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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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Israeli restaurants are hiding their identity. New York magazine won’t say why
I walked into Jerusalem Chicken restaurant because someone told me it served the best maqluba this side of Jerusalem — all within a few minutes of LAX.
Outside, the well-lit sign said, “Palestinian Chicken Eatery,” which, because I’d seen the Curb Your Enthusiasm “Palestinian Chicken” episode about a dozen times, already had me smiling. Then I stepped inside.
Across from a deli counter filled with platters of rice and roasted vegetables was a cardboard sign: “End US Funding of Israel. Defend Palestine. End the Cycle of Genocide.”
This was 2022. Genocide seemed like an especially scurrilous charge, but it was their restaurant. I could yell, scream, protest, vandalize the place or call for a boycott. The young man behind the counter served me a leg and a thigh roasted dark, fragrant with sumac, clove and cinnamon. I ate.
Call me crazy but that’s what I demand of restaurants: Good food, clean kitchens and kind service. But, it seems, when it comes to Israeli restaurants, a different standard applies.
Somewhere toward the end of her long New York magazine feature on Middle Eastern food in New York City, Madeleine Leung Coleman points out that Israeli restaurants are increasingly labeling themselves as Middle Eastern or Levantine rather than Israeli.
“There could be many reasons why,” she writes. “Perhaps there’s a fear of being targeted. Or they’re second-guessing if they should call their food ‘Israeli’ at all.”
I’m going to offer a third choice: Perhaps it’s because of articles like hers.
The disappearing ‘Israeli’ restaurant
Coleman understates the actual violence against Israeli and Jewish-owned restaurants (and, oddly, against Palestinian restaurants). She implies that Israeli restaurants serve food that is somehow stolen from Arab cultures. She blurs the distinction between Israeli restaurateurs and the actions of a government 7,000 miles away. In short, she reinforces the stigma she purports to describe. It’s a case study in journalism-as-activism, for which innocent restaurateurs and diners will pay the bill.
Her piece, “When Eating Out Is Political,” charts the evolution of Middle Eastern food in the city from turn-of-the-century market stalls, falafel stands and halal carts to its current incarnation in high-end, often Michelin-starred chef-driven restaurants.
The core argument is that Israeli restaurants became trendy by appropriating Palestinian, Mizrachi and North African dishes while Arab, Iranian and North African restaurants languished as cheap, “outer-borough” places, and especially post-9/11 hid their identities behind a vague “Mediterranean” label.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, and growing protest against Israel, the stigma has reversed. Palestinian, Syrian and Iranian restaurants have flourished with cheffy food, and owning their particularist labels, while Israeli restaurants have had to hide their identity.
It’s true that Middle Eastern cuisines are having their moment in New York, and Coleman’s descriptions of the “delicate, hand-shaped beef dumplings” at the Syrian restaurant Huda or the wild mallow “topped with twists of fried onion and salty black olives” at the Palestinian restaurant Tanoreen in Brooklyn make it clear that these chefs, whether Palestinian, Syrian or Iranian, should be celebrated.
But the celebration is tainted with bias and ignorance when it comes to all things Israeli.
From Moshe’s Falafel to Solomonov
First, the history. By Coleman’s recounting, Israeli restaurants swooped in to success and instant “It” status sometime in the early aughts.
“We were told this was the flavor profile of this young country,” she writes, “which was so richly funded and supported by our own.”
I’m not sure what American aid to Israel has to do with the efforts of early chefs like Einat Admony and Michael Solomonov, but that sentence shows how Coleman condemns talented individual chefs for somehow being complicit in … foreign aid decisions?
She’s also wrong on the timeline. Israeli food came to America the same way Arab food did, with immigrant sweat and no guarantees of success. Moshe Mizrachi, an Israeli of Syrian origin, opened his falafel restaurant in Manhattan in 1981. It failed. He reincarnated it as a cart, and four decades later it’s an institution.
The food these Israelis brought with them wasn’t, as Coleman writes, Arab dishes or food their grandmothers made — her attempt to dismiss Israeli food as either stolen or copied.
She might have mentioned that over half of Israel’s population has origins in the greater Middle East and North Africa. Falafel, hummus, stuffed vegetables, shakshouka and all the glorious ingredients that go into them were part of their traditions too. What was a Jewish chef from Iraq supposed to cook, lox and cream cheese?
