LOWERING THE BARR

Roseanne Barr and the Self-Hating Personality

Roseanne Barr, 2010 (photo MikeAllen)

On June 14, 2023, in an interview with Theo Von on his This Past Weekend podcast, Roseanne Barr, who’s Jewish, stated in the context of online disinformation and “mandating truth”: “There’s such a thing as the truth and facts and we have to stick to them. And nobody died in the Holocaust either, that’s the truth. It should happen—6 million Jews should die right now because they cause all the problems in the world. But it never happened.”

Umm, okay. It’s Roseanne Barr, right? And she’s just up to her old tricks. Like intentionally mangling the national anthem at a baseball game. Or tweeting that Valerie Jarrett, former senior advisor to President Obama, “is a product of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes.” Or implying that Parkland shooting survivor and gun-control advocate David Hogg is a Nazi. Or spreading QAnon conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and the claim that Donald Trump (whom she began supporting in 2015) saved hundreds of children from sex traffickers during his 1st month in office.[1]

Umm, not okay.

Even less so when Theo Von calls Barr’s Holocaust-denial rant “sarcasm” and she herself deems it “satire,” with both of them chastising the dullards who didn’t get the joke. Which no doubt would’ve included Barr’s Lithuanian immigrant grandmother, who was fortunate to have escaped the Shoah, though several other family members did not.[2] 

If this Barr wasn’t low enough, the would-be satirist then “clarified” her Holocaust remarks by adding, “I’m 100 per cent Jewish,” and “people should be glad” that Jews “control” the entertainment industry, “because if Jews were not controlling Hollywood, all you’d have was fuckin’ fishing shows.”[3]

Which was the last straw for Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. “Sarcasm or not,” he rebutted, “Roseanne Barr’s comments about Jews and the Holocaust are reprehensible and irresponsible. This isn’t funny. And shame on Theo Von for letting it go unchallenged and instead diving into conspiracy theories about Jews and Hollywood.”[4]

And all this meshugas at a time when media-hogging politicians and big-name celebrities have been spewing Jew-hatred, neo-Nazis were praised as “good people” by a recent and wanna-be future US president, and antisemitic violence is on the rise.

Nor does it help when Barr defenders such as yahoo!news’s David Diamond, in lamenting her being “unfairly slammed for satire,” adds that she’s “a liberal activist member of the Peace and Freedom party.” Come again? Barr left the Peace and Freedom party in 2013, according to her own website, and since then (per her Trump support and other shenanigans) has clearly taken a sharp turn to the right.[5]

Perhaps most hypocritically, 4 months before the Theo Von interview flap, Barr had joined the chorus of complaints about Dave Chappelle’s antisemitic “jokes” in his SNL monologue, which she called a personal affront to “my people.”[6]

So okay, maybe Roseanne Barr isn’t a full-fledged self-hating Jew, but judging by her offensive blathering, she’s doing a damn good imitation. And she’s had a wealth of high-profile models to draw upon.

The modern Jewish self-loather originated during the Jewish emancipation (Haskalah) period of the 1800s, when Western European Jews finally gained grudging entry into the larger mainstream. A glass ceiling remained, antisemitic pushback resulted, and one overarching caveat applied, satirized by Jews in the adage: “A Jew at home, a gentleman on the street.” Don’t be “too Jewish,” in other words, don’t stick out (something Hollywood’s Jews later took to heart in film and television production).[7]

“Napoleon Grants Freedom to the Jews,” by Louis François Couché, 1806

Assimilation, if not outright conversion, thus became the name of the game, in hopes of “making it” in a world that was predominantly non-Jewish and at its core still seething with antisemitism. And with Jewish self-denial came self-hatred, as any maligned group (women, people of color, LGBTQs) unavoidably experiences in response to the messages of abject and insurmountable difference it absorbs from the dominant culture and society

As with all “disorders,” however, self-hatred exists on a spectrum, and its most noteworthy and extreme Jewish expression occurred in Austria in the late-19^th/early-20^th centuries.   

