Uncategorized
Why is everyone laughing at Anne Frank?
It’s hard to explain exactly what Slam Frank is. It’s a musical about Anne Frank in the hip-hop style of Lin-Manuel Miranda, but also with a touch of Bob Fosse. Anne is Latina and queer; her mother, Edith, is Black.
This is not race-blind casting. It’s very much on purpose, a way to leverage Anne Frank’s story for a send-up of identity politics. If that sounds pretty offensive, well, that’s kind of the point.
Slam Frank began as a parody video posted to Instagram by Andrew Fox, who is Jewish; online, he played the part of a theater director trying to create a chance for “Latinx girlies to feel seen, to feel included, to feel like they’re a part of the Holocaust.” Despite — or, perhaps, because — of how edgy the concept was, the social media account went so viral that it birthed a full-fledged show. Or, arguably, two; the conceit is a play within a play, a production of Anne Frank staged by a theater troupe working to “decolonize” the Holocaust.
The show’s jokes aren’t really focused on Anne Frank, or Anita Franco, as she is dubbed in the play. Instead, they skewer woke culture. Otto, Anita’s father, is neurodivergent, a fact he reminds everyone of about once every five minutes. Peter Van Daan, Anita’s crush, realizes they’re nonbinary, leading to an entire musical number in which each resident of the Annex discovers their own marginalized identity. “Every woman is a Jew hiding in her own attic,” warbles one character about her newly realized feminism. It culminates with the cast ripping off their yellow stars to replace them with pronoun pins in the same shape.
A few years ago, Slam Frank would have been unimaginable. But at a sold-out performance late on a Tuesday, the audience was eating it up like they’d been starving for years. The laughter was so raucous that it could occasionally be hard to hear the dialogue.
The question is what changed so that a New York audience could laugh so heartily and so openly at jokes making fun of disabilities, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation — jokes that just a few years ago would have gotten someone canceled by a full-fledged angry online mob. Even today, there is a fully-serious Latinx production of The Diary of Anne Frank going up in Los Angeles, which the director said was meant to provoke discussion about immigration in the U.S.
It’s not that people aren’t upset; some writers for Jewish publications have accused the show of going “too far.” Reducing the focus on Jewish victims is, sometimes, a tactic of Holocaust deniers or distorters. People get defensive. Fox said the show got kicked out of a workshop program.
But Slam Frank isn’t really about the Holocaust; it’s about what happens when we talk about the Holocaust in an era in which certain identities are not considered oppressable.
Fox was inspired by a viral Twitter thread from 2021 that accused Anne Frank of white privilege, calling her a “colonizer.” I wrote about this discourse at the time; ahistorical discussions of Anne Frank’s purported whiteness were cropping up every few months during that period, as the Black Lives Matter protests and the pandemic brought identity politics to the main stage.
This discourse, while obviously absurd — Jews in the 1930s were not considered white — was nevertheless taken somewhat seriously in some circles. So, to make Anne Frank more unambiguously sympathetic, Fox assigned her and her compatriots in the Annex every extra identity she might need to qualify for victimhood.
Anne Frank’s story is particularly well-suited to a send-up of identity politics. Not only is it a narrative that most people know well — which is important since Slam Frank can sometimes be so focused on its one-liners that the beats of the story get muddled — but the Holocaust has become the archetype of the oppressor-oppressed dynamic. Online, anyone who is persecuting anyone else is quickly labeled a Nazi or called Hitler; the Jews, then, become the archetypal victim. It’s fertile ground for satirizing the so-called oppression Olympics.
For all its lambasting of a type of political correctness usually associated with the left, however, Slam Frank is not a conservative or right-wing production, though it’s also clearly not “woke.” It’s a hard show to pin down; it feels like a Rorschach test in ideology. Or, to better reflect its social media roots, it feels like one giant exercise in trolling.
Going off of the bonafides and bios of the cast and creative team, however, there are hints that the show is at least somewhat identified with the very culture it’s skewering. Olivia Bernábe, who plays Anita, uses they/them pronouns in real life, despite all the show’s jokes about pronouns. Joel Sinensky, who wrote the book, has worked on another project with Chapo Traphouse, the podcast king of the dirtbag left — a brand of leftism that rejects the etiquette of the left while retaining its political aims.
It seems safe to infer that the show’s critiques are from within the liberal milieu it’s satirizing. Sigmund Freud, in a lengthy text on humor — Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious — theorized at one point that “every joke calls for a public of its own” and that sharing the joke demonstrates “psychical conformity.” So the question becomes when, and why, the left finally became comfortable laughing at itself.
