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A new version of the famous Holocaust diary is being called ‘Anne Frank pornography’ and getting banned from schools
(JTA) – Among the many books that conservative parents have recently asked their children’s schools to remove is a lushly illustrated version of the most famous Holocaust diary.
The graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, published in English in 2018, has found itself at the center of a growing number of controversies involving book removals from school libraries. A small number of passionate activists have pushed for the book to be removed from schools in Florida and Texas, calling it “pornography” and even “antisemitic.” Sometimes, they’ve succeeded.
The movement to police children’s literature — particularly graphic novels — on the basis of race, sex and gender has encompassed thousands of different titles, and it has grown to become a potent political force with potential reverberations for the 2024 presidential race. The official who has played one of the biggest roles in enabling parents to challenge school library books, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is now running for president.
To defenders of the illustrated book — including the foundation created in Frank’s memory, historians and Jewish groups — the inclusion of Anne Frank’s diary among the list of banned books is a sign that the movement is bigoted and misguided.
Proponents of removing the book from schools say the graphic adaptation is essentially an obscene version that distorts Frank’s legacy and aids in “grooming” children. Even some Jewish parents and at least one Jewish lawmaker have objected to the book’s presence in schools.
“I read the diary of Anne Frank many times as a kid. I don’t remember any of that stuff that they put in that graphic novel,” Florida Rep. Randy Fine told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Calling the adaptation an “Anne Frank pornography book,” Fine continued, “And frankly that graphic novel is antisemitic. To sexualize the diary of Anne Frank in that sort of inappropriate way, it is antisemitic.”
Here is what you need to know about the book, the criticism it’s facing and the context that has made it a flashpoint in a deepening culture war.
What is ‘Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation’?
Published in 2018, “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” is a new, abridged version of Frank’s famous diary presented in comic-book format. The project was authorized by the Anne Frank Fonds, the Switzerland-based foundation started by Anne’s father Otto Frank, which controls the copyright to the diary Otto rescued after he survived the Holocaust. Anne herself perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after hiding out for most of the war with her family in an Amsterdam annex.
The Oscar-nominated Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman, together with illustrator David Polonsky, put the new book together. It was intended as a companion piece to the 2021 animated film “Where Is Anne Frank,” which Folman directed.
While the film tells the fanciful story of Anne’s imaginary friend Kitty coming to life and wandering through modern-day Amsterdam, the book is a straightforward, though heavily truncated, rendition of Anne’s original diary. All of the entries it reproduces are taken from her original text, and dialogue between the characters in the annex is based on Anne’s own recollections of their conversations. Some of its supporters resist the label “graphic novel,” which they say implies the story is fictional.
The new book, the foundation says, is not meant to replace Frank’s original diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 as “The Secret Annex” and in English in 1952 as “The Diary of a Young Girl.” That book, along with subsequent editions that restored some passages edited out of the first publication, continues to be published and widely read in dozens of languages.
Why and how is the book being challenged?
A handful of parent activists, the largest “parents’ rights” group in the country and at least one Republican state lawmaker — Fine — have specifically gone after “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” as part of their larger campaign against what they say is obscene and pornographic content in schools. After a few isolated incidents of parental opposition to the book over the last year, their efforts have gained steam in recent months.
Organized by members of “parents’ rights” groups such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education, parents nationwide have brought challenges against thousands of books in school libraries, the vast majority of which deal with topics of race, gender and sexuality. This movement began as parents organized to oppose COVID-19 mask mandates in public schools, and picked up steam in the aftermath of the 2020 racial justice protests following George Floyd’s murder, as well as recent political controversies involving LGBTQ-focused issues such as medical procedures for trans children.
The groups operate under the presumption that their children’s educators and librarians might be trying to sneak leftist viewpoints (including what they call “critical race theory” and “gender ideology”) into the classroom, or even that they are “grooming” their children.
Increasingly, such parents have trained this focus on books, and have become particularly sensitive to any literary depictions of sex and/or LGBTQ identity — particularly in graphic or comic-book format. Some of the most-banned books in schools across the country are graphic novels and memoirs with LGBTQ themes, including “Gender Queer” and “Fun Home.”
“People are just so uncomfortable with the idea of seeing anything represented visually,” said Kasey Meehan, director of the Freedom to Read program at the literary free-speech activist group PEN America. “Time and time again, when graphic novels are taken, an image is pulled out of context or an image is held up and declared as porn.”
Florida has emerged as a frontier for this movement under the leadership of DeSantis, who is a Republican. Under new laws he championed, educators can face felony charges for making obscene material accessible to students; the state also has a new law, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by its critics, that prohibits any classroom instruction on sexual identity or orientation in elementary and middle school, and limits it in high school.
Why are parents complaining specifically about the graphic adaptation?
Critics of the book say they are objecting to the small handful of passages in which Anne describes sexual matters. In one, she discusses a time she asked a female friend if they could show each other their breasts, but was rebuffed. (“If only I had a girlfriend,” she muses.) In another, she describes clinical details of her own vagina.
These passages are Anne’s own writing, and were part of her actual diary. Folman and Polonsky reproduce them in the book and show a full-page illustration showing her wandering through a garden of female nude statues in the Greco-Roman tradition.
This illustration, which is presented as coming from Anne’s imagination, has garnered the most intense blowback from parents. In Facebook groups devoted to book challenges, some members have shared screenshots of the page as evidence of the adaptation’s obscene qualities, questioning why any parent would want their child to read it.
Some people challenging the book have offered other explanations. Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms For Liberty whose Florida district has removed the book, told JTA that she was troubled by the fact that the adaptation only replicates a small percentage of the original diary, while leaving out what she believed to be crucial context: the original epilogue that shifted from Anne’s first-person narration to a larger study of the victims of the Holocaust. (An afterword does appear in the graphic adaptation.)
Inveighing against current child literacy levels she said are woefully low, Justice was also infuriated by the idea that Frank’s diary needed an illustrated version to begin with.
“Anne wrote the diary when she was 13,” she said. “So the diary is written at a level where children of that age can completely understand it.”
What has happened when parents have challenged the book?
The book first grabbed headlines in August 2022, when administrators at Keller ISD, a public school district in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, ordered staff to remove it (along with a selection of other books) from their shelves. The book had been challenged by a single parent the previous year, and the school’s new board, backed by right-wing special interest groups, had ordered its review policy for classroom materials to be completely overhauled. Any books that had ever been challenged in the district were to be removed from circulation until the matter had been resolved. Following public outcry, the book was returned to Keller’s shelves a week later.
A second Texas school district, Katy ISD outside Houston, had also placed the book under review during the 2021-22 school year, ultimately determining it was only appropriate for high school students.
The book soon landed on the radar of parent activists in Florida. One Florida school district, Indian River County Schools on the state’s Atlantic coast, ruled in April that the book was “not age-appropriate” at any level of instruction, including high school. A parent there had challenged it, claiming that the book “minimizes the Holocaust.”
After a review, the district agreed with the parent, telling JTA it had determined the book to be “a fictional novel,” “not the real diary of Anne Frank,” and filled with “inappropriate content.” The district superintendent issued a statement backing the ruling, citing Florida’s statewide Holocaust education mandate as a reason why the school should not make the book available to students.
The national leadership of Moms For Liberty issued a statement siding with the district — and emphasizing that Anne Frank’s diary is not itself objectionable.
“There are multiple versions of Anne Frank’s diary of varying age appropriateness available to students,” the statement said. “Only this ONE version was removed.”
Justice, the Moms for Liberty cofounder, is a former board member for Indian River County Schools and still lives in the area. She told JTA she does not like the book either and said its removal was a sign of the system working as it should: School administrators took a parent’s challenge seriously and came to a decision.
“If the superintendent and the school board wanted it there, it would be there,” she said. “If the Holocaust education group in the county had wanted it there — these are Jewish people — had wanted it there, it would be there.”
Another Florida school district, Clay County Public Schools outside Jacksonville, has kept the book restricted from student access for some five months and counting, following a single parental complaint earlier this year. That parent, Bruce Friedman, is Jewish, and has become a leading voice of the broader book challenge movement. He challenged the graphic adaptation along with hundreds of other books in his district that he deemed to be inappropriate for students. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s grooming,” he told JTA about the adaptation.
Facing a backlog of book challenges, Clay County in April altered its challenge policy to make it harder for parents like Friedman to file blanket requests to remove many books at once for broadly defined reasons. But notably, the district retained the pending challenge to “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” even after its policy change. A final decision on the book is still pending.
How are the book’s supporters responding to the criticism?
Activists opposed to the book banning movement and experts on the diary’s publication history say critics of the Anne Frank adaptation are wrong even about the most basic facts of their objections.
First, while the visual format of the graphic adaptation (which incorporates some surreal imagery) arguably lies somewhere between fact and artistic interpretation, and its rendition of the diary is severely abridged, the book did not invent the passages these parents find objectionable, as some have alleged. Those came, word for word, from Frank herself. Both passages were fully restored to her English-language diary beginning with versions published in the 1980s, largely without incident.
A crucial part of the argument against the graphic adaptation is the idea that both of these passages were excised from the initial English-language edition of the diary. Both Friedman and Fine have told JTA they have no recollection of having read the passages with sexual content in their own childhood memories of the diary.
They almost certainly did, said Ruth Franklin, a book critic and author who is writing a book about Frank and her diary to be published next year by Yale University Press. According to Franklin’s research, the very first English-language edition of the diary did indeed include one of the two passages the parents are now objecting to: the part where Anne discusses her attraction to another girl.
Franklin said that, contrary to popular belief, Otto Frank was the one who pushed for the passage to be included in the diary’s first English-language edition after it was excised from the Dutch original. Otto is often portrayed as having been responsible for removing the passage so as to sanitize Anne’s language for a general audience.
Contemporary parents who insist they did not read the passage as children, she said, are “misremembering.”
“If they were to actually go to the library and open up the edition that has been in print since 1952, they would be unhappily surprised to find what’s there,” Franklin said. “It seems inconsistent to me to go after the graphic adaptation and not the diary itself.”
At least one parent has objected to the unabridged text-based version of the diary before. In 2013, a Michigan mom challenged an unabridged edition of the diary, citing the same passages that today’s parents are objecting to in the graphic adaptation. She argued that the unabridged diary was “inappropriate for the middle school,” and tried to push her daughter’s district to swap out the “definitive” edition of the diary for the original version that excised one of the objectionable passages. The parent’s objection made national news, was the subject of much condemnation and was ultimately rejected by the district.
Conditions in schools have changed in the last decade, with parents in multiple states newly empowered to challenge books in their children’s schools. The movement has caught up not only the graphic version of Anne Frank’s diary but a growing number of other titles with Jewish and Holocaust themes.
Meehan of PEN America suggested that the parents who objected to Anne exploring her sexuality were doing so because of the passages’ latent LGBTQ themes, meaning that the text had become an example of “intersectionality,” or representing more than one marginalized group. Some of the book’s opponents, including Justice, have separately attacked the idea of intersectionality.
“When there are multiple themes represented in a book,” Meehan said, “then that book becomes even more a focus of efforts to remove it.”
For the Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss group that controls the diary and authorized the adaptation, the situation is clear-cut. From across the Atlantic, the group issued a statement responding to challenges of the diary in all its forms: “We consider the book of a 12-year-old girl to be appropriate reading for her peers.”
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The post A new version of the famous Holocaust diary is being called ‘Anne Frank pornography’ and getting banned from schools appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Can the US really bring Iranians democracy?
