“Effective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments,” ABC News President Kim Godwin said in a statement provided Tuesday to HuffPost. “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.”
During a discussion on the talk show about a Tennessee school board’s controversial decision this month to remove “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from the eighth-grade curriculum, Goldberg argued that the Holocaust was “not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man” and that it involved “two white groups of people.”
Prominent Jewish organizations, including the Auschwitz Memorial and Anti Defamation League, criticized her comment.
“The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people ― who they deemed to be an inferior race,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote in a tweet directed to Goldberg.
Goldberg issued a statement Monday evening offering her “sincerest apologies.”
“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,” she wrote.
