Whoopi Goldberg, cohost of “The View,” is backtracking after claiming on the show that the Holocaust was “not about race.”
“On today’s show, I said the Holocaust ‘is not about race but about man’s inhumanity to man,’” she wrote. “I should have said it is about both. As Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League shared, ‘The Holocaust was about the Nazis’ systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — whom they deemed to be an inferior race.’ I stand corrected. The Jewish people around the world have always had my support, and that will never waiver.”
Greenblatt acknowledged Goldberg’s apology with a statement of his own, thanking the celebrity “for correcting your prior statement and acknowledging the Holocaust for what it is. As antisemitism surges to historic levels, I hope we can work together to combat ignorance of that horrific crime and the hate that threatens all.
A senior source at ABC News told DailyMail.com that employees were surprised by the network’s soft touch on their comments, especially as Rosen Barr’s firing came so quickly over racist comments about Valerie Jarrett.
“There is a blind spot in The View when it comes to anti-Semitism. It’s never too big of a hate crime for them.
“These comments are absolutely disgusting and outrageous, and it’s time for Disney and ABC to step up and publish them,” the source said.
Conservative author and talk show host Ben Shapiro, a practicing Orthodox Jew, also condemned Goldberg for her “insidious” claims about the Holocaust and Nazism.
“The intersectional argument is that Jews are white people and that Jews are disproportionately successful thanks to ‘white supremacy,’” he said. “Because racism is ‘animus plus power,’ the Jews are powerful because they are white, anti-Semitism from non-white supremacists isn’t bigotry. The attempt to abstract the causes of the Holocaust from Jew-hatred to ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ is actually a way of obscuring and covering for anti-Semitism.”
Even Goldberg’s fellow co-hosts were turned off by her remarks, which came during a televised discussion about a Tennessee school board that made headlines recently for removing from schools the Holocaust-themed graphic novel “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning book in which different people groups are represented as different animals. The novel, by Art Spiegelman, is designed to educate kids about the evils of Nazism and the Holocaust.
Co-hosts Joy Behar and Ana Navarro immediately pushed back on Goldberg. Behar noted the fact that the Nazi regime considered Jewish people to be a different ethnic race and had also targeted black people. Navarro, for her part, pointed out the Nazis were white supremacists who had also attacked and killed gypsies.
It’s not known why Goldberg, who is not Jewish, changed her name from Johnson. She is the daughter of Robert James Johnson and Emma Johnson. She was born in Manhattan in 1955 as Caryn Elaine Johnson (via Encyclopedia).
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice