(The Hill) — Whoopi Goldberg returned to “The View” on Monday following a two-week suspension for saying the Holocaust was not “about race.”
“I’ve got to tell you there’s something kind of marvelous about being on a show like this,” Goldberg said as she opened the daytime political talk program on Monday. “Sometimes we don’t do it as elegantly as we could … I want to thank everybody who reached out while I was away.”
Earlier this month, ABC suspended Goldberg following her comments on the Holocaust, which the network called “hurtful.”
“While Whoopi has apologized, I’ve asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments,” Kim Godwin, president of ABC News, said in a statement at the time of the suspension.
During a discussion on “The View” about a Tennessee school board voting to remove “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from an eighth-grade language arts curriculum, Goldberg said the Holocaust was not about race but rather “about man’s inhumanity to man.”
“The Jewish People around the world have always had my support and that will never waiver,” Goldberg wrote in a message posted on social media later that day. “I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused.”
The show later invited Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, on to explain how and why the Holocaust was indeed “about race.”
“We’re going to keep having tough conversations,” Goldberg said on Monday. “And in part, because this is what we’ve been hired to do and it’s not always pretty, as I said, and it’s not always as other people would like to hear but it is an honor to sit at the table and be able to have these conversations because they’re important, they’re important to us as a nation and to us more as a human … entity.”