godwin said. “The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family, and communities.”

The network’s decision “is a surprise to most of the staff,” according to an E! News insider. “There are a lot of text messages being sent around right now. Tomorrow will be interesting.” Goldberg’s suspension came one day after she said that the Holocaust was “not about race” while discussing a Tennessee school board’s vote to remove Maus — a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman about the Holocaust — from its 8th-grade curriculum. She also said that the genocide of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945 was “about man’s inhumanity to man” and claimed it was between “two white groups of people.”

Goldberg’s remarks received some pushback from her co-hosts and a swift response from the Jewish community, including the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt. “No @WhoopiGoldberg, the #Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people – who they deemed to be an inferior race,” Greenblatt tweeted. “They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering 6 million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous.” Goldberg doubled down on some of her offensive statements on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which was taped before she issued this apology.

“On today’s show I said the Holocaust ‘is not about race, but about man’s inhumanity to man.’ I should have said it is about both,” she said in a statement shared on Twitter and Instagram. She also cited Greenblatt’s words and apologized for the pain she caused. On Feb. 1, she invited Greenblatt on The View to further educate her and the show’s millions of viewers about the Holocaust. “The Third Reich was predicated on the idea that the Aryans — the Germans — were a ‘master race’ and the Jews were a subhuman race,” he said. “It was a racialized antisemitism.”

Goldberg also issued another apology on-air. “I said something that I feel a responsibility for not leaving unexamined because my words upset so many people, which was never my intention,” she said. “And I understand why now and for that I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful and helped me understand some different things.” She also clarified that the Holocaust was “indeed about race, because [Adolf] Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race.” She added, “I regret my comments, as I said, and I stand corrected.”