Whoopi Goldberg has apologized after she sparked a firestorm on The View and online Monday by claiming the Holocaust was not about race.

If youre going to do this, then lets be truthful about it, she said during a discussion about a Tennessee school boards controversial decision earlier this month to remove Maus, Art Spiegelmans Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from an eighth-grade curriculum.

Because the Holocaust isnt about race. No, its not about race, Goldberg claimed.

Then what was it about? her co-host Joy Behar asked.

Its not about race. Its about mans inhumanity to man, Goldberg answered. Thats what its about.

Ana Navarro, another co-host on the talk show, interrupted, Well, its about white supremacy. Thats what its about. Its about going after Jews and gypsies, who often prefer the term Roma.

But these are two white groups of people, Goldberg argued. But youre missing the point. The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Lets talk about it for what it is. Its how people treat each other. Its a problem.

Goldbergs comments were circulated on social media, prompting backlash from prominent Jewish groups.

The Holocaust was about the Nazis systematic annihilation of the Jewish people who they deemed to be an inferior race, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote in a tweet directed to Goldberg.

Auschwitz Memorial, the Twitter account for the memorial and museum at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, directed Goldberg to an online course about Holocaust history. It also shared a chart, provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, that illustrates how Nazi Germany divided people into racial groups based on their Jewish ancestry.

Jewish organizations have been forced to repeatedly educate and call out public figures in recent months, amid a spate of book bans in U.S. public schools as well as efforts by conservatives to equate pandemic restrictions and vaccine mandates to the widespread, systematic persecution and murder of Jews in Europe during World War II.

In a Twitter statement Monday evening, Goldberg said she offered her sincerest apologies.

I stand corrected, she wrote, citing Greenblatts tweet. The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never [waver]. Im sorry for the hurt I have caused.