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‘The View’ co-host and actress Whoopi Goldberg has defended her controversial vision of the Holocaust, insisting the extermination of Jews by Nazi Germany was not “originally” about race. 

Goldberg, who claims a distant Jewish ancestry herself, discussed the explosive topic in an interview with The Times, published Saturday. Originally designed to promote her new movie ‘Till,’ a film about black teenager Emmett Till, who was brutally lynched in 1955 over allegedly having whistled at a white woman, the interview eventually devolved into discussion of highly controversial topics. 

The actress herself brought up the Holocaust scandal that unfolded early this year, when she said the massacre of Jews was “not about race” but actually white-on-white violence and a display of “man’s inhumanity to man.” The remarks at the time furnished Goldberg with a fortnight suspension from ‘The View’ and with condemnation from the Jewish community.

While the actress was forced to apologize for her comments, she still stands by them, Goldberg told The Times, claiming that Jews themselves are split on whether their identity is religious only or counts as a race.

“My best friend said, ‘Not for nothing is there no box on the census for the Jewish race. So that leads me to believe that we’re probably not a race,’” she argued.

Offering a reminder that the Nazis actually treated Jews as a race and claimed to use skull-measuring techniques to identify them, the actress brushed off such reasoning. “The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying?” she said, adding that Jews were not the only target of the Holocaust.

“It wasn’t originally...Remember who they were killing first. They were not killing racial; they were killing physical. They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision,” Goldberg claimed.

“They did that to black people too. But it doesn’t change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was the point I was making,” she added.

During the interview, Goldberg also stood by her other controversial remarks, namely her recent comment that actual “men don’t have eggs,” which has been deemed to be grossly transphobic by many.

“I do have questions, because trans men, I was told, still have their prostates,” Goldberg said. Reminded by the interlocutor that such people are actually “trans women,” the actress shot back, stressing that “women don’t have prostates.”

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