\u201cthe most important new show around\u201d<\/a><\/span> aren\u2019t telling you is what happens in the play\u2019s final scenes.<\/p>\nMargot 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\u2019t 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 \u201ccancels the Holocaust\u2019 so the Jews don\u2019t have to commit suicide to save humanity from the evils of Zionism.<\/p>\n
Cue the applause, and the actors all turn up for a final chorus wearing t-shirts with woke slogans, including one reading \u201cby any means necessary,\u201d something that is embraced by those cheering for Hamas\u2019 efforts to slaughter the contemporary living Jews that are not as popular as the dead Anne.<\/p>\n
Sure, we\u2019re 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 \u201cPalestine\u201d and the cheers that greeted Anne\u2019s claim that the \u201cseven million colonizers\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t acknowledging that Jews don\u2019t have \u201cwhite privilege.\u201d 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 \u201cwhite\u201d oppressors.<\/p>\n
Contrary to its press clippings, \u201cSlam Frank\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Would they do this to another group?<\/b><\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Such a play, even if it claimed to be a satire, would be denounced as racist. Even the hit musical comedy \u201cThe Book of Mormon\u201d by the creators of the cartoon satire \u201cSouth Park,\u201d to which \u201cSlam Frank\u201d has been compared, is kinder to its targets\u2014the adherents of that faith\u2014than 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.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t 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 <\/i>deliberately downplayed the Jewish elements of the story and sought to universalize Anne as a girl just like everyone else. That pleased Anne\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Yet, just like those adaptations of Anne\u2019s story that came at a time when Jews were eager to fit in and be seen as the same as everyone else, \u201cSlam Frank\u201d speaks just as loudly to the current desire of many, including some Jews, to erase not just Israel but also Jewish peoplehood itself.<\/p>\n
The answer to the question as to why antisemitism is flourishing in a way that it hasn\u2019t 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 \u201cweaponizing antisemitism.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019t shame or deter antisemites; it excited them.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t have surprised anyone\u2014since, for the chattering classes, the Jews remain a metaphor, rather than a people with rights.<\/p>\n
A product of this moment in cultural history<\/b><\/p>\n
A world in which \u201cSlam Frank\u201d 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\u2019s one in which people, including New York theater audiences who think of themselves as enlightened liberals, can believe blood libels about Jews committing \u201cgenocide,\u201d and that the war to eradicate the sole Jewish state and to commit another Holocaust against its people is a righteous one.<\/p>\n
\u201cSlam Frank\u201d seems unlikely to have a long afterlife or hold the stage in the future, and not merely because it isn\u2019t as clever as its admirers think it is. Rather, because it is a product of this particular moment in cultural history.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ccolonizers\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: <\/i>@jonathans_tobin.<\/i><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
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