Goldberg Slammed Over More 'Deeply Offensive' Holocaust Remarks

Comedian apologizes after latest controversy
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 27, 2022 4:30 PM CST
Updated Dec 28, 2022 12:31 AM CST
Whoopi Goldberg Slammed for 'Deeply Offensive' Holocaust Remarks
Whoopi Goldberg poses for a portrait to promote the film "Till," on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022, at the Park Lane Hotel in New York.   (Photo by Matt Licari/Invision/AP)
UPDATE Dec 28, 2022 12:31 AM CST

Whoopi Goldberg is apologizing again. In a statement responding to her latest Holocaust comments controversy, the comedian said that these most recent comments were simply an attempt to explain her original controversial comments about the Holocaust. "It was never my intention to appear 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 still learning a lot and believe me, I heard everything everyone said to me," Goldberg says, per EW. "I believe that the Holocaust was about race, and I am still as sorry now as I was then that I upset, hurt and angered people. My sincere apologies again, especially to everyone who thought this was a fresh rehash of the subject. I promise it was not."

Dec 27, 2022 4:30 PM CST

Whoopi Goldberg is finishing 2022 the way she started it—being criticized for her remarks about the Holocaust. In an interview with the Times of London, she returned to the claims that led to her suspension from The View earlier this year, arguing that the Holocaust "wasn't originally" about race. "Remember who they were killing first," she said. "They were not killing racial; they were killing physical." In January, she said the Holocaust "wasn't about race" because it involved "two white groups of people." Anti-Defamation League chief Jonathan Greenblatt called Goldberg's latest comments "deeply offensive and incredibly disappointing, especially given that this is not the first time she had made remarks like this."

"In a moment when antisemitic incidents have surged across the US, she should realize that making such ignorant statements can have real consequences," Greenblatt said, per the Hill. When he addressed Goldberg's remarks earlier this year, Greenblatt said the Nazis' racial laws led to the slaughter of 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million children. "Germans considered themselves the ‘master race’ and claimed all other non-Aryans were inferior," he said. "This is a trope we still hear echoed by white supremacists in the US today."

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Goldberg was also criticized by numerous Jewish groups and US Rep. Ritchie Torres, who said, "Antisemitism is anti-Jewish racism. Period. Claiming the Holocaust had nothing to do with racism is historical revisionism at its worst," per NBC. In her remarks to Times interviewer Janice Turner, who had been speaking to Goldberg about new movie Till, in which she plays lynching victim Emmett Till's grandmother, Goldberg argued that even Jewish people are divided over whether they are a race and said " you could not tell a Jew on a street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them." Turner wrote that Goldberg's views seemed to stem from an assumption that America's "specific racial politics, defined by slavery and Civil War, are the universal and only experience of race." (More Whoopi Goldberg stories.)

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