From shattah to schnitzel
Israelis also ate what Palestinians ate, and learned to cook it. This is how every culture’s foodways evolve — including that of Palestinians.
In the 15th century, Christopher Columbus brought chile peppers back from the Americas, after wreaking havoc on the native populations. Those chiles give Palestinian shattah sauce its heart and heat. The “most traditional Palestinian dish,” according to cookbook author Reem Kassis, is maftool, a pebbly couscous that likely arrived via the Berbers, whose own history of subjugation, rebellion and assimilation with the Muslim invaders is, to say the least, fraught. Schnitzel is now a popular Palestinian dish, likely adopted from Ashkenazi immigrants.
Cultures exchange food, like they do music, fashion and language. None of this is to say Israelis haven’t ignored or downplayed the Palestinian contribution to their cuisine, or used food as a political or economic weapon — most unconscionably in Gaza itself. But the Israeli chefs most associated with the New Israel Cuisine are usually the first to point all that out.
“I don’t think there’s enough understanding how deeply rooted Israeli food, as it’s cooked at the moment and seen all over the world, is actually based on Palestinian cooking,” the chef and author Yotam Ottolenghi told me in a 2022 interview.
Credit where credit is due. But the only reason to question an Israeli cook’s right to do what cooks throughout history have done is if you question Israel’s existence itself.
‘The land mass currently called Israel’
And Coleman clues us in that she leans that way.
She repeatedly refers to Israel’s attack on Gaza as a genocide. Many genocide experts and international bodies have concluded it is. Many others, including the International Court of Justice, have not, something a fair journalist would point out.
And then there is the strange way she describes an image on the menu of the Palestinian restaurant Ayat as “a cheerful tourist-style map in which the land mass currently called Israel is titled ‘Discover Palestine.’”
Even the progressive watchdog site Mediaite called that “bizarre.” Just as bizarre is her explanation for why chefs are less likely to publicize their connection to Israel.
“In the last few years,” she writes, “some Israeli restaurants have been vandalized, spray-painted with notices that accuse them of co-signing the Israeli government’s project. This may be one reason why some are staying silent.”
Here’s a better reason:
- In February 2022, vandals sprayed “F– Jews” on the wall of Miriam’s restaurant in Brooklyn.
- In December 2023 anti-Israel protesters surrounded Goldie’s, Michael Solomonov’s falafel restaurant in Philadelphia, vandalizing it and chanting, “Long live the intifada!”
- In February 2024 a masked man took a baseball bat to the windows of Rothschild TLV on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
- In July 2025, intruders broke into a Melbourne, Australia Israeli restaurant, threw chairs and shattered windows while people were eating.
- In August 2025, intruders ransacked Manny’s restaurant in San Francisco and spray-painted “F- Manny’s” and “Die Zionist” on the walls.
There’s more, but you get the idea. It isn’t a few kids with spray cans: it’s open season on Israeli and Jewish-owned restaurants. At least three Palestinian restaurants have been vandalized as well, as well as Kanaan in Berlin, which is owned by an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian. If every Israeli restaurant is complicit in the worst behaviors of the Israeli government, is Jerusalem Chicken collaborating with Hamas?
Israeli restaurants aren’t Med-washing their names because they’re reckoning or apologetic. They’re hiding because the violence against them is getting worse, for patently absurd reasons. Coleman could have written that story, not one where victims did something to deserve it.
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Trump just used journalists as human shields — Jewish ethics has thoughts about that
Everyone has been talking about The Odyssey this summer. So much so that, apparently, the president of the United States felt the need to act out a famous piece of Greek mythology, namely the story of the Trojan horse. When an Iranian assassination threat in July seemed credible enough, the Secret Service spirited Trump off of Air Force One in a catering truck after a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey.
The plane then took off as usual, loaded with top government officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as the usual cast of aides and journalists who often accompany the president. Most believed they were on the plane with Trump, and weren’t aware of any threat. And had Iran actually attacked, and Air Force One been shot out of the sky, they would have gone down in the president’s place.
It is not unheard of for presidents to change plans suddenly for safety reasons, or otherwise use some amount of subterfuge to obscure their location; when Bill Clinton flew to Pakistan, for example, there were several decoy planes. But it is highly unusual for the plan to involve risking numerous other people, including civilians. Several journalists have accused Trump, who has long picked fights with the press, of using the media as an expendable human shield.