Some of Slam Frank’s jokes do go a bit far — there are, of course, big and important lessons to learn about the way systemic oppression still operates in society, and it was good that we spent the past few years grappling with them. The show makes fun of the idea that a group hiding from the Nazis would be worried about such trivial problems as the perfect label for their sexuality, but the real Anne Frank did grapple with her sexual feelings toward both boys and girls in her diary.
Still, most of Slam Frank’s jokes are not laughing at people’s identities themselves, which saves it from seeming mean-spirited. The butt of the joke is not that Peter is nonbinary or that Edith is Black or that Otto is neurodivergent, it’s the way the fellow residents of the Annex react to these labels.
And even if Slam Frank sometimes overshoots the mark, it’s reclaiming something else: funniness.
After Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump in the presidential election, more and more pundits began to point out that scolding voters is not a winning strategy. Liberals had somehow made their brand into telling people off while Republicans, once known for stodgy lectures about tradition and sexual mores, became the party of fun. They embraced Trump’s bad dancing as a delightful meme. They threw parties in the hottest bars in the city. Most importantly, they made jokes and didn’t chastise anyone for laughing at them.
The way for the left to come back from such bad branding is to learn how to laugh at itself. And self-deprecating humor is what Jews are best known for — that and the Holocaust. So maybe turning Anne Frank into a joke isn’t so strange after all.
The post Why is everyone laughing at Anne Frank? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Gaza Needs Massive Boost in Emergency Aid After Ceasefire, UN Relief Chief Says
A satellite image shows trucks with aid waiting by the Egypt-Gaza border, October 15, 2025. Photo: Satellite image ©2025 Vantor/Handout via REUTERS
The United Nations is seeking a dramatic boost in humanitarian aid for Gaza, saying the hundreds of relief trucks cleared to enter the devastated enclave under a ceasefire were nowhere near the thousands needed to ease a humanitarian disaster.
Tom Fletcher, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and its top emergency relief coordinator, told Reuters in an interview that thousands of humanitarian vehicles must enter weekly to avert further catastrophe.
“We have 190,000 metric tons of provisions on the borders waiting to go in and we’re determined to deliver. That’s essential life-saving food and nutrition,” Fletcher said.
Israel’s two-year air and ground war against Palestinian terrorist group Hamas drove almost all Gaza’s 2.2 million people from their homes, and famine is present in the north, global monitors say.
“GOOD BASE,” BUT NOT ENOUGH
Israeli officials said 600 trucks have been approved to enter the blockaded territory under the current US-brokered truce deal. Fletcher called that a “good base” but said it was not enough to meet the scale of need.
Fletcher called for over 50 international NGOs, including Oxfam and the Norwegian Refugee Council, to be allowed to bring in aid, saying the issue has been raised with Israel, the United States and other regional partners.
“We cannot deliver the scale necessary without their presence and their engagement. So we want to see them back in. We are advocating on their behalf,” he said.
Fletcher said the looting of aid trucks – a frequent scourge while fighting continued – had dropped sharply in recent days as deliveries increased.
“If you’re only getting in 60 trucks a day, desperate, hungry people will attack those trucks. The way to stop the looting is to deliver aid at massive scale and get the private sector and commercial markets operating again.”
Fletcher welcomed the Western-backed Palestinian Authority’s offer to play a role in reopening the Rafah border crossing with Egypt to aid deliveries, expected on Thursday after a delay imposed by Israel over what it called Hamas’ slowness to return bodies of dead hostages under the ceasefire deal.
He said medical evacuations through the crossing would be a priority, citing recent talks with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
He said that for the fresh aid efforts to succeed the ceasefire agreement must be sustained. “We need peace. That way we can massively scale up our operations. We need the world to stay behind this peace plan.”
Twenty remaining living hostages were freed on Monday in exchange for thousands of Palestinians jailed in Israel.
Uncategorized
Syrian Leader Ahmed al-Sharaa Meets with Russia’s Putin at Kremlin
Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa attends an interview with Reuters at the presidential palace, in Damascus, Syria, March 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
i24 News – Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa arrived in Russia on Wednesday for an official visit, his first since taking office in December 2024, according to a Reuters report.
The visit marks a significant moment in Syrian-Russian relations following the ouster of former president Bashar al-Assad.
Saudi broadcaster Al-Hadath reported that al-Sharaa is expected to urge Russian President Vladimir Putin to hand over Assad, a longtime Moscow ally who fled to Russia after last year’s coup, along with other members of the former regime accused of “crimes against Syrians.”