Otto Weininger, 1903

Born in Vienna in 1880 to a Jewish goldsmith, Otto Weininger studied philosophy at the University of Vienna at the turn of the century, where he met and was heavily influenced by Houston Stewart Chamberlain. The son-in-law of antisemite Richard Wagner, Chamberlain himself promoted antisemitism, ethno-nationalism, and so-called scientific racism, and has been referred to as “Hitler’s John the Baptist.”[8]

Weininger converted to Christianity in 1902 and the following year published his most famous work, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). Building on Chamberlain’s racist ideology with an added dose of misogyny, the book lambastes modernity as “Jewish” and asserts that “women and Jews are pimps; their goal is to make man guilty. The modern era is not only the most Jewish,” he asserts, “but also the most feminine of eras, which . . . has the least originality and the biggest hunt for originality.”[9]

Ironically, Weininger himself was accused of plagiarism, and the book’s “anthropological observations” borrow from a common antisemitic trope: that “Jewish hair . . . points to the Negro, and the completely Chinese or Malaysian skull shapes, which one so often finds among the Jews—who frequently have a yellow complexion—point to partly Mongolian blood.”[10] (The term “mogul,” initially a pejorative applied to the early Jewish studio heads, derives from this notion.[11])

Weininger’s conversion wasn’t enough to rid him of his “boundless self-loathing,” however, and shortly after Geschlecht und Charakter’s publication, the 23-year-old committed suicide.[12]

Though his influence lived on.

“Unsurprisingly,” Sara Hong recounts, “Weininger’s most ardent posthumous fans were the Nazis, foremost Hitler himself, who reportedly said he ‘had only encountered one decent Jew, Otto Weininger, who killed himself when he realized that the Jew thrives on contaminating the authentic folk bloodlines of others.’ Weininger’s suicide was regarded by Third Reich ideologues as the only ‘honorable’ way for a Jew to cleanse the world of his existence. Repulsive as this undeniably is, it’s hardly irrelevant. The noxious Weininger syndrome still afflicts certain Jews.”[13]

And no one has exhibited this affliction more noxiously in the post-World War II period, at least among the American Jewish elite, than Roy Cohn, Esq.

The major difference between Cohn and Weininger is that Cohn’s Jewish self-loathing, with gay self-hatred heaped upon it (arguably also the case with Weininger), far from crippling Cohn emotionally, actually contributed mightily to his career successes—until, per Thackery, the ruthless qualities that led to his rise finally led to his disbarment.[14]

Politico’s Michael Kruse describes Cohn as “a lawyer who hated lawyers, a Jewish person who hated Jewish people, and a gay person, fiercely closeted if haphazardly hidden, who hated gay people, calling them ‘fags’.”[15]

Roy Cohn, 1964 (photo Herman Hiller)

Cohn first achieved notoriety in the 1950s through his successful prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and rebounded from his close association with the ultimately disgraced Senator Joseph McCarthy to become a go-to guy for the mafia and a darling of the rich and famous, ranging from Norman Mailer and Aristotle Onassis to the Reagans. Among his closest allies and protégés was Donald Trump, for whom he greased the wheels for Trump’s own mafia dealings and garnered an out-of-court settlement in the racial discrimination case involving several of Trump’s properties. Most grievously in the long run, he fostered a relationship between Trump and Fox News’s Rupert Murdoch and is credited—before and even after his death from AIDS in 1986—with grooming Trump for the White House.

Matt Trynauer, whose 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? took its title from one of Trump’s frustrated White House outbursts, says Cohn “created a president from beyond the grave,” while Cohn’s infamous motto, “Never apologize, always attack!” describes Trump’s MO to a Tee.[16]

And increasingly, it seems, Roseanne Barr’s as well.

As for Jewish self-hatred, if one happens to accuse Barr of it outright, she has a sarcastic reply ready and waiting. Responding to accusations of his being a self-hating Jew for his mocking Judaism in his films (the least of his problems nowadays), Woody Allen quipped, “While it’s true that I’m Jewish, and I don’t like myself very much, it’s not because of my persuasion.”[17]

Woody in 1969’s “Take the Money and Run” (Frame Grab)

Now that’s funny.

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NOTES

[1] On the Valerie Jarrett tweet, see Madeleine Aggeler, “ABC Cancels ‘Roseanne’ After Racist Tweet about Valerie Jarrett,” The Cut, May 29, 2018, https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/roseanne-barr-valerie-jarrett-racist-tweet.html. On Barr’s early and continuing support for Trump, see Ross Tracy, “Roseanne Barr on Trump: Playing the Heel for Hillary,” Hollywood Reporter, June 7, 2016, and Leslie Gornstein, “Celebrities who support Donald Trump for president,” CBS News, October 29, 2020, www.cbsnews.com/pictures/celebrities-who-support-donald-trump. On her spreading conspiracy theories, see Dave Weigel, “The conspiracy theory behind a curious Roseanne Barr tweet, explained,” The Washington Post, March 31, 2018, and Travis Clark, “Every controversial step that led toward ABC’s ‘Roseanne’ cancelation from Pizzagate to Parkland shooting to the final racist last straw,” Business Insider, “May 29, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/everything-that-led-to-abcs-roseanne-cancellation-2018-5.

[2] Seven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan, “Roseanne Barr’s Holocaust denial, call for violence against Jews is ‘unpardobale sin,’” yahoo!news, July 5, 2023, https://www.yahoo.com/news/roseanne-barrs-holocaust-denial-call-091430056.html.

[3] Tom Murray, “Roseanne Barr podcast episode pulled from YouTube due to ‘hate speech’ Holocaust comments,” yahoo!news, June 30, 2023, https://news.yahoo.com/roseanne-barr-podcast-episode-pulled-191326408.html.

[4] Emily St. Martin, “Roseanne Barr faces backlash for antisemitic remarks: ‘Sarcasm or not, it’s reprehensible and irresponsible,’” Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-06-27/roseanne-barr-holocaust-comments-sarcastic-jewish.

[5] David Diamond, “Roseanne Barr unfairly slammed for satire,” yahoo!news, July 9, 2023, https://news.yahoo.com/roseanne-barr-unfairly-slammed-satire-100225168.html.

[6] Raquel “Rocky” Harris, “Roseanne Barr Says Response to Dave Chappelle’s ‘Antisemitic’ ‘SNL’ Jokes Shows She’s the Victim of ‘Double Standard,’” The Wrap, February 13, 2023, https://www.thewrap.com/roseanne-barr-dave-chappelle-snl-antisemitic-double-standards.

[7] Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

[8] James D. Forman, Nazism (New York: F. Watts, 1978), 14.

[9] Sara Hong, “Another Tack: The Otto Weininger Syndrome,” Jerusalem Post, June 4, 2010, https: www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Another-Tack-The-Otto-Weininger-syndrome.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Vincent Brook, “Still an Empire of Their Own: How Jews Remain Atop a Reinvented Hollywood,” in From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood, Michael Renov and Vincent Brook, eds. (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press), 5.

[12] Hong, “Another Tack.”

[13] Ibid.

[14] William Makepeace Thackery famously explored this topsy-turvy character type in his 1844 novel Barry Lyndon, sumptuously adapted to the screen by Stanley Kubrick in 1975.

[15] Michael Kruse, “The Final Lesson Donald Trump Never Learned From Roy Cohn,” Politico, September 19, 2019, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/19/roy-cohn-donald-trump-documentary-228144.

[16] Gabrielle Bruney, “Roy Cohn Was an Infamous Fixer Who Made President Trump ‘From Beyond the Grave,’” Esquire, June 18, 2020, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a29177110/wheres-my-roy-cohn-matt-tyrnauer-donald-trump-interview.

[17] Quoted in Lawrence J. Epstein, The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 196.