(Reuters) – American actress Whoopi Goldberg has issued an apology after facing a backlash for her comments on the Holocaust saying it “was not about race”.
Goldberg, who co-hosts ABC’s U.S. talk show The View said on Monday that the holocaust was about man’s inhumanity to man and involved “two white groups of people”.
The Oscar-winning actress later apologised saying, “On today’s show, I said the Holocaust ‘is not about race, but about man’s inhumanity to man’. I should have said it is about both.”
The discussion on the talk show came after a school board in Tennessee voted to remove the Holocaust-themed graphic novel “Maus” from its eighth-grade language arts curriculum, citing profanity and nudity contained in the Pulitzer Prize-winning work by cartoonist Art Spiegelman.
Goldberg’s comments faced criticism by activists online for being dangerous.
“No Whoopi Goldberg, the Holocaust was about the Nazis’ 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. Holocaust distortion is dangerous”, Jonathan Greenblatt, Chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League said on Twitter.
“The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never waiver. I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused,” Goldberg said in her apology.
(Reporting by Radhika Anilkumar in Bengaluru; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
