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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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Sunkist Fruit Gems return after panic over loss of synagogue staple
(JTA) — Sunkist Fruit Gems, candies beloved for their throwable qualities at Jewish celebrations, will return after a brief panic over their discontinuation.
The sugar-coated gummies will be on shelves in early 2027 following an outpouring of “overwhelming support and enthusiasm shown by Sunkist Fruit Gems fans in recent days,” Sunkist confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The company said it will collaborate with CandyRific, a Kentucky-based confectionery company, to continue the legacy of Sunkist Fruit Gems days after reports of the gummies’ demise.
The fruit gems tick crucial boxes for being hurled at bar and bat mitzvahs, wedding celebrations and other happy occasions: They are kosher, soft enough to avoid injuring celebrants and individually wrapped so they don’t get stuck on the floor.
Those attributes will be preserved in their relaunch. “Consumers can expect the same key product characteristics they know and love, including individually wrapped pieces, a soft texture, fruit flavors, and kosher certification,” Sunkist said.
EJewishPhilanthropy first reported Thursday that the fruit gems were being discontinued by Ferrara, a Chicago-based candy company, prompting memorial tributes in Jewish communities throughout the United States.
The fruit gems have been a staple at synagogues for generations. They were born from an overabundance of citrus in the 1930s, when the citrus harvester Sunkist transformed its surplus fruit into byproducts, according to a history published by the company. The candies evolved from Christopher’s Fruit Gems to take the Sunkist name in the 1960s.
Protests against their disappearance included an appeal in eJewishPhilanthropy penned by Sara Fredman Aeder, the executive vice president of programming at the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, headlined “Save the Fruit Gems.”
Sunkist’s announcement on Instagram that the fruit gems were “not going anywhere” was met with grateful replies.
“I panic-bought in bulk for my wedding next year,” said one commenter on Instagram. “Now I feel foolish lol. But enjoying a bunch of very yummy gummies.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Sunkist Fruit Gems return after panic over loss of synagogue staple appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani rolls out NYC’s first plan for fighting antisemitism — without defining the term
Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday unveiled New York City’s first comprehensive strategy to combat antisemitism, promising millions of dollars for security, hate-crime prevention and Jewish education as antisemitic incidents rise.
But the 30-page plan leaves unresolved a central source of tension between Mamdani and much of the Jewish community: what counts as antisemitism and when anti-Zionism crosses that line. That question has followed Mamdani since his first day as mayor, when he revoked an executive order from former Mayor Eric Adams adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic.
The strategy does not adopt a formal definition of antisemitism and offers little clarity on how the administration views anti-Zionism.
“New York City can and will leverage all of the tools at its disposal to combat antisemitism effectively without needing to adopt a definition for this specific form of hate,” the document reads.
Phylisa Wisdom, who leads the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism and crafted the plan, told reporters the city is taking an approach similar to the Biden administration’s 2023 national antisemitism strategy, which drew from several competing definitions and frameworks rather than choosing one. Those include IHRA; the Nexus Document, which says criticism of Israel or opposition to Israeli government policy is not necessarily antisemitic; and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which offers a narrower definition.
Wisdom said the administration’s focus is less on settling that debate than on protecting Jewish New Yorkers regardless of their politics.
The Israel question
The question of how to define antisemitism has shaped the debate over pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses and outside synagogues, a persistent source of tension between Mamdani and Jewish organizations.
The strategy mentions the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the war that followed as part of the rise in antisemitism, but does not directly link them. It points to a broader rise that began years earlier, including around the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. Wisdom said antisemitism often spikes during conflicts involving Israel, as NYPD data showed after Oct. 7.
Mamdani has long sought to distinguish between his opposition to Israel and Zionism and his commitment to protecting Jewish New Yorkers. But he has repeatedly clashed with Jewish organizations and leaders over where anti-Zionist activism crosses the line into antisemitism. Those tensions intensified after a series of protests outside synagogues hosting events promoting real estate in Israel and the West Bank and his repeated accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Some demonstrations have included chants calling for an “intifada” and other rhetoric Jewish leaders described as antisemitic and intimidating. Mamdani has condemned violence and expressions of support for terrorist organizations, but also defended the constitutional right to protest.
That prompted City Council Speaker Julie Menin to push legislation this past spring requiring the NYPD to develop a plan for establishing a buffer zone when demonstrations involve harassment, intimidation or physical threats. Mamdani, who had raised concerns about restricting protests, allowed the synagogue measure to become law without his signature.
The new antisemitism plan notes that neither the NYPD nor FBI considers protest outside a house of worship hateful or antisemitic, a position the Mamdani administration shares.
