Jewish activists and community members demanded the firing of Whoopi Goldberg “View” over the weekend after she doubled down on her past statements about the Holocaust, sparking a furious backlash on social media.
Ten months after being suspended from an ABC daytime talk show for insisting that the Holocaust was “not about race” Goldberg, in a new interview with Britain’s The Sunday Times, showed little remorse for her past rhetoric, reiterating that the estimated 6 million Jews who were systematically killed in the Holocaust were not targeted based on their race.
The View’s co-host also claimed that the Nazis targeted people of African descent rather than Jews because they were physically different, and went so far as to say that it was easier for Jews to blend in with whites and hide from the Nazis than Black people did during the Holocaust.
MESSAGE FROM WHOOPI GOLDBERG HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS: ‘SHAME ON YOU’
“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 can’t tell a Jew on the street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was what I meant,” she said. “But you’d have thought I’d put a big old stinking piece of junk on the table, naked.”
The Times of Israel called Goldberg’s comments “inflammatory” in a Sunday article, noting that although her real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson, the talk show co-host is not of Jewish descent and has adopted a more “Jewish” pen name.
Comments Goldberg Holocaust in February, which led to it two-week suspension from the network and the subsequent apology, stunned many in the Jewish community. At the time, religious leaders, activists and online critics encouraged her to educate herself on the subject, but largely supported her return to the show.
Now, with her lack of remorse in her latest interview, some are calling for her firing because of her history of historically ignorant statements.
“So, after a supposed ‘apology’ earlier in the year, Whoopi Goldberg is doubling down on her vile remarks that the Holocaust was not about race, but instead about ‘white on white’ violence.” Somebody get this ignorant fool off the air!” International legal The general director of the Forum, Arsen Ostrovsky, writes about this.
“Once again, Whoopi insists on dismissing the Holocaust as simply a white-on-white crime, rather than an industrial-scale murder of European Jews. #Antisemitism — the oldest and most toxic hatred in history — is on the rise, but Whoopi is determined to trivialize it,” replied Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby.
Lucy Lippiner, a Holocaust survivor and author of “The Long Journey Home: A Young Girl’s Memoir of a Holocaust Survivor,” chided Goldberg for constantly using the horrors of the genocide she witnessed as a “punching punch.”
“Whoopi Goldberg continues to use the Holocaust as his punching bag. We told her that her comments hurt us and she just doesn’t care,” said Lippiner, who has been outspoken about Goldberg’s past Holocaust rhetoric.
“I survived the Nazis and the Holocaust,” she added, “so I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the comedy that was, and spreading the fake Jewish name, get the better of me.”
Newsweek contributor Joel Petlin responded: “Accepting an apology from some people who spew anti-Semitic garbage is a triumph of hope over experience. We know that anti-Semitism is likely to happen again, but we still hope they’ve learned something along the way. Unfortunately, Whoopi just found out she can get away with it. Again.”
“I would like actors to stick to acting, and football players to football. Every time people like Whoopi Goldberg or Gary Lineker open their mouths about things they don’t understand, they get smaller and smaller…,” agreed investigative journalist David Collier.
Rep. Richie Torres, DN.Y. also called the co-anchor of “Podzhad”.
“Anti-Semitism is anti-Jewish racism. And the point. To claim that the Holocaust had nothing to do with racism is historical revisionism at its worst,” he wrote.
In her account of the interview, Janice Turner of the Times revealed that “Even now [Goldberg] does not understand why her statements offended. She insists that the Jewish people themselves are divided over whether they are a race or a religion.’
The interview came less than a year after Goldberg went public humble apologies for the same comment after making people “very angry”. However, she somewhat defended her remarks at the time, saying that as a black woman she sees race as something she can see.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS PROGRAM
Whoopi Goldberg at the premiere of ‘Till’ during the 60th New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center on October 1, 2022 in New York City.
(Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for FLC)
Responding to Goldberg in an interview with Fox News Digital earlier this year, Lippiner said of her position: “She was wrong. It was very against my race, my Jewishness. It wasn’t white people against white people, as she says. White, but we were exterminated because we were Jews. Men, women, children, babies were killed because we were Jews.”
“I guess she’s a smart person,” Lippiner added. “[But] I don’t understand how she could be so ignorant of the Holocaust, how it happened and what it happened to us, the Jewish people.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to an ABC spokesperson for comment and will update if they hear back.
Fox News’ Gabriel Hayes contributed to this report.
