Whoopi Goldberg reiterates false claim that Holocaust “wasn’t originally” about race

Whoopi Goldberg is again receiving criticism for her false claims about the Holocaust. In an interview published with The Sunday Times of London on Saturday – the sixth day of the Jewish holiday Hanukkah – the actor and “The View” co-host reiterated her claims that the Holocaust “wasn’t originally” about race.

Goldberg first made the public statements on an episode of “The View” about 10 months ago, saying at the time that “the Holocaust isn’t about race,” but rather, “inhumanity to man.”

She later apologized and was suspended from the show for two weeks for her comments. 

But she is now sticking to her claims. 

In the interview with The Sunday Times, Goldberg – whose real name is Caryn Johnson and goes by a self-given name she has said comes from a Jewish relative – said there is division about whether Judaism is a race or a religion. That’s when the interviewer noted that to the Nazis, it was a race, hence the Holocaust, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 6 million Jews. 

“That’s the killer, isn’t it” Goldberg responded. “The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying?”

The interview then mentioned the Nazi-era laws that specifically targeted Jewish people. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime issued more than 400 decrees and regulations against Jewish people in the first six years of his rule. The legislative actions started with limiting Jewish people’s participation in public life and within a few years, the Jewish population was segregated from other Germans and forced to identify themselves as Jewish. 

And it wasn’t just forced upon those who practiced the religion. According to the Memorial Museum, it was also those who had Jewish grandparents, even those who had converted to Christianity. 

Despite this, Goldberg insisted the Holocaust “wasn’t originally about race.” 

“Remember who they were killing first. They were not killing racial; they were killing physical. They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision,” she said, later adding, “… you could not tell a Jew on a street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was the point I was making. But you would have thought that I’d taken a big old stinky dump on the table, butt naked.”

The interviewer wrote that Goldberg then pondered whether a Jewish person is still part of the Jewish race if they are no longer practicing their religion. And when the interviewer asked whether race can be more about skin color, Goldberg responded, “Well, it’s not in its official… when you look it up.”

But at its core, the Nazi focus was on pushing the idea of the “Aryan” race, a false racial identity that was adopted by Hitler to classify a superior group of people that mostly excluded those who were Jewish, as well as those who were Black or Roma and Sinti, according to the Memorial Museum.   

And Hitler himself called Judaism a race, saying in one of his first major statements that “Jews are definitely a race, and not a religious belief.” In that same statement, he called Jewish people an “alien race” and said that antisemitism must have “the ultimate aim” of “the irreversible elimination…of all Jews.” 

Goldberg’s comments swiftly received criticism, including from 89-year-old Holocaust survivor Lucy Lipiner.

“Whoopi Goldberg continues to use the Holocaust as her punching bag. We told her that her comments harm us and she simply doesn’t care. I survived the Nazis and the Holocaust, so I’ll be damned if I let a comedy has-been, peddling a fake Jewish name get the better of me,” she tweeted. 

Video game director Luc Bernard said that Goldberg needs to be forced “to go to a Holocaust memorial and learn about the Nuremberg laws.” 

“The View” and its network ABC have not issued a public statement about Goldberg’s latest comments.