Whoopi Snaps at Co-Host for Correcting Her During 'Holocaust Remembrance Day' Segment
Those of you who follow my writing here — all three of you — know that I’ve been waging a campaign regarding Whoopi Goldberg and her tenure on “The View.” The basic message is this: You don’t have to keep on doing this, Whoopi.
For those of you too young to remember, Whoopi was once a talented actress and comedienne. She has a Golden Globe award for Best Actress and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. (These were earned, having been bestowed in an age before those awards were reserved for actors in niche, woke movies nobody really saw but everyone pretends they did.)
She now presides over a political gabfest where a panel of women with varying degrees of political experience — usually not a whole lot of it — attempt to talk over each other to make the dumbest point they possibly can. This is not how one wishes to end one’s career, yet Whoopi seems determined to make this the final chapter of her legacy.
Making it somewhat more problematic is that Goldberg (not her real birth surname, something to keep in mind for reasons that will soon become apparent), has revealed herself as a bit of a closet anti-Semite over the past year or so. At best, she can be called an ignoramus around Jewish issues, particularly involving the Nazis.
So, who better to lead the show’s commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday than Goldberg — who thusly proceeded to horribly mangle the pronunciation of a Hebrew term for the Holocaust and then snapped at her co-host for correcting her?
“I’m taking us to a different place right now,” Goldberg began.
“Every year on this show, we shine a light on Holocaust Remembrance Day — also known as Yom HaSho-Hah in Hebrew,” she continued, tripping over the last syllable on the Hebrew term.
“Yom HaShoah,” co-host Sara Haines said, correcting her.
“Yes, Yom HaShoah,” Goldberg said pointedly, as if she’d totally nailed the landing the first time.
Whoopi “The Holocaust is not about race” Goldberg leads the cast marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. pic.twitter.com/2LCeBFEWQw
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) April 18, 2023
While one doesn’t want to pick at old wounds, it’s been a little over a year since Goldberg was suspended over comments about the Holocaust on “The View.”
“Let’s be truthful, the Holocaust isn’t about race, it’s not,” she said during a discussion about the extermination of an estimated 6 million European Jews at the hands of the Nazis.
“It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about. These are two groups of white people.”
The View panel confronts Whoopi after she says “the Holocaust isn’t about race.” pic.twitter.com/ah5RFxNlyI
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) January 31, 2022
She then apologized: “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. 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,” she said in a statement.
“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 then went on Stephen Colbert’s CBS late-night show that same evening and proceeded to undo the apology in dumpster-fire fashion.
“It upset a lot of people, which was never, ever, ever, ever my intention,” she said. “I’m incredibly torn up by being told these things about myself.”
Right. And then she claimed the Nazis “couldn’t tell who was Jewish. They had to delve deeply to figure it out. … They had to do the work.”
“If the Klan is coming down the street, and I’m standing with a Jewish friend — well, I’m gonna run. But if my friend decides not to run, they’ll get passed by most times because you can’t tell who’s Jewish,” she said.
“I understand that not everybody sees it that way and that I did a lot of harm, I guess, to myself.”
If not explicitly five-alarm, Ilhan Omar-level anti-Semitic, those comments were enough to at least prove that Goldberg certainly wasn’t a philo-Semite, nor was she even remotely educated about the Nazis or the Holocaust. (The Nazis, after all, could tell who was Jewish well enough to make them wear yellow stars on their clothing to identify themselves — something most adults given prominent positions on national talk shows should probably be aware of.)
This led to a two-week suspension by ABC. Goldberg said she was very, very sorry and made sure everyone knew everyone knew she knew the Holocaust was “indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race.”
This was in January and February of 2022. In December of 2022, during an interview with Britain’s The Sunday Times, Goldberg called the Holocaust “white on white” violence and said even her Jewish friends — yes, she really used the “some of my best friends are [insert whoever you’re insulting here]” trope — backed up her interpretation of it.
“My best friend said, ‘Not for nothing is there no box on the census for the Jewish race. So that leads me to believe that we’re probably not a race,’” Whoopi claimed.
So, she proceeded to apologize. Again:
“It was never my intention to appear as if I was doubling down on hurtful comments, especially after talking with and hearing people like rabbis and old and new friends weighing in. I’m still learning a lot and believe me, I heard everything everyone said to me. I believe that the Holocaust was about race, and I am still as sorry now as I was then that I upset, hurt and angered people.”
In between these two Holocaust-related faux pas, she found time to associate members of mainstream conservative group Turning Point USA with neo-Nazis on a July episode of “The View,” occasioning another apology:
“In Monday’s conversation about Turning Point USA, I put the young people at the conference in the same category as the protesters outside, and I don’t like it when people make assumptions about me and it’s not any better when I make assumptions about other people, which I did. So, my bad, I’m sorry.”
So, in other words, she came into 2022 apparently knowing frighteningly little about the actual Nazis, neo-Nazis, Judaism, the Jewish people as a race or the Holocaust. She came out of 2022 knowing roughly the same amount regarding these subjects, despite her protestations to the contrary.
Who better to lead the segment about Holocaust Remembrance Day on “The View” than that person?
Whoopi can do acting. She can do comedy. She can’t do punditry and she has years and years of inexperienced experience to prove it.
Whoopi, please: Go back to movies, go back to sitcoms, go back on the comedy circuit, go to some Hebrew 101 classes, whatever. Or just go away. But please, stop making things worse for yourself and your legacy on “The View.”
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