ABC’s “The View” hosted the head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to speak about antisemitism and the history of the Holocaust a day after its leading host, Whoopi Goldberg, sparked backlash with comments suggesting the genocide was “not about race.”
“The View” on Tuesday opened with Goldberg issuing an on-air apology for her comments a day earlier, when she said the Holocaust “isn’t about race” amid a discussion 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.
“It’s about man’s inhumanity to man,” Goldberg said of the Holocaust on Monday.
“I misspoke,” she told viewers on Tuesday. “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.”
Goldberg first published a written apology on social media on Monday evening, quoting Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the ADL, as saying that “the Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systemic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race.”
Greenblatt was the first guest on Tuesday’s show and spoke about how Goldberg’s comments were inaccurate and caused harm.
“It was a radicalized antisemitism,” Greenblatt said. “Now, that might not fit exactly or feel different from the way we think about racism in 21st-century America … but throughout the Jewish people’s history, they have been marginalized, they have been persecuted, they have been slaughtered in large part because many people felt they were not just a different religion but indeed a different race.”
The head of the ADL told Goldberg platforms like hers are “so important” to efforts fighting the targeting of Jewish people around the world.
“Using it to educate people that antisemitism remains a clear and present danger,” he said. “I mean, it’s a real issue, and we’ve got to confront it and the racism at the core.”
During an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Monday night, Goldberg said she “gets it” in response to the backlash her comments created and that she wanted to be sure she did not issue a “fake apology.”
“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.”