‘Rabbi’ Roseanne Barr is Rewriting the Torah
Yes, THAT Roseanne Barr
In her television studio in El Segundo, Roseanne Barr is singing the Israeli national anthem — and it’s good.
“If I asked you to sing ‘Hatikvah,’ would you slug me?” I had hesitantly asked her, remembering her screeching mangling of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a baseball game in 1990.
Roseanne responded with a look of genuine shock. Of course she would sing it, she said, even though, she added, “I haven’t practiced it and I do forget a lot of the words.” But then she began crooning the Hebrew in a rich, vibrating alto, carefully pausing before the high notes, crescendoing to a heartfelt peak — before stopping midsong. “The rest is really hard,” she explained. “The only songs I can sing really good are the Hebrew songs of my childhood.”
Even so, Roseanne, at 58, comes off more like a Jewish wise woman than the sardonic “domestic goddess” who transformed her blue-collar feminist comedy into a hit sitcom, “Roseanne,” from 1988 to 1997. Now a grandmother of five, she’s wearing her salt-and-pepper hair long, stylish red glasses and little makeup. And even after leaving Los Angeles for a simpler life in Hawaii, she has continued mouthing off on her blog, roseanneworld.com, as well as in a 2011 memoir, “Roseannearchy: Dispatches From the Nut Farm,” which describes her Jewish journey amid rants about politics and her ex-husband, Tom Arnold (the book appears in paperback Oct. 11).
Roseanne’s adventures on a macadamia nut farm in Hawaii will be chronicled in her new reality series, “Roseanne’s Nuts,” premiering on Lifetime July 13. The show may touch on her plans to once again publicly sing the American national anthem, this time, she said, triumphantly.
Roseanne has been practicing her singing, which has also improved courtesy of the breathing techniques she’s learned since becoming one of the first celebrities to frequent the controversial Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles in the 1990s.
“So many people in Hollywood go, like, ‘You’re such a Jewy Jew,’ ” she said, laughing. “But I think it’s just fantastic to be a Jewish person. Jews are such a fantastic bunch — thinkers, creators, moralists — and the more people know that about us, the better.”