US actress and producer Whoopi Goldberg once again claimed on Saturday that the Holocaust was not connected to race, less than a year after similar comments led to her two-week suspension as host of “The View.”
In an interview with The Sunday Times of London, Goldberg said that the Nazi-orchestrated genocide was “white on white” violence, and not 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,” she said.
When the interviewer noted that the Nazis viewed their victims as lesser races, Goldberg replied: “Yes, but that’s the killer, isn’t it?”
“The oppressor is telling you what you are,” she continued.” Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying?”
Explaining that Jews are not identifiable as a 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, butt naked.”
Goldberg was promoting her new film, “Till,” in which she plays the mother of civil rights activist Mamie Till-Mobley. The movie tells the true story of Till-Mobley’s quest for justice after her son, 14-year-old Emmett Till, was lynched by white supremacists in Mississippi in 1955.
Goldberg was criticized when she claimed that “the Holocaust isn’t about race,” but rather about “man’s inhumanity to man,” during a discussion with co-hosts on “The View” in January.
“If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it,” Goldberg said, before elaborating that “these [Jews and Nazis] are two white groups of people.”
Jewish leaders had slammed her initial statement, noting that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had referred to Jews as an inferior race. Goldberg apologized online the night she made the remark, and on the next day’s show.
However, ABC News President Kim Godwin told her to sit out for two weeks.
Goldberg, born Caryn Elaine Johnson, has no Jewish ancestry but adopted her stage name to be deliberately Jewish-sounding, in part because she has said she personally identifies with Judaism. She told a London audience in 2016: “I just know I am Jewish. I practice nothing. I don’t go to temple, but I do remember the holidays.” In 2016, she designed a Hanukkah sweater for Lord & Taylor.
