Whoopi Goldberg, a moderator on ABC’s The View since 2007, has been suspended from the morning talker for two weeks following her controversial remarks about the Holocaust on Monday’s telecast while discussing a Tennessee school board’s banning of novel Maus, which depicts author Art Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor.
Goldberg alleged that the Holocaust was “not about race,” claiming Nazis and Jews were both white. “The Holocaust isn’t about race…it’s about man’s inhumanity to man,” she said.
"Effective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments," ABC News president Kim Godwin said in a statement Tuesday evening following the immediate backlash. "While Whoopi has apologized, I've asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments."
“These decisions are never easy, but necessary,” she said in her memo. “Just last week I noted that the culture at ABC News is one that is driven, kind, inclusive, respectful, and transparent. Whoopi’s comments do not align with those values.”
On Tuesday’s telecast, Goldberg apologized in a segment that also included an interview with Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.
“I misspoke,” Goldberg said to open the talk show. “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.”
As Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League shared, ‘The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race.’
"It upset a lot of people which was never, ever, ever, ever my intention… I thought we were having a discussion," Goldberg told Stephen Colbert on Monday night’s telecast. "I think of race as being something that I can see. You couldn’t tell who was Jewish. They had to delve deeply to figure it out. My point is, they had to do the work."
"I don’t want to fake apologize…I’m very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying,” Goldberg told Colbert.