Much has been made, particularly in the Jewish world, of the idea of human shields, particularly because Hamas is often accused of the practice. Human shields can refer to putting civilians in harm’s way as part of a military strategy, or using them as decoys or to protect soldiers. (Hamas purportedly has used civilian sites such as hospitals or schools to protect their weapons stores and headquarters.)
There are numerous stories in Jewish texts in which innocent lives are sacrificed for ulterior motives, and the perpetrators are roundly condemned. King David sends his general Uriah to the frontlines so he will die and never realize that David had slept with his wife; God sends the prophet Nathan to rebuke David for his selfishness and Batsheva loses the pregnancy as punishment. When Simon and Levi destroy Shechem in retribution for the rape of their sister Dina, the patriarch Jacob censures their actions.
Though there is plenty of warfare in the Bible, and God at times orders the destruction of entire cities or groups, most Jewish sages interpret this to only apply to combatants because other commandments, such as to leave the gates of a besieged city open to allow people to flee, instruct that innocent civilians must be protected.
Beyond general ethics, the laws of war laid out in the Geneva Convention protect civilians and forbid the destruction of pivotal resources such as hospitals. But the strategy is, in many ways, a successful one precisely because it is so contemptible; everyone agrees that killing civilians not involved in war is morally wrong, which means that there is an international uproar if combatants do kill civilians to get to an enemy stronghold.
The U.S. and Israel both hold themselves apart operating uniquely moral armies — ones that follow the laws of war and protect civilians. Both nations publicly boast of fighting only necessary, noble wars. Reality, however, often differs. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, tens of thousands of American soldiers were discharged for misconduct. And after Oct. 7, Israel also began using human shields, forcing Palestinian civilians to go ahead of Israeli soldiers to check for traps or mines.
When Trump landed, the White House press pool asked him, on the tarmac, what the threat was, and whether the journalists and aides on board the original plane were in danger. Trump responded that he simply did what the Secret Service told him to; “I get a lot of threats,” he said, and said he believed that the plane he actually flew on — a plane no one knew he was on — was in more danger than Air Force One.
But it’s clear to everyone else — including many members of the media who were on the plane — that the civilians left on the plane targeted by the Iranian threat were human shields. Trump may have long defamed the media, but putting them knowingly in harm’s way is still a bad look. Such a bad look that, after The New York Times reported on Trump’s planes, FBI agents went to the journalists’ homes to subpoena them for their reporting.
Thankfully, neither plane was shot down. But that doesn’t make Trump’s decision to protect himself any more moral.
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Apple pays $150k to settle federal antisemitism lawsuit
(JTA) — Apple has agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a federal lawsuit alleging that the company failed to accommodate a Jewish employee’s observance of Shabbat, and later fired him after he complained of religious discrimination.
The lawsuit, which was filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in September 2025, accused Apple of discriminating against Tyler Steele, a longtime employee of one of its stores in Reston, Virginia.
Steele converted to Judaism in the spring of 2023, and while his manager initially approved his request not to be scheduled on Fridays and Saturdays due to his observance of Shabbat, another manager that replaced the previous one later rescinded the accommodation.
According to the complaint, Steele’s new manager, Anthony Dosch, denied his requests to have the days off in September 2023, allegedly telling him that month that he “could become a rules Nazi with regards to our policies.”
Days after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, Dosch also warned Steele not to get into politics or debates about the conflict at work, and a month later issued him a misconduct warning claiming that Steele had body odor that violated the store’s policies.
The EEOC alleged that Steele later complained to Apple officials in November 2023 about antisemitic behavior and the denial of his religious accommodation. Steele was fired from the store in January 2024, after reminding Dosch that he could not work on a Friday the following month for religious reasons.
“Employees should not have to violate their religious beliefs to keep their jobs or live in fear of retribution because they requested an accommodation,” EEOC Philadelphia Regional Attorney Debra Lawrence said in a statement at the time the lawsuit was filed.
In its lawsuit, the EEOC accused Apple of religious discrimination and retaliation in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Apple and the EEOC unveiled the settlement in an Aug. 7 filing in federal court in Virginia, nearly a year after the initial complaint.
Apple denied the allegations and did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which required the company to award Steele $80,000 in back pay and $70,000 in compensatory damages and interest.
Under the settlement, the company will also be required to update its religious accommodation policies and conduct trainings with some employees in its Virginia operations within 90 days.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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