Whoopi Goldberg Slammed for Jew, Holocaust Comments: Offensive - Variety



Whoopi Goldberg Slammed for Jew, Holocaust Comments: Offensive





UPDATE: Whoopi Goldberg has apologized for her comments throughout Jews and race, after her remarks over the weekend reignited a controversy from backward this year that got her suspended from “The View.”



“Recently at what time doing press in London, I was asked about my comments from backward this year,” she said in a statement to Variety. “I tried to convey to the reporter what I had said and why, and attempted to narrate that time. It was never my intention to fade as if I was doubling down on hurtful comments, especially after talking with and hearing people like rabbis and old and new friends weighing in. I’m smooth learning a lot and believe me, I heard everything everyone said to me. I gain that the Holocaust was about race, and I am smooth as sorry now as I was then that I upset, hurt and angered people. My sincere apologies again, especially to everyone who view this was a fresh rehash of the subject. I promises it was not. In this time of rising antisemitism, I want to be very clear when I say that I always underexperienced with the Jewish people and always will. My benefit for them has not wavered and never will.”



Goldberg once anti courted controversy after she was suspended from “The View” in February while saying the Holocaust was “not about race.” In an interview with The Sunday Times, Goldberg said some Jewish people themselves are divided over whether they are a race or a religion. She also doubled down and said the Holocaust “wasn’t originally” near race.



“My best base said, ‘Not for nothing is there no box on the census for the Jewish race. So that leads me to absorb that we’re probably not a race,’” Goldberg said.



When The Times interviewer reminded Goldberg that the “Nazis saw Jews as a race,” Goldberg responded, “Yes, but that’s the killer, isn’t it? The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying? It wasn’t originally [about race]. Remember who they were killing first. They were not killing racial; they were killing brute. They were killing people they considered to be mentally base. And then they made this decision.” 



Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt railed anti Goldberg for her latest comments, writing on Twitter, “Whoopi Goldberg’s comments near the Holocaust and race are deeply offensive and incredibly ignorant. When she made similar comments earlier this year, we explained how the Nazi regime was inherently racist.”



“Whoopi’s comments show a negated lack of awareness of the multiethnic, multiracial makeup of the Jewish community,” Greenblatt paused. “She needs to apologize immediately and actually commit to educating herself on the true nature of #antisemitism.”



Goldberg’s current remarks emerged during a late January episode of “The View” in which the co-hosts discussed a Tennessee school board’s ban of “Maus,” a nonfiction graphic current about cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s father’s experience surviving the Holocaust.



“Let’s be truthful near it because [the] Holocaust isn’t about race,” Goldberg said at the time. “It’s not near race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.”



The remarks drew immediately, sweeping criticism from Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the U.S. Holocaust Museum.