"Sparked by a 2022 Twitter commenter who asserted that 'Yeah, Anne Frank had white privilege,' it reimagines Anne as 'Anita' — a pansexual Latina hiding from the Nazis..."

"... in a radically inclusive attic with her militant black mother, her neurodiverse father and assorted other disordered personalities.... For Peter, Anita’s love interest, the real challenge isn’t evading the Nazis; it’s daring to live your authentic self. Before coming out as non-binary, he laments to Anita: 'Outside, they’re fighting a war, but in here, I’m fighting expectations!'.... [T]he show’s real target isn’t Jews (or Nazis, for that matter) but the performative politics that have come to infect so much of cultural life...."

From "Inside Slam Frank — the ‘offensive’ Holocaust musical that could save Broadway/A show has turned the tragedy of Anne Frank into an ‘inclusive’ commentary on wokeness. And New York City audiences can’t get enough" (London Times).

And here's the review at Forward: "The new Anne Frank musical wants you to laugh at ‘woke culture’ — but is it funny? In ‘Slam Frank,’ it’s hard to tell who’s in on the joke and who is just…in it":

"Larry David had one of the stupidest op-eds in today's New York Times in which he compares Bill Maher having dinner with Donald Trump with having dinner with Adolf Hitler."

"Um, you know, Larry David, that's a form of Holocaust denial. Comparing Trump to Hitler is a form of Holocaust denial because Trump didn't have gas chambers, he didn't have shooting squads, he didn't take babies, and throw them into ovens, and if you're making a comparison what you're saying is Hitler didn't have any of those things either. So shame — shame — on you Larry David. You know, we used to be friends, boy. No more. And the one thing: about Larry David he stopped being funny, I don't laugh at his jokes anymore because I know they're not jokes. That's who he really is, so they're not jokes...."

Said Alan Dershowitz, trashing Larry David's trashing of Bill Maher's dining with Trump.

Here's David's NYT op-ed "My Dinner With Adolf" — free-access link — which begins:

Imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. “He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.” But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side....

Read the whole thing. I gave you the free link. Now, I do think what Larry wrote there is funny. It just violates a rule of taste: You shouldn't compare anything to the Holocaust. 

We can talk about why that rule fell out of fashion. But whether Larry David is violating a strict and important rule or just going with the flow of the current taste within his hyper-elite stratum of society is a separate question from whether it's funny.

"Her father was a notions wholesaler in Frankfurt, and together with her parents and grandmother, she lived a comfortable life largely shielded from the reality..."

"... that Germany was becoming ever more perilous for Jews. When the Nazis took her father away in 1938, her mother and grandmother managed to get her included in a group of children sent to a school in the Swiss mountains. There, she later recalled, she was educated only through the eighth grade and served for all practical purposes as a housekeeper for the Swiss children. She never saw her family again; they were all presumed murdered at Auschwitz."

From "Ruth Westheimer, the Sex Guru Known as Dr. Ruth, Dies at 96/Frank and funny, the taboo-breaking psychologist said things on television and radio that would have been shocking coming from almost anyone else" (NYT).

"I still to this day call it the worst meeting I have ever had. He was 99 or 100 at the time."

"We said, 'We think what you did was absolutely incredible and we would love to make a film about that particular moment in your life.' He said, 'Oh, no one else needs to know what I did. No one else. Anyone who needs to know about this, already knows about it.'"

 
From "'The worst meeting I have ever had': why a Kindertransport hero rejected a film about his life/As One Life is released, producer says that Nicholas Winton – the 'British Schindler' who saved 669 children – was reluctant for his story to be told" (The Guardian).

"So, if you want to be real, tell us what privileges you have received being Jewish?"

 Stuart Rojstaczer gives a brilliant answer (TikTok video):

"An instructor at Stanford University.... asked Jewish and Israeli students to identify themselves... told [them to] stand in a corner, and said, 'This is what Israel does to the Palestinians'..."

"The instructor then asked, 'How many people died in the Holocaust?' When a student answered, 'Six million,' the lecturer said, 'Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer.'... The teacher 'didn’t say anything that happened to the Israelis.... He ignored that. He said, "Hamas is a legitimate representation of the Palestinian people. They are not a terrorist group. They are freedom fighters. Their actions are legitimate."... He’s saying Israel is worse than the Nazis and Hamas is innocent. This is what Jewish students face at Stanford and other places. They’re feeling isolated, under attack and threatened.'"

