Whoopi Goldberg, moderator of ABC's "The View," has twice stated that the Holocaust was not about race—a claim at odds with historical fact and Nazi ideology, which explicitly defined Jews as a racial enemy and built genocide on that classification.
In 2022, Goldberg told her audience the Holocaust was solely about "man's inhumanity to man." The remark drew swift backlash. ABC suspended her for two weeks. She apologized, saying she had been corrected and that her understanding of race, as a Black woman, had been tied to visible characteristics.
Ten months later, she repeated the same argument in an interview with the Sunday Times of London. She apologized again.
Historians and Holocaust education advocates argue that Goldberg's comments, delivered from one of American television's largest platforms, misrepresent a foundational fact: Nazi racial law and ideology drove the systematic murder of six million Jews. The regime classified Jews as a race, enacted race-based laws, and constructed the killing machinery on racial pseudo-science.
The timing of her remarks—made 80 years after Anne Frank's death at Bergen-Belsen in 1945—has sharpened the criticism. Frank, who died at 15, left a diary that humanized victims of the Holocaust and became a touchstone for Holocaust education worldwide.
Goldberg herself once demonstrated a deeper understanding. In her 1984 Broadway play "The Whoopi Monologues," she wrote and performed a scene set in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, showing awareness of Frank's significance to Holocaust memory.
Educators say the danger lies not in ignorance alone but in misinformation delivered by influential figures. One observer noted that Nazi Germany was among Europe's most educated societies—a reminder that schooling does not guarantee historical truth. What matters, that analysis argued, is who teaches and what narrative they spread. When public figures with large platforms obscure the racial ideology at the heart of the Holocaust, they risk allowing the hatred that produced it to resurface.
