Roseanne Barr has just turned 70. It’s an excellent opportunity to take a close look at the high-profile, complicated and volatile Judaism of one of the most influential, controversial and oftentimes successful women in the American television and entertainment industry. Despite the broad-based consensus regarding her importance in the world of American comedy, as well as the brilliance of the good seasons of the trailblazing sitcom Roseanne – somewhere around the end of the 1980’s and early 1990’s – taking her seriously was a thing that was hard to take seriously. Yet, even when her remarks were confused, not always coherent, often baseless, capricious and blunt, the world listened to her for over thirty years. She’s too big and too prominent a celebrity not to pay attention to even when she’s talking nonsense.
Barr was born on November 3, 1952 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her father – Jerome Hershel “Jerry” – came from a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia, whereas her mother came from a family of Jewish immigrants from Austria-Hungary and Lithuania. After arriving in the United States, her father’s family changed their name from Borisofsky to Barr. Even though their home was Jewish, in public they tried to conceal their Judaism and were even active in the Mormon Church. In her autobiography, My Life as a Woman, published in 1989, Barr writes that she was the only Jewish girl in the neighborhood and at school, which made her very paranoid. As she sees it, that could explain her attraction to conspiracy theories, which she frequently airs on social media, and then usually apologies for soon after.
In her autobiography, she also talks about her love for her grandmother, whom she called Bobbe – which is Yiddish for grandma. Her grandmother would feed her grandchildren schmaltz – rendered chicken or goose fat – seasoned with salt. Every morning, she also donated 18 cents of charity on behalf of herself and each of her grandchildren and children (all of them besides her non-Jewish daughter-in-law, whose life she made miserable). Barr always felt like an outsider in the surroundings she grew up in, and following a series of traumatic events (including a car accident when she was 16 and a long hospitalization in a mental institution), she left home at the age of 18. She attributes that decision to her Judaism, which she describes in her autobiography: “I had left home (like all Jewish girls) in order to eat pork and take birth control pills.”
When reading her book, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Barr internalized quite a bit of the antisemitism which may have been targeted at her, or that she heard about from her grandmother. The descriptions of her family, as well as the generalizations she makes about Jews, are at times ludicrous and humiliating. But the book was written more than 30 years ago, and since then Barr has also experienced some transformations when it comes to her Jewish identity.
Roseanne Barr was not always identified with Judaism. For years, it was easy to miss the fact that she’s Jewish because the subject was never mentioned on her sitcom Roseanne. Furthermore, she didn’t always support Israel. In 2008, she called Israel a “Nazi state” due to its treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza. Today, it’s the members of BDS that she calls Nazis. A year later, in 2009, when doing a photo shoot for the satirical Jewish magazine Heeb, she made a lot of people angry when she dressed up as Hitler – complete with a moustache and swastika armband. She was also shown taking a batch of human-looking cookies out of the oven. The fact that her grandmother lost nearly all of her family in the Holocaust didn’t stop her from doing that. In response to the uproar she created, Barr explained that she making fun of Hitler and not his victims. Later on, she maintained that the photograph was taken to protest Israel’s policies in Gaza. Did we say a little batty?
For a while, Barr believed that she could solve the problems of the Middle East all on her own. In 2011, during an interview with the Jewish American periodical, The Forward, she spoke about her intention to run for President of the United States and Prime Minister of Israel – two for the price of one – in order to save both those countries from themselves. (In the end, in 2012, she only ran for the American presidency and came out of the campaign with a documentary film). In that same interview, Barr explained that her goal was to bring women into politics and religion – as a form of tikkun olam, repairing the world. As part of her agenda, she also taught Jewish women kabbalistic meditation, which she herself had practiced for many years.
Since then, her views on Israel have changed. For around a decade now, Barr has been completely pro-Israel. So much so, that she attacks anyone who dares to criticize Israel – even if that person is an Israeli. For example, in 2015 she went head-to-head with Rogel Alpher, the television critic of Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper. It started with a tweet from Alpher, in which he appealed to French Jews not to emigrate to Israel in order to escape Muslim fascism, claiming that Israel suffers from Jewish fascism. In response to that tweet, Barr wrote to him in her normally tactful manner: “Shut your fu**cking” mouth, you fat and privileged skinhead.” The two then embarked on a lengthy battle on Twitter. The bottom line is that Roseanne told Alpher that if he hates Israel so much, why doesn’t he leave. And Alpher told Roseanne that if she is such a Zionist, why doesn’t she move to Israel.
However, even though her squabble with Alpher was hot merchandise at the time, the story has in the meantime cooled off because Barr started to supply much larger scandals. Anyone who follows the American television industry knows that she made a huge comeback, which she quickly screwed up with her big mouth. In March 2018, her sitcom Roseanne was revived on ABC. Some say that the reboot of the series was closely connected with Trump’s victory in the presidential elections. At the time, the network was in dire need of content that would appeal to Trump’s voters, which is why was Roseanne was revived. In the first episode of the new season, they made a point of saying that the lead character, Roseanne Conner – just like Roseanne Barr herself – was a Trump supporter. Following the broadcast, Trump picked up the phone and called Barr to congratulate her. In an interview she gave to the Israeli newspaper Yisrael Hayom in 2019, Barr said: “I voted for Trump because he promised to move the embassy to Jerusalem, and thank God that he exists. He promised to recognize Jerusalem and kept that promise.”
