Feb. 1 (UPI) — Whoopi Goldberg says she’s “incredibly torn up” about the comments she made about the Holocaust on “The View.”
The 66-year-old actress and television personality apologized Monday and also addressed her remarks on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
During Monday’s episode of “The View,” Goldberg and her co-hosts were discussing the recent banning of “Maus,” a graphic novel about the Holocaust, by a school board in Tennessee when Goldberg said the Holocaust “isn’t about race.”
“It’s about man’s inhumanity to man,” she added. “These are two white groups of people.”
Her co-host Joy Behar disagreed, saying, “Well, they considered Jews a different race.”
Goldberg later apologized in a statement on Twitter.
“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. As Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League shared, ‘The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race.’ I stand corrected,” Goldberg wrote.
“The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never waiver. I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused,” she said, adding her “sincerest apologies.”
On “The Late Show,” Goldberg explained that she approached the idea of race differently as a Black woman.
“I feel, being Black, when we talk about race it’s a very different thing to me,” Goldberg said. “As a Black person, I think of race as something people can see. So I see you and what race you are.”
“People were very angry and they said, ‘No, no, we are a race,’ and I understand,” she added. “I respect everything everyone is saying to me and I don’t want to fake apologize. I’m very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying.”
Goldberg said people are now calling her anti-Semitic and a Holocaust denier.
“I’m incredibly torn up by being told these things about myself. I get it, I accept that. And I did it to myself. This was my thought process, and I will work hard not to think that way again,” she said.
