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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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New York’s Israel Day parade was a shanda — but not because of Mamdani
Mayor Zohran Mamdani made the right decision in skipping the city’s annual Israel Day Parade — because of the specific Israeli officials the parade honored.
American Jews have the right to celebrate Israel’s existence, if they find it to be a meaningful part of their personal Jewish identities. But Mamdani’s specific decision not to march in this specific parade, this year, alongside far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich, Amichai Chikli and Ofir Sofer, is defensible. Those painting that choice as a sign of antisemitism have a lot of explaining to do about whose company they choose to keep.
Chikli, Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism — the man who is supposed to be the voice of diaspora Jews in Israel — has used his platform to spread hatred. He has described LGBTQ+ Pride events as “disgraceful vulgarity”; courted far-right European extremists like Tommy Robinson while parroting their Islamophobic statements; and called antisemitic dog whistles deployed against George Soros by the like of Elon Musk “anything but antisemitism” — while serving as the minister tasked with combating antisemitism.
His behavior has been so outrageous that in 2025, hostage families and Jewish community leaders across Europe signed letters calling him an “inappropriate representative,” citing his statements calling for the expulsion of people from Gaza and southern Lebanon, which they said amounted to support for ethnic cleansing.
Smotrich’s record of inflammatory statements is even more extensive. In 2023, he called for the Palestinian village of Hawara in the West Bank to be destroyed by the state, saying “I think the village of Hawara needs to be wiped out” shortly after a shocking settler attack there that some compared to a pogrom. The United States State Department decried those remarks as “repugnant” and “disgusting.”
Smotrich has since called for Gaza to be emptied of its Palestinian population, and has spearheaded the radical expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, advocating for annexation with the explicit intent of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. He himself says the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor has reportedly filed a secret arrest warrant application against him for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied West Bank.
At the Sunday parade, Smotrich approvingly told attendees that the event reminded him of the Jerusalem Flag March, an ultra-nationalist procession where participants this year chanted “Death to Arabs” and attacked Palestinian residents.
And Ofir Sofer, Israel’s immigration and absorption minister, has called for changes to Israel’s Law of Return, complaining that many new immigrants to Israel are not Jewish under Orthodox halachic standards. His vision of Israel includes no room for Reform Jews, secular Jews or partial-heritage Jews.
These are the people Mamdani was supposed to join in celebration?
Mamdani did not refuse to celebrate Jewish life. He refused to endorse these deeply problematic Israeli officials by appearing alongside them. That is not a slap in the face to Jewish New Yorkers. It is, if anything, a gesture of respect toward the many Jewish New Yorkers, including me, who find Chikli, Smotrich and Sofer an embarrassment and a threat to the diverse, pluralistic, egalitarian Judaism we actually practice.
Mamdani has stated clearly that he believes Israel has a right to exist, although not as a hierarchy that favors Jewish citizens over others. He has backed his administration’s Office to Combat Antisemitism and proposed expanded funding for hate crime prevention. He guaranteed a robust police presence at the Israel parade, spending weeks planning to ensure it proceeded, in his words, “seamlessly and peacefully” — as it did.
None of this fits the profile of an antisemite.
And those who criticized Mamdani’s refusal to participate are failing to grapple with an important truth: Mamdani’s politics, whatever one thinks of them, are not alien to American Jewish life. They are, instead, increasingly central to it.
A poll by the Jewish Voter Resource Center, released just this week, found that almost half of American Jews under 35 support a binational state: a single country in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, governed by all its inhabitants together. Among non-Orthodox Jews under 35, that figure reaches 51%.
This is not a fringe position on the left flank of the community. It is a near-majority position among the next generation of American Jews. Add to that the fact that a 2025 survey by Jewish Federations of North America — not a left-wing organization — found that only 37% of American Jews overall identify as Zionist at all, while among young Jews aged 18 to 34, the share identifying as anti-Zionist or non-Zionist has reached nearly a third.
