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The Schmooze

Rosanne Barr Blasts ‘Stay in France’ Call to Jews

Roseanne Barr took to Twitter to blast an Israeli writer’s call for Jews to stay in France.

The comedian called Rogel Alpher a “skinhead” and urged him to “STFU,” meaning “shut the f*** up,” after he urged French Jews not to immigrate to Israel.

On Sunday, hours earlier, he tweeted: “Jews of France, stay in France. Don’t flee Muslim facism [sic] into the arms of Jewish fasicm [sic]. Nothing for you in Israel.” Alpher was promoting an opinion piece he penned for the Israeli daily Haaretz.

In the opening of the piece, which was published Saturday, Alpher wrote, “There is no God, he did not appoint you as the chosen people and he did not promise you the land of Israel. You have no rights here. Israel has stopped being the Jewish state. It is a binational apartheid state in which Palestinians live under an occupation that denies them their basic human rights. The Zionist enterprise is dead. Committed suicide.”

Barr, of course, is no stranger to controversy. The comedian is an outspoken critic of the pro-Palestinian left and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. She has even called Jews who support it “anti-Semites” and recently retweeted a post from JTA’s Jewniverse noting that the Bataclan, the Paris nightclub where at least 130 people were killed in a recent attack, was named for a 19th-century Jewish operetta.

In the universe before smartphones, Barr notoriously screeched the national anthem — replete with crotch grabbing — before a San Diego Padres baseball game in July 1990. (President George Bush deemed her performance “disgraceful.”)

Alpher, too, has the ability to set tongues wagging. His recent Haaretz columns include “The Secular Israeli Will Go the Way of the Woolly Mammoth,” as well as a letter, written in the event of his death in a terrorist attack, in which he apologizes for his “paltry role in the injustice of the occupation.”

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