Whoopi Goldberg apologised for her remarks on her talk show ‘The View’ earlier this year regarding Jews and race. In a subsequent interview, Whoopi revived her earlier claims and claimed that the Holocaust “wasn’t originally” about race. Whoopi has come under fire for her latest comments, in which she repeated the same line of reasoning, claiming that the approximately 6 million Jews who were systematically murdered during the Holocaust from 1933 to 1945 were not selected because of their race.
Whoopi remarked in a recent interview with The Sunday Times, “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 physical. They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision.”
The Academy Award-winning actor further asserted that individuals of African heritage were similarly targeted by the Nazis and that Jews during the Holocaust had it easier blending in with White people and evading capture than Black people did. Whoopi responded with rhetoric when a reporter said to Goldberg that “the Nazis measured the skulls and noses of Jews to “prove” they were a different race.” She said, “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. That was the point I was making. But you would have thought that I’d taken a big old stinky dump on the table, b*** naked.”
Jewish activists and the community reacted negatively to the remarks. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, tweeted, “Whoopi Goldberg’s comments about 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 complete lack of awareness of the multiethnic, multiracial makeup of the Jewish community. She needs to apologise immediately and actually commit to educating herself on the true nature of anti semitism.”
Arsen Ostrovsky, CEO of the International Legal Forum, tweeted, “So, after supposed ‘apology’ earlier in year, Whoopi Goldberg doubles down on her vile remarks that the Holocaust was not about race, and instead ‘white on white’ violence. Someone get this ignorant fool off the air!” Author Lucy Lipiner, who wrote Long Journey Home: A Young Girl’s Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust, attacked the actor in a tweet, “Whoopi Goldberg continues to use the Holocaust as her punching bag. We told her that her comments harm us and she simply doesn’t care. I survived the Nazis and the Holocaust, so I’ll be damned if I let a comedy has-been, peddling a fake Jewish name get the better of me.”