Whoopi Goldberg’s ‘The View’ co-hosts are ‘furious with’ ABC over her suspension: report

ABC has suspended Whoopi Goldberg from “The View” for two weeks because of a comment she made about the Holocaust — and according to the Daily Beast’s sources, her colleagues on that popular daytime talk show are “furious with the network’s decision.”

During “The View’s” Monday, January 31 broadcast, Goldberg and her colleagues discussed a Tennessee school board’s decision to ban “Maus” — an Art Spiegelman novel about the Holocaust and Nazi death camps during World War II. Goldberg commented that the Holocaust was “not about race,” but “about man's inhumanity to other man.”

Critics of Goldberg’s comment have been stressing that Adolf Hitler was deeply racist and considered Jews an inferior race — and that Hitler, like other White supremacists, did not consider Jews White. Hitler also considered many other people inferior, from Blacks to gypsies to Arabs.

ABC News President Kimberly Godwin, responding to the controversy on February 1, announced, “Effective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments. 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 has apologized for her comments, saying that she “misspoke” and lamenting, “My words upset so many people, which was never my intention.”

But her colleagues on “The View,” according to Daily Beast reporters Lachlan Cartwright and Justin Baragona, believe that ABC is going too far by giving Goldberg a two-week suspension.

“Multiple sources said that Goldberg’s co-hosts Sunny Hostin, Joy Behar and Ana Navarro are furious with the network’s decision,” Cartwright and Baragona report.

On Tuesday night, February 1, Navarro — a Florida-based Never Trump conservative, Nicaraguan immigrant and conservative activist who supported now-President Joe Biden in the 2020 election — told the Beast, “I love Whoopi Goldberg. I love ‘The View.’ This was an incredibly unfortunate incident. Whoopi is a lifelong ally to the Jewish community. She is not an anti-Semite. Period. I am sad. And I have nothing else to say.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League, did not accuse Goldberg of anti-Semitism, but he did describe her comment as a “dangerous” distortion of history. In a statement, the ADL director wrote that the Holocaust “was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race. They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering 6 million Jews.”

During a February 1 appearance on CNN, Greenblatt said that he accepted Goldberg’s apology and emphasized, “I know she’s been a friend of the Jewish community all throughout her career, and I respect that and appreciate it. I can’t comment on ABC News’ internal process, but what I will say is that I hope Whoopi can use the next two weeks for a process of introspection and learning.”