By Orowo Victoria Ojieh, Entertainment Correspondent
Oscar-winning actress and comedian Whoopi Goldberg has faced a backlash for comments she made about the Holocaust during a recent episode of The View talk show.
During a discussion with co-hosts on the show, Goldberg claimed the Holocaust, which involved the murder of about six million Jews and other victims, was not “about race.”
News of the suspension came just a day after Goldberg said that the Holocaust was “not about race” during a discussion about a Tennessee school board’s recent decision to remove Maus, a graphic novel about the atrocity, from an eighth-grade language arts curriculum.
Her comments drew a quick response on Twitter and social media platforms. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt was one of the users who corrected the host on Twitter. According to Greenblatt, “The Nazis dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering 6 million Jews.” He added: “Holocaust distortion is dangerous.”
StandWithUs, an organization dedicated to education about Israel and fighting anti-Semitism tweeted that the Holocaust “was driven by multiple factors, and there is no doubt that one of them was Nazi racism against Jews.”
In her on-air apology, Goldberg stated that the Holocaust “is indeed about race, because [Adolf] Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race.”
Goldberg apologized for her comments and said that the situation has been a learning experience. She shared: “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.
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“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.”
Despite the apology, ABC News President Kim Godwin suspended the host for two weeks “for her wrong and hurtful comments,” according to a statement posted on the TV channel’s public relations Twitter account.
