A day after The View’s Whoopi Goldberg drew intense backlash for claiming the Holocaust wasn’t about race, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told the show to fill its co-hosting vacancy with a Jewish person.
“So yesterday on our show, I misspoke, and I tweeted about it last night, but I kind of want you to hear it from me directly,” Goldberg noted at the top of Tuesday’s show. “I said something that I feel a responsibility for not leaving unexamined because my words upset so many people, which was never my intention. And I understand why now, and for that, I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful and helped me understand some different things.”
Noting that her remarks revolved around a discussion about a Tennessee school board’s decision to ban Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, Goldberg said she now knows that the Holocaust “was indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race.”
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“I stand corrected and I stand with the Jewish people,” she added before introducing Greenblatt to the show.
“Well, Whoopi, there’s no question that the Holocaust was about race,” he proclaimed. “That’s how the Nazis saw it as they perpetrated the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people across continents, across countries with deliberate and ruthless cruelty. And literally the first page of Maus, the book you were talking about yesterday, Whoopi, it opens with a quote from Hitler, and literally, it says, the Jews undoubtedly are a race, but they are not human.”
He continued: “You see, Hitler’s ideology, it was predicated on the idea that the Aryans, the Germans were a quote, ‘master race,’ and the Jews were a subhuman race. It was racialized antisemitism.”
He said that while this “might not exactly fit or feel differently than the way we think about race in America,” as that typically revolves around people of color, Jewish people “have been marginalized” and persecuted throughout history.
“They have been slaughtered in large part because people felt they were not just a religion, but indeed a different race,” Greenblatt added. “And your platform, Whoopi, is so important, using it now to educate people to realize that antisemitism remains a clear and present danger.”
Later in the interview, he also called for the program to consider someone Jewish when they finally decide to hire a permanent replacement for former co-host Meghan McCain. (The View has only had two Jewish hosts in the show’s 25-year history—and none since 2016.)
Since McCain’s departure last year, the seat has been filled by a rotating slate of conservative guest hosts such as Condoleezza Rice, Mary Katharine Ham, and Gretchen Carlson as the program continues to audition for a full-time fifth panelist.
“I know you guys believe in representation, and I know you guys work to bring all points of view,” he stated. “Think about having a Jewish host on this show who can bring these issues of antisemitism, who can bring these issues of representation to The View every single day.”
Liberal co-host Joy Behar reacted to Greenblatt’s call for a Jewish host by reminding viewers that she is, in fact, not Jewish. “I guess I don’t count because everybody thinks I’m Jewish, but I’m not," she quipped. “So maybe you’re right, Jonathan."
Goldberg sparked widespread outrage on Monday when she repeatedly insisted that the Holocaust was “not about race.” Even as several of her co-hosts pointed out that the Holocaust’s goal was “white supremacy” and that the Nazis saw Jewish people as an inferior race, The View moderator wouldn’t back down from her assertion.
“It’s about man’s inhumanity to man,” she claimed, adding that the Holocaust involved “two white groups of people.”
Goldberg’s remarks prompted swift condemnation from the ADL and other Jewish groups, with Greenblatt specifically calling out the Oscar-winning actress’s “dangerous” distortion of the history of the Holocaust.
“[T]he #Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people—who they deemed to be an inferior race.” he tweeted on Monday. “They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering 6 million Jews.”
Goldberg would eventually release a statement on Monday night, apologizing “for the hurt” she had caused with her comments. “On today’s show, I said the Holocaust ‘is not about race, but about man’s inhumanity to man.’ I should have said it is about both,” Goldberg wrote, adding, “The Jewish people around the world have always had my support, and that will never waiver.”
In a Monday night appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which was recorded before she released her apology, Goldberg essentially doubled down on her remarks while attempting to clarify them.
“I feel, being Black, when we talk about race it’s a very different thing to me, so I said that I felt that the Holocaust wasn’t about race,” she declared. “And people got very, very, very angry, and still are angry. I’m getting all of the mail from folks, and very real anger, because people feel very differently.”
She added, “But I thought it was a salient discussion because, as a Black person, I think of race as being something that I can see. So I see you and I know what race you are, and the discussion was about how I felt about that. People were very angry, and they said, ‘No, no, we are a race,’ and I understand. I understand. I felt differently.”
Stating that she didn’t “want to fake apologize,” Goldberg lamented to Colbert that she was “very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying” and are now accusing her of antisemitism and Holocaust denial.
“I thought we were having a discussion about race, which everyone, I think, was having,” she concluded.