Menin told the Forward she had no input in developing the strategy. Wisdom said her office met with the City Council’s Jewish Caucus, of which Menin is a member. A spokesperson for Menin said the speaker was briefed Monday, a day before the plan was released.
What the plan includes: Security and prevention
The strategy comes as antisemitic incidents continue to move in the wrong direction. Recent NYPD statistics showed that in the first seven months of 2026, anti-Jewish incidents rose 8.5%, and 57% of the reported hate crimes in the city involved Jewish victims.
The new strategy attempts to tackle that problem through funding for security, education and cultural programs.
The Mamdani administration is putting $6.4 million into the Partners Against the Hate grant program that offers grants up to $10,000 for community-based initiatives. It is part of a $26 million investment Mamdani announced earlier this year for the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. The Jewish Community Relations Council of New York will serve as the anchor organization in the program, working with grassroots groups on programs that include education, victim support, data collection and combating online hate.
Another $1 million will go toward a security program aimed particularly at smaller religious institutions and vulnerable nonprofits that may not qualify for larger federal security grants. The money could pay for stronger door locks, shatter-resistant glass and security wands.
And the administration is restarting an interagency Security Infrastructure Working Group that brings together the NYPD, Department of Transportation and other city agencies to help synagogues and Jewish cultural institutions assess threats and improve security.
City Hall also plans to work with public schools to expand eighth-grade visits to the Museum of Jewish Heritage and continue teaching students about Jewish American history through existing curriculum. The administration is also investing $2 million to complete the Queens Holocaust Memorial and $2.5 million in the Center for New Jewish Culture in Brooklyn.
An informational campaign on LinkNYC kiosks across the five boroughs will highlight the contributions of Jewish New Yorkers, modeled after a campaign created to combat anti-Asian hate following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Outreach to Jewish New Yorkers
The plan comes after months of outreach aimed at hearing from a Jewish community deeply divided over Mamdani and his views on Israel.
Wisdom said the office, which includes another two staffers, conducted a five-borough listening tour in homes, schools and community centers. Participants represented a wide range of religious observance and political views.
Mamdani has also increased his own outreach. In August, he met with a group of rabbis from several denominations for a discussion about Jewish safety and belonging. Some of those rabbis pressed him over his rhetoric on Israel. He has also met with Hasidic and Orthodox leaders and maintains close relationships with progressive Jewish organizations.
Wisdom said that concerns raised during those private conversations helped shape the final strategy.
But she acknowledged that those meetings have not erased the central disagreement.
Mamdani has repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, produced a Nakba Day video commemorating the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948, and called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal.
During his mayoral campaign, he pledged to have Netanyahu arrested if he came to New York under an International Criminal Court warrant, though his administration later acknowledged that the city does not have the authority to carry out such an arrest. Netanyahu, during his speech at the United Nations last week, accused Mamdani of spreading lies about Israel and contributing to an atmosphere in which Jews feel unsafe. Mamdani rejected that criticism and stood by his views on Gaza.
Wisdom said in a press briefing on Monday the administration recognizes that discussions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are part of the broader conversation about how Jewish New Yorkers experience safety in the city. But she said disagreement with the mayor on foreign policy should have no bearing on whether someone receives the protection of City Hall.
The administration rolled out the strategy on Tuesday with support from top city officials, several Jewish elected officials and liberal and progressive Jewish organizations, including the New York Jewish Agenda, Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Nexus Project, New Jewish Narrative, Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, Bend the Arc and J Street’s New York City chapter.
Jamie Beran, CEO of Bend the Arc, commended the decision not to enshrine a single definition, adding that doing so would be “unnecessary” and “a distraction from substantive policies.”
But the strategy did not meet the demands of the Anti-Defamation League, which had called for a “clear, formal definition of antisemitism the city actually uses.” ADL also asked that the plan ensure city contracts, pensions and procurements are kept “free of ideological boycotts.”
In a video announcing the strategy, the mayor said his conversations with Jewish New Yorkers over the past year repeatedly brought him back to the same concern of growing antisemitism. “This is not only unacceptable,” Mamdani said. “Today, we hold a responsibility to sustain and protect our Jewish neighbors.”
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Evan Gershkovich’s prison memoir begins with a Soviet Jewish exodus
A few days after Russian security agents arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on a trip in March 2023, his lawyers showed him a slip of paper with messages from home. He was being held alone, in what Russian prisons call “quarantine:” two weeks without a cellmate before joining the general population. His eyes went straight to the note from his mother.
Soon he would start getting kosher food, Ella Milman wrote, and then added: “If you come home with sidelocks, I’ll understand.”
