WATCH Shmuley Boteach Stress Roseanne’s Jewish Repentance
Using Jewish concepts, long-time acquaintance of Roseanne Barr, Shmuley Boteach yet again showed he is her most eloquent defender, bar none.
Less than a week after Barr posted a YouTube video of herself screaming that she thought the “b—— was white” about Valerie Jarrett — and hours after she filmed Sean Hannity’s show — Boteach hosted a conversation with the star at Standup, a comedy venue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Telling reporters that she had a “big heart” and, by showing her vulnerability she had shown her “soft underbelly,” Boteach said that Barr had gone through the four stages of Maimonidean repentance that are core to Jewish “teshuvah.” It was important for her to atone personally, but also as a “high profile ambassador” as a Jewish woman and a “practitioner of Jewish beliefs.”
Boteach repeatedly returned to the way that “Martin Luther King Jr., the greatest American of the twentieth century” had forgiven people who had been racist toward him. While Barr’s transgressions were quite different, Boteach called for love and healing while clearly distinguishing the difference in Jewish law between someone who did one bad thing and someone who demonstrates a pattern of bad behavior.
“We have no Jesus in Judaism. No perfect man.” Boteach put the onus on the Jewish people to forgive one another and Americans to forgive Roseanne.
They were at Standup to conduct a conversation. Boteach hoped that it would be entertaining but it would not be a standup or comedy act. They were appearing at that venue because Donny, the owner, had offered them the studio in which they had recorded the four podcasts since Barr’s fateful tweet.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO