Whoopi Goldberg criticized for repeating claim that Nazis didn't target Jews over 'race'

Actress and talk show hostess Whoopi Goldberg is facing renewed pushback over claims that the Nazi Holocaust wasn’t about race.

In a recent interview with the Sunday Times, she said the Holocaust “wasn’t originally” based on 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.

The interviewer Janice Turner mentioned that Nazis saw Jews as an inferior race. She’s correct. Nazis saw Jewish blood as dirty and targeted Jewish individuals and other races, like the Romani people, over racial physical characteristics that have since been depicted in racist and anti-Semitic illustrations.

Goldberg replied to Turner’s comment, stating, “Yes, but that’s the killer, isn’t it? The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying?… It doesn’t change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them.”

Goldberg made and apologized for similar comments she made about the Holocaust on her co-paneled talk show The View in early 2022. The comments resulted in her two-week suspension from the program.

She later apologized, stating, “The Jewish People around the world have always had my support and that will never waver. I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused.”

At the time, she criticized a Tennessee school board’s vote to removeMaus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from an eighth-grade language arts curriculum, The Hill reported. Goldberg said that the book shouldn’t raise parent concerns about so-called Critical Race Theory because the book wasn’t about race, but rather “man’s inhumanity to man.”

She later apologized, saying that the Holocaust was both about race and inhumanity.

Her latest comments compelled social media commenters on Twitter to criticize her.

“Whoopi Goldberg – 1 million Jews were murdered in Auschwitz alone, so take a lesson from @AuschwitzMuseum,” Boundless Israel co-founder Aviva Klompas wrote. “Hitler targeted Jews for annihilation arguing that we are a distinct and inferior race. Stop distorting history. It’s offensive to every Jew murdered in the Holocaust.”

Video game designer Luc Bernard wrote, “This is one of the times where I think someone should force Whoopi Goldberg to go to a Holocaust museum and learn about the Nuremberg laws.”

Goldberg’s comments have a notable weight at this moment as rapper Ye and former President Donald Trump’s dinner guest Nick Fuentes have both uttered anti-Semitic comments that have mainstreamed anti-Jewish views while also drawing widespread public condemnation.