The protesters at a January rally I attended in New York City’s Washington Square Park were loud and raw throated as they denounced the brutal Islamist regime in Tehran, then in the midst of slaughtering thousands of their comrades in Iran. A crowd of more than 1,500 called on the United States to make good on President Donald Trump’s all-caps promise that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”
I turned to an Iranian friend next to me who was lustily joining cheers calling for the tyrants’ overthrow. Like most of the rest of the protesters, she was also cheering the demonstration’s other prominent images: Israeli flags, the images of President Donald Trump and photos of Reza Pahlavi, the son and self-declared heir of the autocratic monarch Iranians ousted in 1979.
My friend’s parents had once been members of Iran’s leftist Tudeh Party, the country’s official communist faction, which was among the staunchest opponents of Pahlavi’s father. Recalling my own 20-month stay in Iran toward the end of his rule, I asked my friend if she understood the rampant corruption and repression under which Iranians lived during that time.
Was she aware of the role the U.S. played in installing the shah in power, and the torture of dissidents by SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, with support from Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad — a record Pahlavi has never acknowledged?
My dear friend fixed me in her gaze with clear eyes, devoid of illusion.
“Yes,” she said simply. “And it would be better.”
Lowered expectations
Whether the bombs and missiles the U.S. is now raining down on Iran will fulfill the promise Trump held out for protesters remains an open question. But In New York City, back in January, there was no mistaking their desperate faith in him — or the irony of that faith.
It was the U.S., after all, that joined with Great Britain in 1953 to overturn the democracy Iran enjoyed 73 years ago. Twenty-six years of U.S. support ensued for the autocracy that followed.
During the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, it was the U.S. that also supplied Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, with critical intelligence and precursor chemicals that enabled him to manufacture and deploy outlawed chemical weapons against Iranian troops and civilians, asphyxiating thousands.
Given this history and the woeful fates that befell Iraq and Libya after U.S. intervention, many liberals voice grave doubt that any U.S.-forced regime change could restore democracy to the country. But they may be missing an important point: the extent to which crushing U.S. economic sanctions and the Iranian government’s own brutal repression, corruption and incompetence, have produced economic and political desperation among many Iranians, which radically lowers the bar.
The redemption of ‘Big Satan’
Opponents of Trump can recite a litany of his political and personal depravities, his affronts to democracy here at home, and his unreliability as an international partner in support of human rights and democracy abroad.
But I’ve noticed, anecdotally, that such recitations fall on deaf ears with many Iranians.
Two reasons rise to the top, in my mind, that explain this.
The first is the enormous credibility that Trump and the U.S. have derived from being among the primary hate targets of Iran’s despotic regime. This effect has also benefited Israel, the partner of the U.S. in waging this war. Decades of demonization of “the Big Satan” — and Israel, “the Little Satan” — from leaders so many Iranians despise have performed a miracle of reputational resurrection.
Today, this relentless drumbeat of vitriol has rendered the CIA’s subversion of Iran’s mid-20th century democracy — and Israel’s help in setting up SAVAK — a distant memory. This theocratic regime is the present danger.
Secondly, as a famous saying in Washington goes, “You can’t beat something with nothing.” That appears to be why many Iranians, for now, are turning to Trump. In Iran, the protesters’ own lack of leadership and resistance infrastructure plays into this. There is no Charles de Gaulle or Nelson Mandela waiting in the wings to take charge, with highly disciplined and battle-tested resistance groups to support them.
Another important factor may be the American left’s inability to offer Iranians a compelling alternative vision.
Several liberal members of Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, have consistently praised the bravery of the protesters and their cause. But they have not proposed any way to hold their killers accountable, and have opposed Trump’s war as the way to do so. Their approach, diplomacy and international law, produced President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2016, which radically constrained Iran’s nuclear weapons development.
Based on my reporting from Iran for the Forward back then, I can attest that vast numbers of Iranians strongly supported this at the time. They saw the JCPOA as a way to open Iran up to greater Western influence over time — the greatest fear of the country’s hardline ayatollahs.
But Trump tossed that achievement into the rubbish heap of history in his first term. And the left’s toolbox has been useless since. In the meantime, outside of government, some on the left have played down or ignored the Iranian government’s killings and abuses — or even attributed January’s protests in whole or part to Mossad agents embedded in Iran.
‘Striving for democracy’
Another friend, still living in Iran, told me recently that his grandson had left him feeling shamed. How is it, his grandson asked, that his generation had allowed the shah to be overthrown and replaced by this cohort of theocratic thugs?
My friend in Tehran had no answer.
My friend’s parents had been ardent supporters of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, the fiercely nationalistic Iranian leader ousted by Britain and the U.S. in 1953. But now, the prospect of a return by the shah’s son as a U.S.-backed autocrat with strong ties to right-wing Israelis didn’t phase him at all.
For his part, Pahlavi has publicly espoused a commitment to secular liberal democracy. But just last month his main support group, the National Union for Democracy in Iran, proposed that Pahlavi should serve as the unambiguous “Leader of the National Uprising” who will be empowered to issue official decrees, install hand-picked executive officials during a “transition to freedom and stability” and act as commander-in-chief of Iran’s military forces.
His supporters, meanwhile, have been widely accused of harassing and viciously threatening opponents who do not accept him in this role.
Would a secular, hopefully more competent, authoritarian dictatorship, whether led by Pahlavi or someone else with U.S. backing, be an improvement, I asked my friend in Tehran?
Even as bombs were falling from the sky onto his city last week, he texted back: “Yes sure!”
“I think this can be a phase towards a better situation for striving for democracy,” he added.
To be honest, I fear he and other like-minded Iranians are betting on moonbeams. But even after Israel bombed Tehran’s oil storage facilities over the weekend, engulfing the city in a poisonous black cloud, he texted me poetry.
“Under the black smoke…I saw trees that were hosting a multitude of blossoms with their thin bodies,” he wrote. “It seemed like they were supposed to remind us of spring….To us, who have been stuck in a rut for years? The ideological Mafia rule of the Islamic Republic of Iran has stolen 47 springs from us.”
The post Can the US really bring Iranians democracy? appeared first on The Forward.
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Lawsuit says DOGE used ChatGPT to flag Jewish-themed humanities grants as ‘DEI’ before canceling them
(JTA) — The Department of Government Efficiency tagged Jewish themes as “DEI” in ChatGPT when searching for federal humanities grants to cancel last year, according to a class-action lawsuit.
The methodology contributed to the cancellation of National Endowment for the Humanities grants to study violence against women during the Holocaust, postwar Soviet Jewish literature and hundreds of other topics, even as the NEH would soon bestow $10.4 million, its largest-ever grant, to the Tikvah Fund, a politically conservative Jewish cultural project.
The suit brought by the Authors Guild; a member organization for several academic groups including the Association for Jewish Studies; and a number of individual scholars seeks to restore the canceled funding, which comprised around 80% of the NEH’s grants and was cut amid the Elon Musk-led task force’s broader slashing of federal spending last year.
The suit names the NEH, its acting chair, and several DOGE staffers as defendants, including Justin Fox, who the suit alleges was behind the ChatGPT methodology.
While DOGE’s use of keywords to cancel research grants was already known, as was the sweep’s effect on Jewish projects, the suit has revealed new details in its methodology, including staffers’ use of ChatGPT and their contention that works dealing with Judaism are a form of DEI.
In a filing on Friday, attorneys for the plaintiffs said Fox specified that he considered Jewish grants, including those focusing on the Holocaust, part of DEI.
“For a different grant about violence against women during the Holocaust, Fox testified that ChatGPT properly classified the grants as involving DEI, and thus slated it for termination, because it was ‘specifically focused on Jewish cultures’ (as in, it was about the Holocaust) and the ‘voices of the females in that culture,’” reads the filing.