It was a joke, and a very Jewish one. Gershkovich grew up in a secular family of Soviet émigrés, where being Jewish had more to do with family history and dark humor than with religious practice. His mother was ribbing him that a few weeks of kosher prison food might send him home looking like a yeshiva boy.
Sitting across from the investigator building his espionage case, Gershkovich grinned. His mother, he realized, still had her sense of humor, and that was exactly what he needed.
The kosher food wasn’t a joke. That night, with Passover days away, a local rabbi sent him stacks of matzo.
The scene appears in This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story, Gershkovich’s memoir of his arrest, his 16 months behind bars and his release in the most elaborate U.S.-Russia prisoner swap since the Cold War. The book was published Tuesday.
Most of the coverage is about the prison. But Jewish history runs through the book from its first pages. Gershkovich’s great-grandfather was arrested during Stalin’s purges and vanished. His mother was laughed out of a journalism school application once the clerk saw her passport. And when he moved to Moscow as a young reporter, a Russian coworker needled him with an old stereotype about Jews and money.
The family that left
Gershkovich was born in New Jersey in 1991, two months before the Soviet Union fell apart. His parents had come over in 1979. Thousands of Soviet Jews were leaving at the time, helped by a U.S. law that linked trade with Moscow to whether its citizens were allowed to emigrate.
His mother flew out of Leningrad with her mother and ended up in Detroit. His father’s family came from Odessa and settled in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn neighborhood people call Little Odessa. In those years, his father later joked, Soviet Jews who ran into each other on the street skipped the hellos and just asked where the other was going.
For his father’s side, the decision was easy. Gershkovich’s great-grandfather was arrested in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s purges, and never seen again. His grandfather Mark spent years moving from city to city, afraid of being targeted next, and later dreaded the day his own son would be drafted into the Soviet army.
A Jew on paper
Gershkovich’s mother, Ella, was born in 1957, a few years after the “doctors’ plot,” a Stalin-era campaign that accused Jewish physicians of conspiring to kill Soviet leaders. One of the doctors caught up in it had been a neighbor in her family’s communal apartment.
Her father had wanted to name her Etya, after his late sister. Worried that an obviously Jewish name would draw attention, her mother pushed for Ella instead. It didn’t matter. The family name Milman gave her away, and Soviet passports listed each citizen’s ethnicity. Hers said “Jew.”
Ella dreamed of becoming a writer. When she applied to the journalism department at Leningrad State University, the woman taking her application glanced at her passport and laughed. She studied shipbuilding instead, listened to the Rolling Stones, and heard rumors that the Kremlin planned to deport Jews to Birobidzhan, a remote Soviet region near the Chinese border that had apparently been set up as a Jewish homeland.
When she finally emigrated to America at 22, she sewed a pair of gold earrings from her late father into her skirt’s waistband to get them past customs. Once the plane took off, she couldn’t stop laughing and crying.
A generation later, her son became the journalist she wasn’t allowed to be, and then a prisoner of the state that had turned her away.
Ella and her husand settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where Gershkovich and his sister spent Saturday mornings with a Russian tutor, and holidays meant trips to the Russian groceries and Uzbek grills of Brighton Beach. Gershkovich came to think of himself as Jewish-Russian-American. Russia’s war in Ukraine later forced him to ask why that label had never included Ukraine, given that his father’s family came from Odessa.
The empty chair
In 2017, Gershkovich moved to Moscow to report for The Moscow Times. On one of his first days, he asked a colleague when staff got paid. She laughed and told him his Odessan roots were showing, a jab about Jews and money that served as his introduction to Russian workplace culture.
On a later trip to Odessa, he visited a Jewish museum that displayed a 1953 Soviet propaganda article from the doctors’ plot era. It claimed that the Joint, the New York-based Jewish relief organization, was a front for American intelligence. Gershkovich recalls thinking that Moscow was getting paranoid again, while hoping things hadn’t gotten that bad. A few years later, Russia accused him of spying for the United States.
Gershkovich’s arrest came a week before Passover. That spring, many American Jews left an empty seat for him at their Seders, and activists later sent him letters for Rosh Hashanah. Both gestures deliberately echoed the movement to free Soviet Jewry, the same campaign that had helped free his parents. Natan Sharansky, the most famous Soviet Jewish dissident, who was himself released in a 1986 prisoner swap, advocated publicly for his release.
In July 2024, two weeks after a Russian court sentenced Gershkovich to 16 years in a maximum-security prison, he was freed in a prisoner exchange in Ankara, Turkey. Jewish groups celebrated, and the Orthodox Union posted the traditional blessing thanking God for freeing captives.
His great-grandfather was taken in 1937 and never came home. Eighty-seven years later, his great-grandson did.
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