Whoopi Goldberg is doubling down on her controversial comments about the Holocaust. A year after Goldberg was temporarily suspended from The View after commenting on-air that the Holocaust wasn’t “about race,” the moderator renewed the controversial take in a new interview with The Sunday Times of London, in which she claimed the Holocaust was “white on white” violence and again claimed the horrific genocide was not racially motivated.
The remarks resurfaced when Goldberg explained that her stage name Whoopi Goldberg comes from a “distant Jewish ancestor.” Goldberg then began to speak of her perspective on the Jewish race, telling Times columnist Janice Turner of her The View comments that her “best friend said, ‘Not for nothing is there no box on the census for the Jewish race. So that leads me to believe that we’re probably not a race.’” In her write-up of the interview, Turner, who noted that “even now she does not understand why her remarks offended. She insists Jewish people themselves are divided about whether they are a race or a religion,” explained that she attempted to push back at Goldberg’s claims, telling her, “But the point here, I say, is Nazis saw Jews as a race.”
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“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?” Goldberg said, prompting Turner to ask, “But since the Nazis devised racial laws aimed specifically at Jews, wasn’t the Holocaust about race?” Goldberg responded, “It wasn’t originally. Remember who they were killing first. They were not killing racial; they were killing physical. They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision.”
When Turner countered that “the Nazis measured the heads and noses of Jews to ‘prove’ they were a distinct race,” Goldberg said, “They did that to black people too. But it doesn’t change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them.” Goldberg went on to reflect on the incendiary comments she made on The View, telling Turner, “That was the point I was making. But you would have thought that I’d taken a big old stinky dump on the table, butt naked.”
The recent remarks come nearly a year after Goldberg sparked outrage during a discussion on the banning of Maus by a school board in Tennessee. Her comments that the Holocaust wasn’t “about race” eventually prompted a two-week suspension, with Goldberg also issuing an apology. Responding to her most recent remarks, Holocaust survivor Lucy Lipiner hit back at Goldberg, writing on Twitter that the actress “continues to use the Holocaust as her punching bag.” Lipiner added, “We told her that her comments harm us and she simply doesn’t care.”
