Whoopi Goldberg doubled down on her comments that the Holocaust was not about race: 'You could not tell a Jew on a street'
- Whoopi Goldberg doubled down on her comments that the Holocaust was "not about race."
- She told The Times of London that "you could not tell a Jew on a street" but you "could find me."
Whoopi Goldberg doubled down on her comments that the Holocaust was "not about race," which she made before temporarily being suspended from cohosting the TV talk show "The View" in February.
In a new interview with The Times of London, Goldberg said the Holocaust was not "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," she said.
She also questioned whether Jewish people were a "race" compared to herself as a Black person.
"It doesn't change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street," Goldberg said. "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 Nazis defined Jewish people as a race, and killed six million people in an effort to purge them from the population, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
When Goldberg was asked about the fact that the Nazis classified Jewish people as a race, she responded: "The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They're Nazis. Why believe what they're saying?"
Goldberg made her initial comments about the Holocaust on "The View" on January 31 while discussing the Tennessee school board's decision to ban the graphic novel "Maus" by Art Spiegelman, which is about the Holocaust.
She said the Holocaust was "white people doing it to white people," and not about race but about "man's inhumanity to man."
Goldberg sparked widespread criticism after the comments, which led to her issuing an apology at the time.
"I'm sorry for the hurt I have caused," Goldberg said in a statement following her comments. "As Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League shared, 'The Holocaust was about the Nazi's systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race.' I stand corrected."
Neither Goldberg nor representatives for "The View" immediately responded to Insider's request for comment.