From "Stanford instructor removed for targeting Jewish students as ‘colonizers’ after Hamas attack on Israel/Stanford officials were also criticized for neutral language in initially failing to unambiguously condemn Hamas" (Forward)(quoting Rabbi Dov Greenberg, director of the Chabad Stanford Jewish Center, who was relaying what he heard from 3 students).

"We said 'never again.' The UK was a safe haven. Now..."

"... after the biggest massacre of Jews since the holocaust, British Jewish children are being advised to hide their identities as they walk to school, for their own safety. There should be mass outrage that this is necessary."

Writes J.K. Rowling, at "X," showing us this letter to the editor of the London Times from London resident Dr Sarah Nachshen:

Sir, On advice from her school our teenage daughter has gone off without her blazer this morning. Her male classmates have been advised to cover their skullcaps with baseball caps. On her pre-school dawn run yesterday she ran past the broken glass of a kosher café’s windows and a fresh anti-Israel slogan painted on a bridge. All my grandparents were Holocaust survivors who found safe haven, and built new lives, in the UK, so of course I am twitching with latent anxiety and the creeping dangers of the masses not speaking out against terrorism. I sincerely hope Rishi Sunak honours his pledge to stand with Israel and protect British Jews. 

Sarcasm on top of sarcasm.

Here’s Roseanne Barr saying the Holocaust never happened but should’ve because “Jews cause all the world’s problems,” so 6M of us shd be killed! Is that a “true threat” as SCOTUS defined it today in Counterman v. Colorado? Maybe not but It comes close!https://t.co/FOWHtLpUFp

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) June 27, 2023

Context:

"Susan Benesch, the executive director of the Dangerous Speech Project, said that genocidal leaders often use fear of a looming threat..."

"... to prod groups into pre-emptive violence. Those who commit the violence do not need to hate the people they are attacking. They just need to be afraid of the consequences of not attacking. For instance, before the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Hutu politicians told the Hutus that they were about to be exterminated by Tutsis. During the Holocaust, Nazi propagandists declared that Jews were planning to annihilate the German people. Before the Bosnian genocide, Serbs were warned to protect themselves from a fundamentalist Muslim threat that was planning a genocide against them. 'I was stunned at how similar this rhetoric is from case to case,' Ms. Benesch told me.... 'It’s as if there’s some horrible school that they all attend.'...  Fear speech is much less studied than hate speech.... The 'nontoxic and argumentative nature' of fear speech prompts more engagement than hate speech...."

 
From "Few Are Addressing One of Social Media’s Greatest Perils" by Julia Angwin (NYT).

Is this a suggestion that "fear speech" should be censored? No. What Angwin recommends that social media companies do more fact-checking, add "context and counterpoints to false fear-inducing posts," and rely less on the kind of "engagement algorithms" that promote "outrageous and divisive content." She'd also like us, the users of social media, to notice fear speech and to challenge it ourselves, to provide our own counterspeech — "not necessarily to change the views of true believers but rather to provide a counter‌narrative for people watching on the sidelines."

That's a big part of what I try to do with this blog.

Artist surprises the Shoah Memorial Foundation with murals of "The Simpsons" as Holocaust victims.

"We were not involved in the decision process, and found the painting yesterday morning along with everybody else," said a spokesperson.

Quoted in "Artist paints 'The Simpsons' characters as Holocaust victims outside Milan memorial/Shoah Memorial Foundation says while AleXsandro Palombo did not consult with them before creating the artwork, they 'don’t find it particularly harmful'" (Times of Israel).

The president of the foundation said: "We appreciate the intention behind it, and don’t find it particularly harmful." 

"The German branch of KFC has apologised after inviting customers to commemorate the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 by ordering a fried chicken dish."

The London Times reports.

Under the subject line “Memorial day for the Reich pogrom night”, KFC Germany wrote: “Go ahead and treat yourself to more soft cheese on your crispy chicken. Now available at KFCheese.”... 

It is unclear whether the message can be attributed to a hack, an internal prank, sloppily coded software or a mortifying lapse of judgment by an employee.

"Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich... took an adolescent girl’s diary and raped it into The Diary of Anne Frank, a sitcom...."

"The Frank family, you will recall, have been hiding from the Nazis and squabbling about 'whose turn it is to feed the cat.' At the end, the Nazis show up to take them all to their (offstage) deaths. The Hacketts’ play ends with Anne’s line: 'I believe people are still good at heart.' I’d always considered this merely loathsome twaddle.... For whether or not the line was scribbled by Anne Frank, the Hacketts adopted it as the punch line for their play, that is, that by which they wished their vision to be remembered. But the line brings to mind that of Joseph Goebbels. Addressing the Gestapo, he said, 'History will note that we did these things while still preserving our essential humanity.' The Hacketts’ line, similarly, can be understood as 'These monsters are basically good at heart, despite what they have done to the Jews.'"

Writes David Mamet, in "Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch."

I don't think Mamet means to question whether those words appear in the diary (as it was published), just the placement of those words at the conclusion of the play. Here's the full text of the diary, and here's the context of the line that the Hacketts chose to put at the end of their play: 

Schreibkraft.

"Mrs. Reinhard, then known as Carmen Weitmann, typed the names of more than 1,000 Jewish people — including her own and those of two friends — to create what became known as 'Schindler’s List.' She called herself a 'schreibkraft,' or typist. 'The only practical thing in my life that I learned was shorthand, but I never learned to type,' Mrs. Reinhard told the New York Times in 2007. 'I typed with two fingers only.'"

From "Mimi Reinhard, secretary who typed ‘Schindler’s List,’ dies at 107" (WaPo).

“It was a gamble as far as we were concerned,” she told Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper in 2007. “To go with Schindler was no guarantee of anything. We didn’t believe that Schindler would really succeed in saving us. He was just taking us to a different camp. Who knew? We took a chance only because we believed in Schindler.”...

“He was no angel,” Mrs. Reinhard said of Schindler. “We knew that he was an SS man; he was a member of the highest ranks. They went out drinking together at night, but apparently he could not stand to see what they were doing to us. … I saw a man who was risking his life all the time for what he was doing.”

"She recalled that it was snowing gently when the Germans occupied her town in March 1939. An officer commandeered the family’s house."

"Residents were lining the streets silently, she said, and then, 'as if with one voice, they started singing our national anthem that started with the words "Where is my home?" I didn’t realize that our home was no longer ours, and I didn’t realize that this was the end of our happiness and the beginning of the occupation.' Vera’s mother queued up for four days to apply for the Kindertransport; then, one evening, she announced to her husband at dinner that the girls had secured seats and would be going to England. 'There was a deathly silence. Father looked shocked and terribly surprised,' Mrs. Gissing wrote in her memoir. 'All at once his dear face seemed haggard and old. He covered it with his hands, whilst we all waited in silence. Then he lifted his head, smiled at us with tears in his eyes, sighed and said, "All right, let them go."'"

From "Vera Gissing, Who Was Rescued by ‘Britain’s Schindler,’ Dies at 93/She was not quite 11 when train convoys organized by a London stockbroker carried her and hundreds of other Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II" (NYT).

The embattled speaker of the week is...

"The embattled speaker of the week is Joe Rogan, the host of the world’s most popular podcast," wrote NYT staff editor Spencer Bokat-Lindell, in "What the Joe Rogan Backlash Reveals About How We Handle Misinformation," published yesterday, which was Tuesday, the second day of the work week.

Oh, no! Embattled Speaker of the Week is a much faster game. Joe Rogan was the embattled speaker of last week. The embattled speaker of this week is Whoopi Goldberg: "In a statement on Tuesday night, Kim Godwin, president of ABC News, said that Ms. Goldberg would be suspended for 'her wrong and hurtful comments.'" 

What did Joe even do? Hard to remember in light of Whoopi's blowing off the Holocaust: "This is white people doing it to white people, so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves."

But both Joe and Whoopi were one-person-show comedians who moved into hosting lengthy, semi-serious conversation shows. They offer lateral perceptions. God help us if we lose the ability to listen and think and continue the conversation.

 

Apparently, Whoopi has some free time. She ought to go on Joe Rogan's show. These 2 human individuals are sublimely valuable. The urge to oust them is all wrong. It is self-harm. 

And bring back Roseanne.

