…Here’s how much people love dead Jews: Anne Frank’s diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 via her surviving father, Otto Frank, has been translated into 70 languages and has sold over 30 million copies worldwide, and the Anne Frank House now hosts well over a million visitors each year, with reserved tickets selling out months in advance. But when a young employee at the Anne Frank House in 2017 tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum’s managing director told newspapers that a live Jew in a yarmulke might “interfere” with the museum’s “independent position.” The museum finally relented after deliberating for six months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.
…[The] runaway success of Anne Frank’s diary depended on playing down her Jewish identity: At least two direct references to Hanukkah were edited out of the diary when it was originally published. Concealment was central to the psychological legacy of Anne Frank’s parents and grandparents, German Jews for whom the price of admission to Western society was assimilation, hiding what made them different by accommodating and ingratiating themselves to the culture that had ultimately sought to destroy them. That price lies at the heart of Anne Frank’s endless appeal. After all, Anne Frank had to hide her identity so much that she was forced to spend two years in a closet rather than breathe in public. And that closet, hiding place for a dead Jewish girl, is what millions of visitors want to see.
…And here is the most devastating fact of Frank’s posthumous success, which leaves her real experience forever hidden: We know what she would have said, because other people have said it, and we don’t want to hear it.
The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—is often called “inspiring,” by which we mean that it flatters us. It makes us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift, it is worth noting, at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” three weeks before she met people who weren’t.
Here’s how much some people dislike living Jews: They murdered six million of them. Anne Frank’s writings do not describe this process. Readers know that the author was a victim of genocide, but that does not mean they are reading a work about genocide. If that were her subject, it is unlikely that those writings would have been universally embraced.
We know this because there is no shortage of texts from victims and survivors who chronicled the fact in vivid detail, and none of those documents has achieved anything like the fame of Frank’s diary. Those that have come close have only done so by observing the same rules of hiding, the ones that insist on polite victims who don’t insult their persecutors. The work that came closest to achieving Frank’s international fame might be Elie Wiesel’s Night, a memoir that could be thought of as a continuation of Frank’s experience, recounting the tortures of a 15-year-old imprisoned in Auschwitz. As the scholar Naomi Seidman has discussed, Wiesel first published his memoir in Yiddish, under the title And the World Kept Silent. The Yiddish book told the same story, but it exploded with rage against his family’s murderers and, as the title implies, the entire world whose indifference (or active hatred) made those murders possible. With the help of the French Catholic Nobel laureate François Mauriac, Wiesel later published a French version of the book under the title Night—a work that repositioned the young survivor’s rage into theological angst. After all, what reader would want to hear about how his society had failed, how he was guilty? Better to blame God. This approach did earn Wiesel a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as a spot in Oprah’s Book Club, the American epitome of grace…
finally posting my full contribution to the CARTOON PUNK zine i organized with @gchoule and @mortalityplays! it’s about growing up Jewish and not realizing it was A Thing until young adulthood. i hope u guys enjoy!
Umm a Jewish woman at FSU was just arrested for pouring her drink on a nazi at her campus literally only a few days following the terrorist attack on Jews at Tree of Life Synagogue
Help her covef the legal fees please! Her Venmo: Shelby-Shoup
Please donate to her or share this.
Florida State University CANNOT and WILL NOT get away with trying to arrest a Jewish woman defending her humanity while they defend their football star rapist.
If you are Jewish in Britain and want to leave images of hope and resilience on your streets while supporting an awesome antifascist organization, consider getting some stickers from Jewdas.
middle aged white man with trump maga van sends pipe bombs and anthrax to 13 prominent democratic politicians, donors, and media outlets.
middle aged white man who claims he ‘doesn’t shoot whites’ attempts to enter a black church for a massacre, fails, and murders two random black strangers in a grocery store.
white man yells ‘all jews must die!’ before entering a synagogue during shabbat and opening fire. the news is still breaking, but at least eight people are confirmed dead.
and it’s not the same but it’s sticking in my chest because it just rhymes neatly with my first memory of learning about the holocaust
the bars of soap, the promises of showers
it’s not the same, it’s not the same, but baby Alder cried for days after first learning that history, and it’s hitting me right in exactly the same place
My family was Jewish, living in 1942 in the Netherlands when the country was occupied by the Nazis. We children were sent into hiding, with foster families who risked arrest and death by taking us in. They protected us, they loved us, and we were extremely lucky to have survived the war and been well cared for.
