Roseanne Barr once called Israel a “Nazi state.” She said the “Jewish soul is being tortured in Israel.” She accused Israel of being “inhuman” toward Hamas. She lambasted “trolls” who objected to her support for a Holocaust denier. And she was photographed dressed up as Adolf Hitler taking “Jews” out of an oven.
You would think that such a history would suffice to keep Jewish advocacy at arm’s length from someone who is so obviously unbalanced. But you would be wrong. Once Barr underwent her “transformation,” “discovered her Jewish identity” and enlisted in the fight against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, she was embraced as a prodigal daughter returning to the fold. She may have been the same foul-mouthed racist as before, but now she was OUR foul-mouthed racist.
Pro-Israel Jews – and not only those on the loony right – adopted her and adored her.
Barr became the poster girl for StandWithUs, the relatively mainstream, Los Angeles-based anti-BDS lobby that unabashedly proclaimed “We love you” in a 2016 Facebook post.
She was the star guest at a 2016 conference in Tel Aviv hosted by the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, in which she actually shared a stage with President Reuven Rivlin. And she headlined this year’s Jerusalem Post conference in New York, where she said – in an interview with one of Israel’s most prominent TV journalists – that she might come to Israel and run for prime minister, for which she received a tumultuous ovation.
Barr’s racist tweets against former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett this week and her anti-Semitic tweet against George Soros proved a rant too far for ABC, which canceled the popular, pro-Trump revival of her iconic 1990s sitcom “Roseanne.”
Now that she’s been disgraced, one can expect her former pro-Israel admirers to run for the hills as well. But what is their excuse? They didn’t know she was unhinged? Didn’t they applaud her when she said the University of California at Davis should be “nuked” after student senators voted for divestment from businesses with Israeli ties? Didn’t they praise her when she called Haaretz’s Rogel Alpher a “privileged fat skinhead”? Didn’t they egg her on at every turn when she obscenely attacked leftists, liberals and Trump-haters? Did they miss the part where she called Hillary Clinton, of all people, anti-Semitic?
Of course they didn’t. They loved it. Barr was the pro-Israel right’s Donald Trump, the blunt advocate who says what they feel, no-holds-barred. Barr may have been exaggerating, they reasoned, and she certainly was outspoken, even vulgar. But hey, isn’t it about time all these Israel-haters started to get a taste of their own medicine? Didn’t it feel good to have a “convert” savage the same people who once loved her for hating Israel?
Of course, no self-respecting Jew would dare say of Valerie Jarrett that she was a “baby of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes” – at least not out loud. But anyone who was privy to conversations among right-wing Jews in Israel or the United States throughout Obama’s tenure can attest to the frequent allusions to his birthplace, race, religion and, of course, his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
“Once a Muslim, always a Muslim,” right-wing provocateur Debbie Schlussel wrote back in 2006. Judy Mozes, wife of Israel’s then-Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom, tweeted in 2015, “Do u know what Obama Coffee is? Black and weak.” And I well remember how shocked I was when one of the leaders of the New York Jewish community, not necessarily known as a crazy right-winger, talked to me about the “Muslim monkey” and was surprised to see me blanch. “That’s the way [they] speak of him on the East Side,” he said, by way of an apology.
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