“More generally, Fox stated that he identified as DEI any grant about a specific ‘minority group,’ meaning any particular ‘ethnicity, culture . . . race or gender or religion,’” the filing went on.
“It’s a Jewish — specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture,” Fox stated about one canceled grant for a project about “violence against women during the Holocaust,” as the latest court filing described it. Fox continued, “It’s inherently related to DEI for that reason.”
When asked in a deposition about the criteria for cancellation, the NEH’s acting chair Michael McDonald said he hadn’t known that DOGE used ChatGPT in its selection process, while also noting that he didn’t agree with the assessment that the Holocaust constituted DEI. The final authority for canceling the grants rested with DOGE, not McDonald, depositions indicated.
Fox, the suit alleges, had created his own “Detection List” of identity-based traits, with separate categories for “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants,” before running the databases through the generative AI software.
His prompt, according to the lawsuit: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” The grants that turned up were all terminated, with only a few exceptions.
Many Jewish-themed projects were among the NEH cancellations, including a grant for “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union,” a translation project that was published in book form last month. The book was singled out during the lawsuit’s discovery phase, which noted, “ChatGPT classified this grant as DEI because ‘[t]his anthology explores Jewish writers’ engagement with the Holocaust in the USSR.’”
“I find it annoyingly amusing that they weren’t bothering to read the grants themselves — that they needed a machine to give them some sense,” Sasha Senderovich, a University of Washington professor who co-translated the volume with University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign professor Harriet Murav, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Three-quarters of their NEH grant had already been paid out, Senderovich said. He believes the NEH’s decision to cancel his grant was an example of “authoritarian logic.”
The book “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” showcases Jewish literature written in the Soviet Union; at right, Jewish women buy flour before Passover in Moscow in 1965. (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)After Senderovich used similar language in a Forward story last year following the cuts, an NEH official called the accusation “tendentious” and accused “wokeness and intersectionality” of being the true authoritarians in a text to McDonald, according to the court filing.
While the DEI justification has generated headlines, Senderovich said, “I think it’s also somewhat misleading to get hung up on what they typed into ChatGPT.”
The NEH’s final grant cancellation list, he noted, included many projects that had not been flagged as DEI. One such cancellation noted by the plaintiffs’ attorneys — which DOGE canceled over McDonald’s objections — was “a grant to advance the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill [sic] University.”
Murav, for her part, told JTA, “I am reeling from these cascading waves of hatred.” She rejected the idea that Jews should be considered part of DEI: “DEI initiatives seek to redress historic failures in American society. DEI efforts in the world of the university are not aimed at American Jews, because American Jews are over-represented in the professions and in the academy.”
Also canceled by DOGE: a project on “the untold story of Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust,” according to the suit. Documentary filmmaker Marisa Fox, whose own grant for a project matching that description was canceled, bemoaned the Trump administration’s new priorities in the Hollywood Reporter last year.
“I’ve seen firsthand how meeting a Holocaust survivor, whether in person or through a project, can dispel the most deep-seated antisemitic beliefs,” Fox — no apparent relation to the DOGE staffer — wrote then. “But if the NEH, NEA and local humanities councils are defunded, the platforms that can bridge divides will be severely limited. And so, too, will our chances of stemming hate’s rising tide.”
Even as staffers appeared to classify Jews as “DEI,” the NEH is moving forward with its support of Tikvah-aligned Jewish scholars. Ruth Wisse, a prominent Yiddish and Jewish cultural scholar, emeritus Harvard professor and senior fellow at Tikvah, is set to deliver the NEH’s annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities later this month at what has been rechristened the “Trump Kennedy Center.” Wisse’s lecture is titled “A Message from the ‘Blue and White’ in the ‘Red, White, and Blue,’” a reference to the colors of the Israeli and American flags.
