Whoopi Goldberg made another attempt to apologize for her remarks claiming that the Holocaust was “not about race,” saying on Tuesday’s broadcast of “The View” on ABC that she “misspoke.”
“Yesterday on our show, I misspoke,” she began. “And I tweeted about it last night but I kind of want you to hear it from me directly. I said something that I feel a responsibility for not leaving unexamined because my words upset so many people, which was never my intention. 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.”
“I said that the Holocaust was ‘not about race’ and was instead about man’s inhumanity to man,” she continued, adding, “But 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. I also stand with the Jewish people as they know, and y’all know, because I’ve always done that.”
Whoopi Goldberg (stage name) begins The View today by apologizing for her comments about the Holocaust. “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.” pic.twitter.com/QvlW0CWnk2
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) February 1, 2022
Goldberg then introduced the show’s first guest, Anti-Defamation League President Jonathan Greenblatt, to explain the point further.
“A lot of people were very upset by what I said yesterday, and the things they’ve. — I regret,” Goldberg said, adding, “And so I want to clear this up. Can you explain why the Holocaust was about race?”
The first guest of the show was Anti-Defamation League CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt. Here he explains to Whoopi how the Nazis viewed Jews as “a subhuman race. It was racialized anti-semitism.” pic.twitter.com/m7zz2zwBNa
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) February 1, 2022
Greenblatt explained that the Nazis had viewed the Jewish people as a race — one inferior to the German “master race” promoted by the Third Reich — and had attempted the “systematic annihilation of the Jewish people.”
He noted in a tweet, “They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering 6 million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous.”
He went on to note that Jews were described as a race in the first pages of the graphic novel “Maus” — the very book that started the entire conversation. “It opens with a quote from Hitler and literally it says, ‘The Jews undoubtedly are a race, but they are not human.'”
Greenblatt added that it might not look like the same kind of “racism” that people see in the United States in the 21st century, but it was unmistakably about race.
Greenblatt concluded by calling for better education on the Holocaust, saying that learning the truth about what happened in the past was the best way to ensure that it never happened again.
“But I would say shows like yours are so important, and I know you guys believe in representation, and I know you guys work to bring all points of view, and, hey, I know you’re considering, new host for the show, a permanent host,” he added. “Think about having a Jewish host on this show who can bring these issues of anti-semitism, who can bring these issues of representation to ‘The View’ every single day.”