This is a moment in Jewish history when scholars, journalists, historians, community leaders and ordinary Jews are all seeking to understand what has been happening to them. Since the Hamas-led Palestinian-Arab terror attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, they’ve witnessed a surge of antisemitism unlike anything American Jews have ever experienced.
Their efforts to comprehend this shocking turn of events have led to cogent explanations. These point to toxic ideologies, media bias and a successful propaganda campaign that exploits traditional tropes—as well as modern innovations—of Jew-hatred, aimed at delegitimizing Israel, Jews and Jewish identity in the name of anti-racism.
One way to understand how we got here, and why this turn against the Jews is being committed by people who think of themselves as high-minded human-rights advocates who would never engage in bigotry, is to go to an Off-Broadway theater in New York City’s East Village where the satirical hip-hop musical “Slam Frank” is being shown.
Everyone’s second favorite dead Jew
Nothing I have read, heard or seen better exemplifies the erasure of Jewish life that has become ubiquitous in popular culture in the third decade of the 21st century than this minor satire.
The play was first performed in 2025 to mostly glowing reviews in outlets like The New York Times and flattering profiles of its creators, Andrew Fox and Joel Sinesky (who are both Jewish), in The New Yorker and The Guardian. But it’s back for a scheduled two-month run at The Orpheum Theater where, judging by the performance that I attended, it’s winning big laughs and loud applause from a mostly young audience eager to join in the mockery of all that the established culture holds sacred.
And what better way to do that than by a new twist on the story of what Dara Horn aptly observed in her seminal book, People Love Dead Jews, as “everyone’s (second) favorite dead Jew—”the most favorite dead Jew being the Christian messiah.
As Horn noted, The Diary of Anne Frank is the world’s most popular and widely read book about the Holocaust specifically because it does not describe the genocide of the Jews that less popular survivor memoirs, such as those by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, did. That’s because the slaughter happens outside of the pages of Anne’s diary, which ends before her family’s capture and the gruesome murder of all of the residents of the famous annex in Amsterdam other than her father, Otto.
It is loved not so much because of the portrait it paints of a brilliant young writer who might have accomplished so much had she been allowed to live. Rather, it is because reading it grants the non-Jewish reader absolution for the mass murder of the Jews.
Readers of the Diary, and the millions who have who seen the universalized version of it presented in a hit play and movie first produced in the 1950s, love the fact that those performances ended with Anne’s famous line: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
As Horn wrote, “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” before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.”
After Anne had observed the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, she learned just how evil those who blamed Jews for everything that was wrong with their world could be.
Remarkably, the authors of “Slam Frank” are after something similar to the false grace that those who have enjoyed the Diary enjoy. Their conceit lies in the work’s presentation: a play within a play performed at a “progressive” company that treats the audience to an absurd version of the familiar story of a group of Jews who spent years hiding in an attic from the Nazis.
The production begins by taking a swipe at the hypocritical “land acknowledgments” about Native Americans that liberals perform at all sorts of occasions to virtue-signal their woke sympathies. It goes on to poke fun at everything else one can think of.
The authors claim the play was inspired by a particularly clueless social-media post asking if Anne Frank ever acknowledged her “privilege” as a white European. Of course, as a member of the most persecuted minority in history and someone who was hunted down and murdered by the German Nazis, she had no “privilege.”
An inside joke
By making fun of everything in our current society, they seem to be offering a form of absolution that enables transcending both fashionable opinion and conventional pieties—both the traditional and woke versions. By laughing along with the send-up not only of the plight of the Frank family, but of all sorts of contemporary cliches about diversity, feminism, gender identity and male chauvinism, they can claim to be innocent of the horrible crimes committed against humanity in the past and not responsible for any bad thing in the present. More than that, it sanctions their sense of themselves as superior to those who cling to identity or history and don’t get the authors’ attempt at an inside joke.
Some Jewish critics have chided those who voiced outrage at the appropriation of the Anne Frank story on the grounds that they’re wrong to think the play is mocking its long dead heroine. Some even claimed it was no more offensive than Mel Brooks’s classic comedy “The Producers,” whose conceit centered on a failed scam to create a certain theatrical flop—a feel-good musical about the Nazis called “Springtime for Hitler.”
Brooks’s comic masterpiece, which was first conceived at a moment in the 1960s when the notion of theatergoers enjoying a “gay romp at Berchtesgaden” truly was unthinkable, doesn’t hit audiences in quite the same manner today when antisemitism has come out of the closet in which it briefly hid after the Holocaust. But he didn’t mock the victims of the Holocaust, deny them their Jewish identity or claim that half of the Jews living in the world (a figure that still numbers millions fewer than before the murder of the six million) are evil “colonizers” who are perverting the legacy of those who died.
That is what “Slam Frank” does. And it accomplishes it to the cheers of those who have been hearing similar messages in the mainstream media and at pop concerts. Brooks was making fun of the Nazis as the epitome of evil that had no place in a normal or decent society. “Slam Frank” mocks the victims of the Nazis, not their murderers.
You can laugh if you like at a show that portrays Anne as a Latina rapper (who flees the “jungles of Germany” at her father’s behest after the American CIA installed Hitler as its dictator); her mother as a black woman who never stops intoning the mantras of diversity; her father as a barely repressed gay man; her sister, Margot, as a neuro-diverse mute/would-be Zionist fascist oppressor of Arabs; her friend/first love, Peter, as a gender-confused aspiring dancer; his father as a stereotypical obnoxious white “mansplainer;” and his mother as a repressed “Stepford Wife.”
