Whoopi Goldberg Returns To ‘The View,’ Talks About Her Two-Week Suspension
Whoopi Goldberg made her return to the moderator’s seat on The View on Monday (February 14), following controversial comments she made about the Holocaust and a subsequent suspension.
The 66-year-old actress, who was joined alongside co-hosts Joy Behar, Sara Haines, Sunny Hostin and guest host Ana Navarro, opened by saying, "Hello, hello, hello and welcome to The View. And yes, I am back" as Behar told her, "We missed you."
"I missed you all too. I 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,” Goldberg added. “Sometimes we don't do this as eloquently as we could."
The return follows Goldberg’s suspension from the ABC talk show after making an assertion on the January 31 airing of the program that the “Holocaust wasn’t about race.”
The comment came in the context of Goldberg and her co-hosts discussing a Tennessee school board’s ban of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Maus, which tells the story of illustrator and author Art Spiegelman’s Polish Jewish parents’ experience during the Holocaust. The school board said they were concerned about female nudity and profanity and removed the material from their curriculum.
While she didn’t address the comments specifically on Monday, Goldberg did apologize via a statement on the show on February 1.
"It's five minutes to get in important information about topics and that's what we try to do every day,” Goldberg continued during her opening. “I want to thank everybody who reached out while I was away. People reached out from places that made me go, 'Wait, what, what, really?' And it was amazing.”
“We're going to keep having tough conversations," she added. "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 were hired to do. It's not always pretty as I said and it's not always what 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 important to us more as a human entity. So Happy Valentine's Day, y'all, and we're going to get started because that's what we do."
