Whoopi Goldberg Returns To 'The View' Following 2-Week Suspension

Whoopi Goldberg returned to her co-host seat at ABC’s “The View” on Monday following a two-week-long suspension due to remarks she made on the program last month about the Holocaust that drew backlash.

“Well, hello, hello, hello and welcome to ‘The View.’ And yes, I am back… And I missed you all, too,” Goldberg said to viewers and her co-hosts at the top of Monday’s show. “I’ve got to tell you, there’s something kind of marvelous about being on a show like this, because we are ‘The View’ and this is what we do. And sometimes we don’t do it as delicately as we could… But it’s five minutes to get in important information about topics. And that’s what we try to do every day. And I want to thank everybody who reached out while I was away.”

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She continued: “And I’m telling you, people reached out from places that made me go, ‘Wait, wait, what? Really? OK!’ And it was amazing and I listened to everything everybody had to say and I was very grateful, and I hope it keeps all the important conversations happening because we’re going to keep having tough conversations. And in part, because this is what we have 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 this table and be able to have these conversations because they’re important. They’re important to us as a nation, and to us more so as a human entity. So, happy Valentine’s Day, y’all! And we’re going to get started, because that’s what we do.”

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Goldberg was suspended from “The View” for two weeks starting Feb. 1 after facing wide criticism for her remarks that the Holocaust was “not about race.”

Goldberg’s comments emerged during a conversation on the Jan. 31 broadcast of “The View,” in which the co-hosts discussed a Tennessee school board’s ban of “Maus,” a nonfiction graphic novel about cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s father’s experience surviving the Holocaust. “Let’s be truthful about it because [the] Holocaust isn’t about race,” Goldberg said. “It’s not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.” The remarks drew immediate, sweeping criticism from Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

Later Monday, Goldberg apologized for the comments on social media. She then offered an on-air apology on the following day’s episode of “The View.”

“So yesterday on our show, I misspoke,” Goldberg said at the top of the show. “I said that the Holocaust wasn’t about race and it was instead about man’s inhumanity to man. But it is indeed about race, because Hitler and the Nazis considered the Jews to be an inferior race. Now, words matter and mine are no exception. I regret my comments as I said and I stand corrected. I also stand with the Jewish people, as they know, and as you all know because I’ve always done that.”

ABC suspended Goldberg from “The View” for two weeks later that day.

“Effective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments,” read a Feb. 1 statement attributed to Kim Godwin, president at ABC News. “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.”