Whoopi Goldberg was suspended from ABC’s The View talk show on Tuesday for asserting a day earlier that the Holocaust was “not about race”, the network’s news division president said when addressing a furore over her comments.

Goldberg, 66, apologised for her remarks later on Monday during an appearance on The Late Show, and again on the broadcast of The View on Tuesday morning.

“Effective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments,” Kim Godwin, president of ABC News, said in a statement the network posted on Twitter.

“While Whoopi has apologised, I’ve asked her to take time and reflect and learn about the impact of her comments,” Godwin said.

“The entire ABC News organisation stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family and communities.”

Goldberg and her The View co-hosts were discussing the Holocaust after a school board in Tennessee voted to remove the graphic novel Maus, by Art Spiegelman, from its eighth grade language arts curriculum. The McMinn County school officials cited profanity and nudity in the Pulitzer Prize-winning work.

“This is white people doing it to white people, so you are all going to fight among yourselves,” Goldberg said at one point.

Jewish groups and others were infuriated by her assertions, which they said contradicted the fact that Nazis killed six million Jews during World War 2 based on an anti-Semitic ideology fomented by Adolf Hitler that they were an inferior race.

“No, Whoopi Goldberg, the Holocaust was about the Nazis’ systematic annihilation of the Jewish people, who they deemed to be an inferior race,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said on Twitter in response to the comments.

“They dehumanised them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering six million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous”, Greenblatt said.

The comedian and actress, born Caryn Johnson, won an Academy Award for her role in the film Ghost. 

Reuters