ABC News has suspended ‘The View’ co-host Whoopi Goldberg over her remarks on Holocaust ‘not being about race’. The network described the actor-comedian’s comments as wrong and hurtful. 

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Announcing the two-week suspension, ABC News President Kim Godwin said, “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 View’, which is a talk show on ABC, Goldberg said that race was not a factor in the Holocaust. The Grammy, Emmy, Tony and Academy award-winner apologised hours later and again on Tuesday’s morning episode, but the original remark drew condemnation from several prominent Jewish leaders.

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“My words upset so many people, which was never my intention,” she said Tuesday morning.

“I understand why now and for that I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful and helped me understand some different things.”

Panelists on the show had been talking about a Tennessee school board’s banning of ‘Maus’, a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Nazi death camps during World War II when Goldeberg said, “The Holocaust was not about race … it’s about man’s inhumanity to other man.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, was called on the show on Tuesday to discuss why her words had been hurtful.

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“Jewish people at the moment are feeling besieged,” Greenblatt said.

“The only explanation that I have for it is that there is a new definition of racism that has been put out there in the public recently that defines racism exclusively as the targeting of people of color. And obviously history teaches us otherwise,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center

“Everything about Nazi Germany and about the targeting of the Jews and about the Holocaust was about race and racism. That’s the unfortunate, unassailable historic fact,” he added. 

With inputs from the Associated Press