Whoopi Goldberg is back on 'The View' following 2-week hiatus over Holocaust remarks

• On January 31, Whoopi Goldberg argued that the Holocaust was not about race.
• She was suspended from the show the following day despite issuing an apology.

Whoopi Goldberg returned to ABC's talk show "The View" on Monday following a two-week suspension over her remarks on the Holocaust, saying that "tough conversations" on the show will continue.

"Yes, I am back," she said Monday after the hiatus that was prompted by her argument that the Holocaust was not "about race."

"It is an honor to sit at this table and be able to have these conversations because they are important," Goldberg added.

—The Recount (@therecount) February 14, 2022

On an episode of the show on January 31, Goldberg said the Holocaust "is white people doing it to white people."

"Y'all go fight amongst yourselves," she said.

The hosts were discussing a Tennessee school board's decision to ban the graphic novel "Maus" by Art Spiegelman who depicted the genocide through animated mice citing "unnecessary use of profanity and nudity."

"If you're going to do this, let's be truthful about it because the Holocaust isn't about race," Goldberg continued. "No. It's not about race! It's about man's inhumanity to man. That's what it's about."

However, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis defined Jewish people as a race, killing six million Jewish people in an effort to purge them from the population.

The same night, she issued an apology.

"I'm sorry for the hurt I have caused," Goldberg said in a statement the night of January 31. "As Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League shared, 'The Holocaust was about the Nazi's systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race.' I stand corrected."

—Whoopi Goldberg (@WhoopiGoldberg) February 1, 2022

The following day, Kim Godwin, the president of ABC News, announced Goldberg's suspension in the wake of her remarks.

"Effective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments," Godwin said in an emailed statement to Insider. "While Whoopi has apologized, I've asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments."

Godwin added: "The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family, and communities."

On Monday's show, Goldberg said that the "tough conversations" would continue.

"And in part, because this is what we've been hired to do, and it's not always pretty, as I said, and it is not always as other people would like to hear," she said, adding that those conversations "are important to us as a nation and to us more so as a human entity."