Whoopi Goldberg Suspended From ‘The View’ For Holocaust Comments

ABC announced Tuesday night that mainstay The View host Whoopi Goldberg has been suspended for two weeks following comments she made about the Holocaust on Monday’s episode. In the episode, Goldberg argued that the Holocaust was “not about race” but instead “man’s inhumanity to man.”

Goldberg apologized for her comments several times, but on Tuesday night ABC News President Kim Godwin announced the suspension and called her comments “wrong and hurtful.”

The comments came during a discussion about the recent banning of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus in a Tennessee school board. Goldberg’s first controversial comment came early in the conversation when she made a quip that the Holocaust was “white people doing it to white people. So y’all go and fight amongst yourselves.”

She expanded those comments later on when she said, “Let’s be truthful about it. Because the Holocaust isn’t about race,” and when her co-host Joy Behar countered that “they considered Jews a different race,” Goldberg continued to assert that the Holocaust was more about human cruelty than racism. “Let’s talk about it for what it is, it’s how people treat each other,” Goldberg said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white… everybody eats each other.”

Goldberg’s comments were quickly met with fierce blowback by Jewish organizations and communities, who called her comments dangerous, and emblematic both of growing ignorance around the Holocaust, and rising antisemitism in recent years.

It’s generally believed that due to Adolf Hitler’s views on racial purity and the casting of Jews as “vermin” deserving only of eradication, the Holocaust was indeed fueled heavily by racism and prejudice.

In an appearance on The Late Show Monday, Goldberg discussed how her race informed the comments she made. “I feel, being black, when we talk about race, it’s a very different thing to me … I thought it was a salient discussion because as a black person, I think of race as something I can see. So I see you and I know what race you are.”

She apologized again on the Tuesday morning episode of The View, where she said “It is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race. Now, words matter, and mine are no exception. I regret my comments, as I said, and I stand corrected.” Goldberg then invited Anti-Defamation league head, Jonathan Greenblatt, on the show for a discussion.

You can watch her initial comments below: