Opinion | Roseanne Barr’s Holocaust denial, call for violence against Jews is an ‘unpardonable sin’ – By Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan (USA Today) / July 5, 2023
Even if we give Roseanne Barr the benefit of the doubt, her comments still offer cover for further hate speech and violence.
During a podcast interview with comedian Theo Von, Roseanne Barr recently said, “Nobody died in the Holocaust, either. That’s the truth.” As if a casual Holocaust denial wasn’t horrific enough for the Jewish actor and comedian, she immediately escalated her rhetoric: “It should happen. Six million Jews should die right now ‘cause they cause all the problems in the world. But it never happened.”
Barr is no stranger to controversy. She incurred Americans’ wrath with a wretched “interpretation” of the national anthem. She got herself kicked off the reboot of her own eponymous sitcom with a racist tweet about former White House adviser Valerie Jarrett. She championed problematic COVID-19 conspiracy theories during the pandemic. But her Holocaust comment might be the most abominable move she has ever made.
What is particularly upsetting about Barr’s latest bout of nonsense is that among those who perished during the Holocaust were her own Jewish Lithuanian family members.
In 1942, Nazis invaded their shtetl, forced Barr’s relatives and their fellow villagers to dig holes and lie down in them, then buried them alive with bulldozers. Barr knows the truth, not only about her relatives but about the Holocaust as a whole. Her grandmother – who escaped the fate suffered by the rest of the family, emigrating to America on a music scholarship – shared the grim story, as Barr’s sister Geraldine noted in her memoir.
