Jewish activists and community members over the weekend called for the termination of Whoopi Goldberg from The View after she doubled down on previous Holocaust remarks, prompting a violent outcry on social media.
Ten months after being suspended from ABC’s daytime talk show for insisting the Holocaust “wasn’t about race,” Goldberg showed little remorse for her earlier interview in a new interview with British newspaper The Sunday Times Rhetoric, arguing again that it was an estimated 6 million Jews systematically killed in the Holocaust, was not attacked on the basis of race.
The View co-host also claimed that the Nazis targeted people of African descent in addition to Jews because they were physically different, going so far as to claim that Jews had an easier time associating with whites mingling and hiding from the Nazis as Black people did at the time of the Holocaust.
MESSAGE FROM HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS TO WHOOPI GOLDBERG: “SHAME ON YOU”
The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg reiterated her belief that the Holocaust was “not about race.” (Screenshot/ABC/TheView)
“That doesn’t change the fact that you couldn’t tell a Jew on the street. You could find me. They couldn’t find her. That was the point I was getting at,” she said. “But you would have thought that I would have put a big old stinky pile on the table, stark naked.”
The Times of Israel called Goldberg’s comments “incendiary” in an article on Sunday, noting that the talk show co-host, although her real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson, has no Jewish ancestry and has a rather “Jewish-sounding” stage name have accepted.
Goldberg’s Holocaust comments in February, which led to her two-week suspension from the network and a subsequent apology, stunned many in the Jewish community. At the time, faith leaders, activists, and online critics encouraged her to educate herself on the issue, but largely supported her return to the show.
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Now, with the lack of remorse evident in her most recent interview, some are calling for her resignation over her history of historically ignorant statements.
“So, after a supposed ‘apology’ earlier this year, Whoopi Goldberg doubles down on her vile remarks that the Holocaust wasn’t about race, it was about ‘white-on-white’ violence. Somebody get this ignorant fool off the air!” International Legal Forum CEO Arsen Ostrovsky wrote.
“Once again, Whoopi insists on dismissing the Holocaust as a mere white-on-white crime and not an industrial-scale murder of Europe’s Jews. #Antisemitism — the oldest and most toxic hatred in history — is rising, but Whoopi is determined to trivialize it,” responded Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby.
Lucy Lipiner, a Holocaust survivor and author of Long Journey Home: A Young Girl’s Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust, berated Goldberg for continually using the genocidal horrors she witnessed as a “punching bag.”
“Whoopi Goldberg continues to use the Holocaust as her punching bag. We told her that her comments hurt us and she just doesn’t care,” said Lipiner, who openly opposed Goldberg’s past Holocaust rhetoric.
“I survived the Nazis and the Holocaust,” she added, “so I’ll be damned if I get overwhelmed by a comedy peddling a fake Jewish name.”
Newsweek contributor Joel Petlin replied: “Accepting apologies from some people spewing anti-Semitic garbage is hope triumphing over experience. We know antisemitism is likely to resurface, but we still hope they learned something from it. Unfortunately Whoopi just learned she could get away with it. Yet again.”
“I wish actors would stick to acting and footballers would stick 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. Ritchie Torres, DN.Y. also called out the co-host of “View.”
“Anti-Semitism is anti-Jewish racism. Point. To claim that the Holocaust had nothing to do with racism is historical revisionism at its worst,” he wrote.
Summing up the interview, Janice Turner of the Times revealed: “Even now [Goldberg] does not understand why their comments offended. She insists that the Jewish people themselves are divided as to whether they belong to a race or a religion.”
The interview comes less than a year after Goldberg issued a watered-down apology for the same comment after making people “very angry.” However, she somewhat defended her comments at the time, saying as a black woman she viewed race as something she could see.
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Whoopi Goldberg attends the premiere of “Till” during the 60th New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on October 1, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for FLC)
Lipiner responded to Goldberg in an interview with Fox News Digital earlier this year, saying of her position, “She was wrong. That was very against my race, my Judaism. It wasn’t whites versus whites like she says. We were White, but we were exterminated because we were Jews. Men, women, children, babies, killed because we were Jews.”
“I assume she’s an intelligent person,” Lipiner added. “[But] I don’t understand how she could have been so unaware of the Holocaust as it happened and that it happened to us, the Jewish people.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to an ABC spokesperson for comment and will update when it receives a response.
Fox News’ Gabriel Hays contributed to this report.
Yael Halon is a reporter at Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to [email protected].