As J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami put it: “The growing disaffection of younger Jewish Americans from Israel is a direct consequence of the policies of Bibi Netanyahu and the way the American Jewish establishment has demanded an ‘Israel right or wrong’ loyalty.”
When we ask whether Mamdani’s absence alienates Jewish New Yorkers, we need to ask: which Jewish New Yorkers? Did Mamdani marginalize himself from American Jewish life — or did the parade organizers, by welcoming these ministers, marginalize themselves from a large and growing portion of it?
The questions at the heart of this controversy — what Zionism means, whether anti-Zionism is compatible with Jewish solidarity, and how to honor Israeli independence while acknowledging Palestinian catastrophe — are genuine, difficult and deeply contested. I have colleagues I respect on multiple sides. I have family members who would disagree with everything I have written here.
But a parade is the worst possible venue for this conversation. A parade is not a symposium. It is not a town hall. It is a celebration, a statement of solidarity, an embodiment of a particular political position. Attending it is an endorsement of that position. And when the parade features ministers who demean Reform Jews, court European neo-fascists, advocate for the further reduction of Palestinian rights and liberties, and favor restricting who counts as Jewish enough to return to a Jewish state, the act of marching becomes an endorsement of those things, too.
We do need richer, more honest, more nuanced conversations about Zionism, anti-Zionism, Israel, and diaspora Jewish identity. Those conversations are happening, in synagogues, in classrooms and in the pages of Jewish publications like this one. They deserve serious venues and serious interlocutors.
Fifth Avenue on a Sunday afternoon, with Chikli, Bezalel and Sofer as honored guests, is not that venue.
Mamdani was right to decline to issue that endorsement. To the Jewish establishment that has called him an antisemite for it: I would ask you, with all due respect, to look again at who you invited to the party.
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Marilyn Monroe would be 100 today. Are we making too much of her conversion?
Back in 2019, Marilyn Monroe’s menorah, a gift from her former in-laws, sold at auction for more than $112,000. The candle in the wind jokes wrote themselves, but how exactly the tragic actress lived her life has long been a point of Jewish fascination.
The effort to make Monroe a Jewish icon is almost certainly strained, though not baseless.
Born Norma Jean Mortenson, she converted to Judaism in 1956 ahead of her nuptials with Arthur Miller. That this detail still commands such attention can’t easily be divorced from certain stereotypes of their mismatched pairing: the beauty and the brain. He, balding and bespectacled, she, a peroxide paragon of bombshell beauty. Philip Roth didn’t need to write about it — Joyce Carol Oates did instead.
But Monroe’s attachment to Judaism, beyond leaving behind such effects as the menorah and an annotated siddur (sold for $21,000 in 2018), may be overstated, even as she continued to identify as a “Jewish atheist” after her 1961 split with Miller. That she engaged with her lessons with some seriousness, according to the rabbi who converted her, may be more a testament to her curiosity and intelligence than a true demonstration of faith.
In 2015, the Jewish Museum in New York offered a useful contrast. An exhibition hosted Andy Warhol’s portraits of Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor presented as a diptych. Taylor’s conversion came about after the death of a Jewish husband and remained important to her through the rest of her life, extending to pro-Israel causes and activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry. (Taylor was buried by a rabbi, Monroe by a Lutheran minister.)
Both women had their films banned in Egypt on account of their adopted faith — in the case of Taylor, this meant completing Cleopatra in Rome. Only one could be said to have lived a thoroughly Jewish life, though Monroe’s death is certainly a mitigating factor, the subject of so many “what ifs.”
When we look at Marilyn as a coreligionist, it may say more about us than her. I suspect the fact she didn’t “look Jewish” is what makes her affiliation matter to so many.
But the affiliations that truly matter are in the credits: Billy Wilder, Tony Curtis, Charles Lederer, Lee Strasberg. The work, or Avodah, is captured in celluloid: the way Sugar Kane takes a belt from her flask and tucks it in her garter or Lorelei Lee swats at her suitors with a fan.
