Whoopi Goldberg Returns to 'The View' After Suspension for Claiming Holocaust Was 'Not About Race'

Though she did not directly discuss the controversy, Whoopi Goldberg said, "We're going to keep having tough conversations"

Whoopi Goldberg was back in the moderator's seat on The View.

On Monday, Goldberg, 66, returned alongside Joy Behar, Sara Haines, Sunny Hostin and guest host Ana Navarro.

"Hello, hello, hello and welcome to The View. And yes, I am back," Goldberg said 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. Sometimes we don't do this as eloquently as we could," Goldberg said, though she did not mention the controversy that got her suspended.

Two weeks prior, on Jan. 31, Goldberg inaccurately asserted that the "Holocaust isn't about race" on The View.

The comment came as she and her co-hosts discussed 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 cited concerns about female nudity and profanity and removed the material from the eighth-grade curriculum. (Goldberg, who immediately faced criticism on social media, shared a statement and apologized on the show on Feb. 1.)

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In Monday's opening, Goldberg also said, "It's five minutes to get in important information about topics and that's what we try to do every day. 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."

Though she did not directly discuss the controversy, Goldberg told the camera that "we're going to keep having tough conversations."

"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," she said. "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."

Goldberg concluded, "So Happy Valentine's Day, y'all, and we're going to get started because that's what we do."

Goldberg was suspended for two weeks over her "wrong and hurtful comments," ABC News President Kim Godwin said in a previous statement, which was previously obtained by PEOPLE. Godwin also said that Goldberg has been asked to "take time and reflect and learn about the impact of her comments."