Whoopi Goldberg Suspended From The View

Whoopi Goldberg has been suspended from The View after she said on Monday's show that the Holocaust wasn't about race. "Effective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments," ABC News president Kim Godwin said Tuesday in a statement cited by CNN. "While Whoopi has apologized, I've asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments. The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family and communities." Goldberg apologized within hours of the show airing, and apologized again at the start of Tuesday's show.

Saying she "misspoke," Goldberg said she understands why so many people were upset by her comments. "For that I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful and helped me understand some different things," she said, adding that she now realizes the Holocaust "is indeed about race, because Hitler and the Nazis considered the Jews to be an inferior race." She then introduced one of her critics, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, as the show's first guest, Variety reports. She had also addressed the comments in an interview with Stephen Colbert on Late Night Monday.

"Because I feel being Black, when we talk about race, it’s a very different thing to me," she told Colbert. "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." She insisted she is neither anti-Semitic nor a Holocaust denier. As for the last name she adopted (she was born Caryn Johnson), New York Post columnist John Podhoretz accuses her of "co-opting" it. "It’s obvious that a 2022 version of young Caryn Johnson would not choose the name Goldberg to gain that extra frisson of non-white pride," he writes. "In fact, Whoopi Goldberg should just drop the Goldberg now. There are dozens of survivors of the Holocaust who bear the name—and an untold number who died in the Shoah with it. Caryn Johnson stains them both." (More Whoopi Goldberg stories.)