A request for comment to Tikvah CEO Eric Cohen was not returned as of press time. Tikvah had a previously unreported connection to NEH senior leadership, the deposition shows: Dorothea Wolfson, who has worked with Tikvah and directs a program established by a former Tikvah board chair, is married to Adam Wolfson, the NEH’s assistant chair for programs. Adam Wolfson said in the deposition that he had made introductions but wasn’t involved in the grant selection.
As it shines a spotlight on DOGE’s practices, the suit also brings a different long-simmering debate to the forefront: whether Jews are considered part of “DEI,” the broad suite of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at universities and other institutions that conservatives have railed against.
Some prominent Jewish voices, including current CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, have argued that DEI practices are at least latently antisemitic because their practitioners do not consider Jews an underrepresented minority. The Trump administration’s crackdown on campus antisemitism has frequently been paired with anti-DEI initiatives.
Yet at the same time, a broader anti-DEI push on the right has also ensnared Jewish projects, or generated confusion among university administrators as to whether Jewish events should be canceled on campuses where DEI is outlawed.
Fox, according to investigations of DOGE staffers last year, is a former investment banker whose DOGE tenure also included stints overseeing cuts at USAID and the General Services Administration. His NEH tenure coincided with a directive for that organization to eliminate $175 million in federal grant funding. The DOGE project largely wound down following its architect Musk’s official exit from government a few months into its tenure, decimating numerous federal agencies and jeopardizing some initiatives to benefit Jews.
“It’s just ridiculous. You have these kids being told just go in and cut as much as you can,” Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Author’s Guild, told JTA about the DOGE maneuvers. “They were given no real instruction.”
The guild is one of several organizations that have co-signed onto the lawsuit, which is requesting the refunding of the grants. It is now awaiting a judge’s ruling on a summary judgment that would avoid a trial.
Among several individual authors represented by the guild in the suit is Jewish author and independent scholar William Goldstein, founding editor of the New York Times’ Books website, whose NEH grant was meant to fund a biography of Jewish LGBTQ playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer.
The post Lawsuit says DOGE used ChatGPT to flag Jewish-themed humanities grants as ‘DEI’ before canceling them appeared first on The Forward.
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Lindsey Graham urges Israel not to strike Iranian oil depots even as he says he helped make war happen
(JTA) — Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has called on Israel to rein in its attacks on Iranian oil infrastructure, marking a rare note of caution from a Republican lawmaker who has said he helped push the United States to join Israel in waging war against Iran.
In a post on X on Sunday, Graham praised Israel for its role in the war before adding that “there will be a day soon that the Iranian people will be in charge of their own fate, not the murderous ayatollah’s regime.”
“In that regard, please be cautious about what targets you select,” continued Graham. “Our goal is to liberate the Iranian people in a fashion that does not cripple their chance to start a new and better life when this regime collapses. The oil economy of Iran will be essential to that endeavor.”
Graham’s post linked to an Axios article that reported that the United States was alarmed by Israeli strikes over the weekend that targeted 30 Iranian fuel depots. On Monday, U.S. gas prices rose to their highest levels since 2024.
The warning from Graham, an ally of President Donald Trump and staunch supporter of Israel, comes days after the Republican hawk told the Wall Street Journal that he had played a key role in urging Trump to strike Iran.
Prior to the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, Graham made several trips to Israel where he met with members of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whom he said he coached on how to lobby Trump to strike Iran.
“They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” Graham told the newspaper.
On Monday, Graham also directed his criticism at Saudi Arabia’s decision to stay on the sidelines of the campaign against Iran.
“It is my understanding the Kingdom refuses to use their capable military as a part of an effort to end the barbaric and terrorist Iranian regime who has terrorized the region and killed 7 Americans,” wrote Graham in a post on X Monday. “Question – why should America do a defense agreement with a country like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that is unwilling to join a fight of mutual interest?”
The post Lindsey Graham urges Israel not to strike Iranian oil depots even as he says he helped make war happen appeared first on The Forward.