It is Marilyn, not Norma Jean, not Miriam bat Sarah, who continues to have immense cultural cachet, already long exceeding her brief time on earth.
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Retracing the epic journey of the world’s oldest Jew
I, A Wandering Jew. A Five-Century History of our Modern Condition
Yair Mintzker
Princeton University Press, 272 pages, $29.95.
My father, an American-born son of Belarusian immigrants, bought the record when it first came out in 1960 and we enjoyed listening to it to no end. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s album The 2,000 Year Old Man featured Brooks as a somewhat laconic old man who responded in Yiddish-inflected English to Reiner’s guileless questions about his long life.
The improvised sketch had apparently begun 10 years earlier, when Reiner, who worked with Brooks on a TV show, turned to him, while testing a new tape-recorder, and asked, “Is it true you were at the scene of the Crucifixion, 2000 years ago?” Jesus Christ, Brooks quipped, was a “nice boy, wore sandals.” William Shakespeare, however, had “the worst penmanship” and when asked if he knew Joan of Arc, Brooks blurted out, “Knew her? I dated her!”
As a kid of 9, I didn’t think that their shtick was anything other than funny. But in retrospect, I can see that the Yiddishkeit tone and audacity of the conceit also answered something bigger and much more sinister. The Shoah had only just ended, the weekend before, as it were. So, the immortality and know-it-all comedy of Brooks’ hero expressed resiliency and social integration in the face of nothing less than genocide. “The 2000 Year Old Man” was, in a Borscht Belt voice, an affirmation of life. My fondness for Brooks resurfaced during the haze of high school, and remained in the back of my mind as decades went by, but it wasn’t until reading Yair Mintzker’s new book, I, Wandering Jew, that I came to appreciate another dimension of its significance, namely, its evocation of the figure of the Wandering Jew.
Originally, the Wandering Jew was an antisemitic trope Christians used to explain the marginality and foreignness of Jews in European society. A cobbler stood at the doorstep of his Jerusalem shop, according to the story, as Jesus labored by, hauling his burden to his death. Refusing his request for help, Jesus cursed the cobbler, who inexplicably came to be known as Ahasverus, the name of a Persian king, to live eternally in exile until the Second Coming. The Jews were thus condemned to a de-territorialized, homeless fate as Christ deniers.
Ahasverus appears and reappears in various forms over the course of European history — often as a tall, severe man who spoke several languages, never laughed and criticized people for moral failures. His story spread in ballads, poems and novels — and eventually in Nazi propaganda — to support the claim that Jews were not only alien to European culture and society but could never live together with Aryans.
Mintzker, a Princeton history professor, has written an intriguing book that traces the legend of the Wandering Jew over the centuries in reverse chronological order, eventually to arrive at the salience of the figure’s story in the author’s own life and times.
The first of his five examples is set in Israel, just a few years after the nation achieved independence, when a mysterious man, known by some as Ben Shoushan, caught the attention of a journalist as he disembarked at the port of Haifa with a forged Moroccan passport that dated his birth in 1902. He seemed to be both middle-aged and ageless, perhaps mad or possibly a genius. The author Eli Weisel had met him at one point immediately after the war and also couldn’t quite make sense of who he was — perhaps a “Kabbalist, comedian and anarchist”? The mystery man, lacking an origin or an income, claimed to speak 30 languages and was said to love riddles.
He spent time in two religious kibbutzim near Tel Aviv. The kibbutzniks recalled him as a harsh, unbearable, eccentric man who lectured on the Talmud, rotating between the communities until he was expelled from both. Leaving Israel in 1956, he was spotted in a Jewish community in Uruguay, where he was regarded as a Wandering Jew, an identity he apparently embraced. In other words, Shoushan was at once a real person, in Mintzker’s view, who also seemed to project a post-Holocaust trope, as of the survival of the Jewish stranger but also the survival of the unconventional Jewish intellectual.
