ABC News president Kim Godwin announced Tuesday night that "effective immediately," she is "suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments" on Monday's The View.
Goldberg said the Holocaust wasn't about race, holding firm amid rebuttals from her co-hosts, then did not quite apologize on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, before finally issuing a full apology Monday night, stating that the Holocaust was about both race and "man's inhumanity to man." She apologized again on air Tuesday and invited Anti-Defamation League chief Jonathan Greenblatt on The View to explain to viewers why she was wrong.
This is how the BBC summarized the Goldberg controversy, before ABC handed down the suspension.
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"While Whoopi has apologized, I've asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments," Godwin wrote in her statement. "The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family, and communities." The Goldberg affair "reached the highest level of decision makers at Disney," ABC's parent company, Variety reports.
The Atlantic's Yair Rosenberg wrote in Tuesday's "Deep Shtetl" newsletter that "Goldberg was right to apologize," and also "I'm glad her misstep has provided a public opportunity to address it. We need to have more conversations about these topics going forward, not fewer."
Goldberg's comment that the Holocaust wasn't about race is "profoundly mistaken," Rosenberg said. "The Nazis were obsessed with race and defined the Jews as their racial inferiors, which is how they justified exterminating them," whether they identified as Jewish or not. "Nazism was a blood-based doctrine of racial supremacy, and its consequence was the genocide of the Jews," he added. "The very term anti-Semitism, which casts Jews in racial terms, was popularized by a German anti-Jewish activist who wanted to give his hatred a scientific sheen"
"Goldberg is not an anti-Semite, but she was confused — and understandably so," Rosenberg wrote. "In my experience, mistakes like hers often happen because well-meaning people have trouble fitting Jews into their usual boxes." Judaism is "not quite a religion" and "not quite a race," but "an amalgam off all these things — more like like a family (into which one can be adopted) than a sectarian Western faith tradition." Read Rosenberg's full primer on what Judaism is and isn't at The Atlantic.
