Whoopi Goldberg Apologizes for Holocaust Comments: “I Stand Corrected”

Whoopi Goldberg issued an apology on February 1 on ABC’s “The View” over her comments on the Holocaust the day before.

Goldberg had been under fire for saying that “the Holocaust isn’t about race” and instead about “man’s inhumanity to man.” She posted an apology to Twitter later that evening, but said on February 1 that she wanted “The View’s” audience to hear it straight from her.

“I said something that I feel a responsibility for not leaving unexamined because my words upset so many people which was never my intention,” Goldberg 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 then acknowledged that the Holocaust was actually “about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race.”

“Words matter and mine are no exception,” Goldberg added. “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.”

She then introduced Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt as their guest, who elaborated about the Holocaust: “The Nazis saw it as they perpetrated the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people across continents, across countries with deliberate and ruthless cruelty. And literally the first page of ‘Maus’ the book you were talking about yesterday, Whoopi, it opens with a quote from Hitler, and literally it says, ‘The Jews undoubtedly are a race, but they are not human.’ You see, Hitler’s ideology, the Third Reich, was predicated on the idea that the Aryans, the Germans were a quote, ‘master race’ and the Jews were a subhuman race. It was racialized antisemitism.” 

“Maus,” a graphic novel about the Holocaust, has been the subject of controversy after a Tennessee school board recently removed it from their 8th grade curriculum over inappropriate language and nudity and will be looking for another book to teach the Holocaust. That controversy is what “The View” was discussing before Goldberg uttered her Holocaust remarks.

Greenblatt added that the Jewish people have been targeted and killed throughout human history “in large part because many people felt they were not just a different religion, but indeed a different race.” He urged Goldberg to use her platform on “The View” to educate people about the evils of antisemitism and called for conservatives to condemn antisemitism on the right and for progressives to denounce antisemitism on the left. “If you demonize Jewish people or you demonize the Jewish state, that is flat-out wrong,” Greenblatt said.

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

Prior to her apology posted to Twitter on January 31, Goldberg appeared on “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert, which was recorded earlier in the day but didn’t air until later at night. According to Entertainment Tonight (ET) Canada, Goldberg explained that “as a Black person, I think of race as being something that I can see. So I see you and I know what race you are, and the discussion was about how I felt about that. People were very angry, and they said, ‘No, no, we are a race,’ and I understand. I understand. I felt differently. I respect everything everyone is saying to me, and, you know, I don’t want to fake apologize. I’m very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying, and so because of it they’re saying that I’m antisemitic and that I’m denying the Holocaust, and all these other things which would never have occurred to me to do.”

Colbert said that he viewed whiteness as “a construct created by colonial powers during the beginning of the colonial imperialist era in order to exploit other people, and that they could apply it to all different kinds of people, that idea of race. And the American experience tends to be based on skin.” Goldberg replied that the Holocaust “wasn’t based on the skin, you couldn’t tell who was Jewish.” She went on to claim that “the Nazis lied.” “They had issues with ethnicity, not with race, because most of the Nazis were white people and most of the people they were attacking were white people, so to me, I’m thinking, ‘How can you say it’s about race if you are fighting each other?’ So it all really began because I said, ‘How will we explain to children what happened in Nazi Germany?’ I said, ‘This wasn’t racial, this was about white-on-white,’ And everybody said, ‘No, no, no, it was racial,’ and so that’s what this all came from.”

Quotes from “The View” provided by transcript from Newsbusters.