"[A]s a black person I think of race as being something that I can see. People were very angry and they said 'no no we are a race' – and I understand."

"People, you know, decided I was all these other things I’m actually not. I’m incredibly torn up by being told these things about myself. And I get it, folks are angry. I accept that and I did it to myself. This was my thought process and I’ll work hard not to think that way again." 

Said Whoopi Goldberg, quoted in "'I stand corrected': Whoopi Goldberg apologizes for Holocaust comments" (NY Post). 

What she'd said was "The Holocaust isn’t about race. No, it’s not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man... It’s how people treat each other.... It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white because black, white, Jews, Italians, everybody eats each other." 

That became an outrage, perhaps because she was wandering toward race-blindness territory and in danger of allying with those naifs who ask why we can't all love one another.

By the way, is Whoopi Goldberg — nee Caryn Elaine Johnson — Jewish?

"So as Spiegelman read the record from the board’s meeting, he focused on their stated issues with stark imagery, as well as strong language."

"Spiegelman’s mother died by suicide when he was 20, and in 'Maus,' he depicts how his father discovered her lifeless body, unclothed in a bathtub. Spiegelman also laughs in reaction to a board member bringing up the author’s past comics contributions to Playboy magazine when assessing the anthropomorphic nudity in 'Maus,' which includes stripped-down concentration camp prisoners. Spiegelman acknowledges that the voices who spoke at the meeting weren’t 'monolithic by any means.' One instructional supervisor spoke of “Maus” as an anchor book to begin teaching the Holocaust to children: 'I am very passionate about history, and I would hate to rob our kids of this opportunity.' The member also noted: 'Mr. Spiegelman did his very best to depict his mother passing away.'"

From "Art Spiegelman sees the new ban of his book ‘Maus’ as a ‘red alert’" (WaPo).

Background: "A school district in Tennessee banned the use of 'Maus,' a Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, in its middle school classes, citing the work’s profanity and nudity in a 10-to-0 vote. As leaders in conservative areas across the country push for more control over the way history is taught, the McMinn County school board expressed concern that the expletives in 'Maus' were inappropriate for eighth-graders. Members also said Art Spiegelman’s illustrations showing nudity — which depict Holocaust victims forced to strip during their internment in Nazi concentration camps — were improper."

What do my Facebook friends think they are doing expressing this kind of hostility?

Here are 2 memes I encountered the other day. I suppose the people who put these up think of themselves as funny and scientifically correct. The first one exults in punishment and the second one makes casual use of the Holocaust.

"I’d rather be in Auschwitz than New York City." Pause. "I mean now, not when it was open."

Said Louis C.K., quoted in "Louis C.K. tells Israeli crowd ‘I’d rather be in Auschwitz than New York City.'"

The funnyman reportedly conceded in Israel that he had masturbated in front of female fans, which he admitted was wrong, and doesn’t recommend doing.

"If they say ‘yes,’ then still don’t do it, because it’s not popular,” he joked....

"But what is exhausting about the current debate over the use of the words concentration camp goes beyond Trump and his made-up reality."

"At its heart, the question is: Should we call these camps, where a distinct group of people is being detained by the government, by their proper scholarly name? Or should we avoid it because it invokes* the Holocaust and might somehow diminish from the attendant suffering of those who perished there? Again, the question turns on emotion, on individualized reactions to the specific words, rather than on accuracy and precision; as many have pointed out, the term 'concentration camp' predates the Holocaust and does not require an intention toward genocide.... Are we now spending more time on the labels than on the actual harms? In a time of information overload and outrage fatigue, is fighting over what we call things coming at the cost of fighting against the things themselves? The sometimes threadbare political axiom 'if you’re explaining, you’re losing' comes to mind.... But we must question whether battles over who is most affronted by references to the Holocaust come under the category of explaining, or trying to find shared meanings, or reaching for truth.... What matters is that words still have the capacity to move, inspire, and terrify us. If they can still do that, perhaps they can still push us to act, even if we don’t always agree."

I'm reading "The AOC–Liz Cheney 'Concentration Camp' Fight Might Just Be a Distraction" by Dahlia Lithwick and Susan Matthews (Slate).

______________

* In an essay about words, it's a good idea to use the right words yourself. It should be evokes, not invokes.