Another version appeared in The Nag, which was an allegorical, 1873 Russian novel by Sholem Yakev Abramovitch in which a broken-down, talking horse declares herself to be a “wandering mare” and demands justice rather than mercy from her tormentors. Abramovitch’s image of the Wandering Jew was somewhat veiled, although the reticent, pitiful animal does admit to being both a horse, passing from one harness to another, and something else. Unable to live or die, she says she wants only to belong — but is dismissed as not human.
In Jewish Memorabilia, Jacob Schudt, who was a Protestant scholar from Frankfurt, adopted the sort of doctrinal view of the legend that the eternal exile of the Jews from Israel was a punishment for having rejected Christ. The final installment of the four-volume work apparently brimmed with antisemitic views that criticized how Jews looked, their lack of hygiene, and purported greed, as well as their supposed penchant for self-flattery. Schudt dismissed the Wandering Jew as nothing more than a fable by which the lower classes could perceive and understand Jews. Yet he also recognized certain flaws in the story — that it contradicted Christ’s compassion, for one. Lacking historical support, Schudt went on to conclude that the story was probably of Catholic origin, or perhaps the result of nothing more than a publisher’s money-making scheme. The figure of Ahasverus, in other words, was a contradiction that featured a real personage who simultaneously never existed.
Mintzker then turns to the centerpiece of the story, an anonymous German broadsheet, the Kurtze Beschreibung, which was a wildly popular text that was first published in 1602 and then republished a dozen times throughout the rest of the century.
It cast Ahasverus as a strange man who met a Lutheran theologian and explained to him that he was a Jewish shoemaker who had been born 1,500 years earlier in Jerusalem, when and where he had refused to help Christ on his way to the Crucifixion and had been cursed to wander the earth until the return of the Messiah. The account included details of the Crucifixion, the deaths of the Apostles, and about Ahasverus himself — for example that he spoke German with a Saxon accent.
Mintzker strives to pin down the author of the pamphlet and how its contents changed over the course of the 17th century. He marshals quite a bit of detailed evidence that leads him to conclude that Paul von Eitzen, a leading a 16th century Lutheran official and contentious pastor in Hamburg who claimed to have met Ahasverus in the 1540s, must have written it. Readers of the pamphlet, Mintzker also notes, would certainly have been able to identify both von Eitzen and the man he called Ahasverus in this version of the story, who was likely a notoriously uncompromising anti-Calvinist named Tilemann Heshusius.
In the final chapter of his well-paced book, Mintzker turns his gaze upon himself — to the meaning of the Wandering Jew in his own life as a yored, an Israeli expatriate.
Mintzker was born and raised in an upper middle-class, progressive Ashkenazi family in Jerusalem, but eventually left the country to go study and then work in the United States. He had learned about Ahasverus from a close high school friend but only came to identify with him in New Jersey, where the image of exile, and of Jews as “eternal strangers,” haunted him and became more and more salient, particularly amid the violence of the past few years in Israel. With the rise of anti-Zionism, Mintzker admits, he came to “embrace the figure of Ahasverus … as a model for political life” but also for his own sense of self.
The 2,000 Year Old Man clearly echoed the legend of the Wandering Jew, in a chutzpadik voice that entertained diaspora American Jews during the immediate post-Holocaust years. But wasn’t this precisely Mintzker’s point? The trope’s meaning, as his book shows us, shifted across time and place. Thus, in this last expression, he comes to own it as an acknowledgement of his own disquiet and alienation, which he connects to his yored autobiography and recent events in Israel that have called Zionism into question. In doing so, the story of the Wandering Jew has shed its antisemitic, racialized roots, or justification for exile once again, to be read anew as a trope of Mintzker’s (and perhaps our) estrangement from contemporary Israeli society. A timely read.
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