Whoopi Goldberg addresses controversy over Holocaust remarks
"The View" co-host Whoopi Goldberg addresses fallout over her retracted claim that the Holocaust wasn't about race.
Jewish activists and community members demanded Whoopi Goldberg face termination from "The View" over the weekend after she doubled down on past Holocaust remarks, prompting a fierce outcry on social media.
Ten months after getting suspended from ABC’s daytime talk show for insisting that the Holocaust was "not about race," Goldberg, in a new interview with U.K. paper The Sunday Times, showed little remorse for her past rhetoric, arguing again that the estimated 6 million Jews who were systematically killed in the Holocaust were not targeted based on their race.
"The View" co-host also claimed that the Nazis targeted people of African descent in addition to Jews because they were physically different, and Goldberg went as far as to suggest that Jews had an easier time blending in with White people and hiding from the Nazis than Black people did at the time of the Holocaust.
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"The View" co-host Whoopi Goldberg doubled down on her belief that the Holocaust was "not about race." (Screenshot/ABC/TheView)
"It doesn’t change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was the point I was making," she said. "But you would have thought that I’d taken a big old stinky dump on the table, butt naked."
The Times of Israel called Goldberg's comments "incendiary" in an article Sunday, pointing out that while her real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson, the talk show co-host has no Jewish ancestry and adopted a more "Jewish-sounding" stage name.
Goldberg's Holocaust comments in February, which led to her two-week suspension from the network and a subsequent apology, stunned many in the Jewish community. At the time, faith leaders, activists and online critics encouraged her to educate herself on the topic, but they largely supported her return to the show.
Now, with the lack of remorse evident in her latest interview, some are calling for her termination over her history of historically ignorant statements.
"So, after supposed ‘apology’ earlier in year, Whoopi Goldberg doubles down on her vile remarks that the Holocaust was not about race, and instead ‘white on white’ violence. Someone get this ignorant fool off the air!" International Legal Forum CEO Arsen Ostrovsky wrote.
"Once again Whoopi insists on dismissing the Holocaust as a mere white-on-white crime, rather than the industrial-scale murder of Europe's Jews. #Antisemitism — history's oldest and most toxic hatred — is surging, but Whoopi is determined to trivialize it," Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby responded.
Lucy Lipiner, a Holocaust survivor and author of "Long Journey Home: A Young Girl's Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust," scolded Goldberg for continuously using the genocidal horrors she witnessed as a "punching bag."
"Whoopi Goldberg continues to use the Holocaust as her punching bag. We told her that her comments harm us and she simply doesn’t care," said Lipiner, who has been outspoken against Goldberg's past Holocaust rhetoric.
"I survived the Nazis and the Holocaust," she added, "so I’ll be damned if I let a comedy has-been, peddling a fake Jewish name get the better of me."
Newsweek contributor Joel Petlin responded, "Accepting apologies from some people who spew Antisemitic garbage is the triumph of hope over experience. We know that the Antisemitism will likely reoccur, but we still hope that they learned something along the way. Alas Whoopi just learned she could get away with it. Again."
"I wish actors would stick to acting and footballers would stick to football. Every time people like Whoopi Goldberg or Gary Lineker open their mouths about things they don't understand they grow increasingly small..," investigative journalist David Collier agreed.
Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., also called out "The View" co-host.
"Antisemitism is anti-Jewish racism. Period. Claiming the Holocaust had nothing to do with racism is historical revisionism at its worst," he wrote.
In her write-up of the interview, the Times' Janice Turner revealed that, "Even now [Goldberg] does not understand why her remarks offended. She insists Jewish people themselves are divided about whether they are a race or a religion."
The interview comes less than a year after Goldberg issued a watered-down apology for the same comment after making people "very angry." She did somewhat defend her remarks at the time, though, saying that as a Black woman she viewed race as something she could see.
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Whoopi Goldberg attends the premiere of "Till" during the 60th New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall on Oct. 1, 2022, in New York City. (Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for FLC)
Responding to Goldberg in a Fox News Digital interview earlier this year, Lipiner said of her position, "She was mistaken. This was very much against my race, my Jewishness. It wasn’t White people against White people as she says. We were White, but we were being exterminated because we were Jewish. Men, women, children, infants, killed because we were Jewish."
"I assume she’s an intelligent person," Lipiner added. "[But] I don’t understand how she could be so unaware of the Holocaust, how it happened and that it happened to us, the Jewish people."
Fox News Digital has reached out to an ABC spokesperson for comment and will update if given a response.
Fox News' Gabriel Hays contributed to this report.