The tenth season of Roseanne was aired 21 years after the original series was canceled. 18.4 million people watched the comeback episode, and it appeared that Barr was once again on the top of the world. But just two months into the new season, the comedienne with no restraints made the mistake of her life when in a tweet she called Valerie Jarrett, a former senior aide to Barack Obama, a mix of “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.” To put it mildly, the tweet did not go over well. In light of the fact that Jarrett is an Afro-American who was born in Iran, Barr was immediately branded a racist. A multitude of social media hashtags called for boycotting her, and ABC had no choice but to act forcefully and cancel the show. Around the same time, Barr also made a foolish remark about Chelsea Clinton, saying that she was married to the nephew of the Jewish-Hungarian-American financier, George Soros (which she is not). She also said that Soros had helped the Nazis (which he did not). All these statements did not contribute to improving her public persona.
Barr apologized for her comments, but also tried to justify herself by declaring that she had no racist intentions. She maintained that she was only trying to highlight the antisemitism inherent in the nuclear deal with Iran, and even insisted that she thought Valerie Jarrett was white. When the network refused to accept her apology, Barr said that she had been “BDSed by ABC.” She also claimed that she was being persecuted for supporting Israel. Trump came to her aid on Twitter. Her good friend and media personality, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, also tried to help.
Shmuley Boteach, an Orthodox rabbi and familiar face on American television, is a radio and TV host, author, and spiritual guide to celebrities (such as Michael Jackson). According to him, he and Barr have been studying Torah together for 25 years and are very close. And as proof of that – Boteach stood by her side throughout the entire racist tweet affair. Merely stood? Hand in hand, the two launched a campaign aimed at obtaining national exoneration for her. Following the incident, Barr was interviewed twice on Rabbi Boteach’s podcast, during which she apologized, said she was sorry, explained herself, squirmed, made excuses, cried and tore her hair out. Among other things, the two discussed Maimonides’s writings on repentance and spoke about what Barr had to do in order to earn forgiveness.
Barr and Boteach joined forces to organize public events in New York and Los Angeles, where she offered her side of the story. They also issued a joint statement which said that not forgiving a person who has expressed true remorse, as Barr did, contradicts America’s values. The statement was released on the day that ABC aired the spinoff series The Conners (in which Roseanne is dead and the family is getting on with their lives without her). Rabbi Boteach also defended his friend in an interview he gave to The View on ABC. He explained that Barr’s intention had been to speak out against Jarrett’s political agenda, but in practice what she did was dehumanize her, and for that she is deeply sorry. Boteach added that Barr is a Jewish woman of faith who takes her Torah studies very seriously, and because of that she has agonized over what she said. According to Boteach, her tweet was contrary to the Jewish faith, which believes that every human being is created in the image of God, and that – he claimed – caused her great pain and suffering. In the same interview, Boteach said that even after she completed the four steps of repentance outlined in Jewish law, each of which he described, people are still unwilling to forgive her. That led him to ask: “Has forgiveness died in America?”
Rabbi Boteach took upon himself not only Roseanne Barr’s public relations, but was also responsible for her growing bond with Israel. In September 2018, a few months after the Valerie Jarrett affair, we heard on the news that Roseanne Barr would soon be moving to Israel. When Boteach asked her in his podcast if she intended to watch the first episode of The Conners, Barr answered that she would be unable to watch it because she was going to be in Israel at the time. “I have an opportunity to go to Israel for a few months and study with my favorite teachers over there,” she said. “And that’s where I’m going to go and probably move somewhere there.” After hearing that, a Kan 11 TV news anchor wondered out loud if Barr was running away from the storm, or if Zionism was behind her decision. “It’s a bit of both,” the commentators said.
In a highly publicized visit at the beginning of 2019, Barr did in fact come to the Land of Israel as part of a delegation organized by Rabbi Boteach. (It was not her first time here as she also visited the country in 2016). Barr’s declared purpose was to help in the fight against the boycott movement (“BDS is a boycott against all Jews in the world. As I see it, it’s just like the first Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses,” she said). She also wanted to become better acquainted with her Jewish roots and deepen her bond with Israel, in general.
Isaac “Bougie” Herzog, who is now Israel’s president, invited her to a tour of Beit Hatfutsot (recently renamed ANU-Museum of the Jewish People), where she was given a family tree album. In Jerusalem, she toured the Old City, prayed at the Western Wall, met with the then Minister of Culture, Miri Regev, and downed some chasers with Shmuley at the restaurant 02. And in Tel Aviv, she took part in a festive event held in her honor at Hangar 11, which was organized by the Tel Aviv International Salon in partnership with the news website Times of Israel and Am Yisrael Foundation.
Following her visit, Barr went back home to Hawaii. Since then, she has not moved to Israel. She won’t be celebrating her 70th birthday here, but rather in America, where she’s working on her next comeback and feasting on kosher coconuts. So, to whoever is celebrating, we extend a mazel tov.