You can nod along to the play’s portrayal of Anne’s family as instructing her to stop speaking and writing in Spanish (her real identity) so as to ensure her book’s future popularity with a white audience along with the other flat jokes that keep the mockery flowing.
And if you’re a theater buff, you can smirk at the numerous allusions to better plays such as “Hamilton” (whose famous logo is appropriated, albeit with a yellow star) and many others.
Most will laugh along with this. So, too, will critics who are straining to be part of the inside joke so as to display their virtue by disdaining everything that is satirized. But what they are either deliberately ignoring, or are just too dim to understand, is that the one thing this play is not joking about is denying the Jews their story, humanity and rights.
A ‘secret’ ending
The producers of the play ask that critics not reveal the ending of the show so as to ensure that audiences fully register the “shock” of some of its denouement. But the secret ending of the play isn’t comparable to the last minutes of Agatha Christie’s “Witness For The Prosecution,” in which the true identity of the murderer and the eponymous witness is revealed. So, I don’t feel obligated to play by their rules.
What those who have lauded the play as “clever, gleefully provocative” or even “the most important new show around” aren’t telling you is what happens in the play’s final scenes.
Margot finally speaks, only to give an oration about the need to go to Palestine to displace and oppress its indigenous Arab population once the war ends. Anne then realizes that her family shouldn’t survive and betrays them herself, leading to their deaths. But then, after the bodies fall (they are shot on the spot rather than gassed or tortured and starved in the camps), Hitler turns up and, having shed his male identity and become a trans woman, he “cancels the Holocaust’ so the Jews don’t have to commit suicide to save humanity from the evils of Zionism.
Cue the applause, and the actors all turn up for a final chorus wearing t-shirts with woke slogans, including one reading “by any means necessary,” something that is embraced by those cheering for Hamas’s efforts to slaughter the contemporary living Jews that are not as popular as the dead Anne.
Sure, we’re not supposed to take any of this seriously except to embrace the notion that no one is 100% correct and that all causes are suspect. But the reaction of the audience to the mention of “Palestine” and the cheers that greeted Anne’s claim that the “seven million colonizers” currently committing crimes there are the result of the six million dead Jews told you all you need to know about the impact of this play at this moment.
Despite the hopes of some who lauded the play, and believed it to be a jab at the tweet that inspired it,the audience wasn’t acknowledging that Jews don’t have “white privilege.” Rather, they were nodding along at the false claim that Jews have no right to live in Israel. And this is because Jews are now wrongly viewed as “white” oppressors.
Contrary to its press clippings, “Slam Frank” is not an equal-opportunity offender. It may be poking fun at most things, but the one thing it is deadly serious about is denying the Jews their stories, as well as the right to mourn their dead with dignity and to live in freedom in their own country without being smeared as monsters and targeted for genocide.
Would they do this to another group?
Moreover, could anyone imagine someone putting on a play today in which black or Hispanic victims of racist crimes were portrayed as Jews or any identity other than their own? Would they deny them their culture and history and use them as stand-ins for more fashionable identities? Of course not.
Such a play, even if it claimed to be a satire, would be denounced as racist. Even the hit musical comedy “The Book of Mormon” by the creators of the cartoon satire “South Park,” to which “Slam Frank” has been compared, is kinder to its targets—the adherents of that faith—than Fox and Sinesky are to the objects of their scorn. But you can do this to Jews with impunity and still be applauded by liberal critics as having accomplished an act of creative genius.
This isn’t the first time the story of Anne Frank has been utilized to advance a non-Jewish agenda. The aforementioned play and movie adaptations of the Diary deliberately downplayed the Jewish elements of the story and sought to universalize Anne as a girl just like everyone else. That pleased Anne’s father, Otto, who had little use for Judaism or Jewish identity. It also drove writer Meyer Levin, who had worked to promote the book and wanted to write a more Jewish play, nearly out of his mind.
Yet, just like those adaptations of Anne’s story that came at a time when Jews were eager to fit in and be seen as the same as everyone else, “Slam Frank” speaks just as loudly to the current desire of many, including some Jews, to erase not just Israel but also Jewish peoplehood itself.
The answer to the question as to why antisemitism is flourishing in a way that it hasn’t since the Holocaust is that contemporary Western culture is willing to mock everything but not the lie that Jews, as both Hitler and woke ideologues alike have claimed, are “weaponizing antisemitism.”
While some Jews thought the unspeakable atrocities of Oct. 7 against Jews by a genocidal Islamo-fascist terror group and its supporters would generate sympathy for the victims, the opposite has occurred. The shedding of their blood in the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust didn’t shame or deter antisemites; it excited them.
And though the movement to demonize and delegitimize the one Jewish state on the planet had been building toward this for several decades, the explosion of antisemitism shouldn’t have surprised anyone—since, for the chattering classes, the Jews remain a metaphor, rather than a people with rights.
A product of this moment in cultural history
A world in which “Slam Frank” is acclaimed as a work of comic genius is not only one in which nothing sacred to the Jews is granted even minimal respect. It’s one in which people, including New York theater audiences who think of themselves as enlightened liberals, can believe blood libels about Jews committing “genocide,” and that the war to eradicate the sole Jewish state and to commit another Holocaust against its people is a righteous one.
“Slam Frank” seems unlikely to have a long afterlife or hold the stage in the future, and not merely because it isn’t as clever as its admirers think it is. Rather, because it is a product of this particular moment in cultural history.
Since Oct. 7 three years ago, it has once again become permissible to strip Jews of their past and identity and to smear them as “colonizers” and oppressors. We can only hope that this episode passes quickly, ensuring that this travesty is relegated to the trash heap of theatrical history, where it belongs.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
