Whoopi Goldberg has apologized for comments she made Monday about the Holocaust in which she claimed during an episode of ABC’s “The View” that it was not “about race.”
“The Jewish People around the world have always had my support and that will never waiver,” Goldberg wrote in a message posted on social media late Monday. “I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused.”
During a debate about a Tennessee school board voting to remove “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from an eighth grade language arts curriculum, Goldberg said the Holocaust “isn’t about race.”
“It’s about man’s inhumanity to man,” Goldberg said. The comments drew some pushback from her co-hosts on the daytime talk program and backlash online.
As part of her apology on Monday night, Goldberg quoted Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League as saying that “the Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systemic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race.”
Goldberg wrote she should have said during her comments on the show that the Holocaust “is about both” race and “man’s inhumanity to man.”
“I stand corrected,” she said after citing Greenblatt’s statement.
“So if you’re uncomfortable hearing about ‘Maus,’ should you be worried, should your child say, ‘Oh my God, I wonder if that’s me?’ No! That’s not what they’re going to say,” Goldberg said during her initial comments about Tennessee and other efforts by school boards and local governments in some parts of the country to limit student exposure to books and curriculum that focus on issues of race, gender identity or sexuality.
“They’re going to say, ‘I don’t want to be like that.’ Most kids, they don’t want to be cruel,” Goldberg said.
During an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Monday evening, Goldberg said after the backlash her comments caused, she wanted to make sure she did not “fake apologize.”
“I’m very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying,” Goldberg said. “I thought we were having a discussion about race, which I think everyone is having.”
This story was updated at 9:55 a.m.