Yet the lasting damage inflicted by that separation reverberates to this day, decades hence.
This is my brother writing in recent years. He tries to deal with his lasting pain through memoir. It’s been 76 years, yet he revisits the separation obsessively. He still writes about it in the present tense:
In the first home I scream for six weeks. Then I am moved to another family, and I stop screaming. I give up. Nothing around me is known to me. All those around me are strangers. I have no past. I have no future. I have no identity. I am nowhere. I am frozen in fear. It is the only emotion I possess now. As a three-year-old child, I believe that I must have made some terrible mistake to have caused my known world to disappear. I spend the rest of my life trying desperately not to make another mistake.
My brother’s second foster family cared deeply about him and has kept in touch with him all these years. Even so, he is almost 80 years old now and is still trying to understand what made him the anxious and dysfunctional person he turned into as a child and has remained for the rest of his life: a man with charm and intelligence, yet who could never keep a job because of his inability to complete tasks. After all, if he persisted he might make a mistake again, and that would bring his world to another end.
My younger sister was separated from our parents at five. She had no understanding of what was going on and why she suddenly had to live with a strange set of adults. She suffered thereafter from lifelong, profound depression.
I was older: seven. I was more able than my siblings to understand what was happening and why. I spent most of the war with Dick and Ella Rijnders. Dick was mayor of a small, rural village, and he and Ella lived in a beautiful house next to a wide waterway. Ella had a warm smile and Dick referred to me as his “oldest daughter”. I was able to go to school normally, make friends, and became part of village life. I was extraordinarily lucky, but I was not with my own parents, sister, and brother. And, eventually, I also had to leave the Rijnders, my loving second “family”. I was returning to my own family, but this meant another separation.
In later life, I was never able to really settle down. I lived in different countries and was successful in work, but never able to form lasting relationships with partners. I never married. I almost forgot to mention my own anxiety and depression, and my many years in psychotherapy.
My grief and anger about today’s southern border come not just from my personal life. As a retired psychotherapist who has worked extensively with victims of childhood trauma, I know all too well what awaits many of the thousands of children, taken by our government at the border, who are now in “processing centers” and foster homes – no matter how decent and caring those places might be. We can expect thousands of lives to be damaged, for many years or for ever, by “zero tolerance”. We can expect old men and women, decades from now, still suffering, still remembering, still writing in the present tense.
What is happening in our own backyard today is as evil and criminal as what happened to me and my siblings as children in Nazi Europe. It needs to be stopped immediately.
While bigots and conspiracy theorists continue to target Jews far in excess of any other religious minorities in America, a combination of neo-Nazi events like Charlottesville and ongoing allegations of anti-Semitism against high-profile progressives has shaken confidence that either the political left or the right are staked in protecting our community. Instead, we see that anti-Semitism is becoming part of mainstream discourse across party lines. Those of us on the left have an obligation to stand up and stop it from derailing and destroying the justice movements we have helped to build, and continue to be a vital part of in the United States.
There are those who say anti-Semitism can be ignored as a “side issue” in Trump’s America, and that there are too many vulnerable people in too much peril for us to be “distracted” or “divided” by focusing on anti-Jewish hate. They are mistaken. Hate emboldens hate. As Eric K. Ward has written here, anti-Semitism fuels white supremacy. In fact, anti-Semitism is the core ideological foundation of white supremacist ideology in Trump’s America. If we ignore the smoke of anti-Semitism rising, the American progressive movement will find itself engulfed in flames.
apparently the reason gayness was associated w/ reactionary politics by most bolsheviks was because the most famous gay men in imperial russia were archconservative aristocrats, such as the tsar’s uncle, famous for having many gay lovers, for ethnically cleansing all of moscow’s jews in 1891, & for crushing the radical student movement at moscow university
just to go full circle from my other post, on the seventeenth of feburary 1905, this guy,
kalyayev, tossed a pomegranate (a nitroglycerin bomb) into the tsar’s uncle’s lap, which blew up his carriage & his upper body (besides the right side of his face). kalyayev was hanged 2 weeks later, although he didn’t really mind because he had expected to die in the explosion anyway, & the tsar’s uncle’s still-ringed fingers were found soonafter on a nearby rooftop
That’s how I want to go
best part: at the end of his trial (i think it might have been his last words, but i’m not sure), he said to the tsar’s aunt & to the judges who had just sentenced him to death, “learn to look the advancing revolution right in the face!” #goals
alder-knight 