According to Syria’s official news agency, SANA, “the two leaders will discuss regional and international developments, and ways to strengthen cooperation between Syria and Russia.”
A Syrian government source told Reuters that discussions are also likely to include the future of Russia’s military presence in Syria specifically the naval base in Tartous and the air base in Khmeimim, both located in the country’s northwest.
In recent weeks, speculation has surrounded Assad’s fate. The New York Post reported that he was poisoned in Russia about a month ago and briefly hospitalized in critical condition before being released. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed Assad was poisoned at his heavily guarded villa near Moscow, where he has resided since his flight from Damascus.
The visit coincides with preparations for Syria’s first parliamentary elections since Assad’s removal, signaling a potential new phase in the country’s post-war political landscape.
Uncategorized
War strained the Israel-Vatican bond. Will the pope use the ceasefire to heal those wounds?
As the ceasefire took hold this weekend, Pope Leo XIV called it “a spark of hope in the Holy Land.”
To understand the new pope’s approach to Israel, after he came into his role at a time of unusually strained relations between the Vatican and Israel, a bit of history helps.
The Catholic narrative when it comes to the Jewish state is one of initial opposition, followed by resigned acceptance, and eventually, formal and diplomatic acceptance. At the same time, since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Church has embodied a growing love and respect of the Jewish people. In the case of Pope Saint John Paul II, it even gently edged toward a mild Catholic Zionism.
Now, after the late Pope Francis sometimes dropped the ball when it came to the Middle East — and was, rightly in some instances, accused of showing partiality to the Palestinians against Israel, or unwittingly reiterating anti-Jewish tropes — Pope Leo is bringing a balanced diplomatic and theological approach to the issues. He listens carefully, is less impulsive, and more strategic.
‘We cannot recognize the Jewish people’
Initially, the church was strongly opposed to Zionism. In 1904, Pope Pius X told Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, that he could not support Zionism for two reasons.
First, as Herzl recorded in his diary, Pius said “The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.” Religious Judaism had no “further validity,” in Pius’ eyes, as it “was superseded by the teachings of Christ.”
In response to Herzl’s attempt to make an argument for Zionism that was not based on religion, Pius was even more adamant: any religionless group was far worse than a group that, like the Jews, practiced a religion he would not acknowledge.
Yet Pius was, paradoxically, full of compassion for Jews suffering persecution. The core of his approach to Israel could be attributed to a theological attitude known as supersessionism, which is not a doctrine of the Catholic Church, but runs deep in its bloodstream.
Supersessionism teaches that God used the Jews as a vehicle to prepare for Jesus, and that when Jesus came, the Jewish people killed him, cursing themselves. As punishment, the Jews were expelled from their historic land, and their religion was invalidated. (Nevertheless, St. Augustine suggested the Jewish people retained a divine role, through offering testimony to the truth of Christ by their scripture, known under the Church as the Old Testament.)
The radical changes of Nostra Aetate
So far, not so good.
For many subsequent decades, the Vatican had no incentive to support Israel. In 1947, the Vatican never endorsed United Nations Resolution 181, which put forward a plan for separate Jewish and Palestinian states in the Holy Land. The Church preferred the structure that had been in place during Ottoman rule over Palestine, which ended in 1918. In that period, the “millet system” ensured religious freedoms, with 19th-century decrees securing Christian denominational sites and rights.
Under the Ottomans, the status quo arrangements regarding holy sites in Jerusalem were also favorable to Catholicism.
But the Ottomans weren’t coming back. And the state of Israel was, eventually, founded and internationally recognized. So, given the Vatican’s respect for international law, it came to a gradual pragmatic acceptance of the State of Israel.
Matters changed in 1965 with the publication of Nostra Aetate at the Second Vatican Council, convened by Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII. In the light of the Holocaust and widespread Catholic complicity with anti-Jewishness in that time, Roncalli — who saved thousands of fleeing Jews while papal nuncio in Turkey during the war — had become a resolute opponent of antisemitism.
Roncalli asked the council to publish a document that rejected the deicide charge, which declared that all Jews in Jesus’ time, and subsequently, were guilty of deicide — the killing of God. This move, he hoped, would defang Christian antisemitism.
The document’s fourth paragraph was its great achievement. It rejected the deicide charge, without denying the scriptural accounts. And it recovered St. Paul’s teaching that God’s promises to his people are irrevocable, articulated in Romans 11:29. That meant the Jewish covenant was valid, in contrast to supersessionism.
Finally, it unequivocally condemned antisemitism, without defining that hatred in detail.
Full diplomatic recognition
While many Catholics still today know nothing about Nostra Aetate, Pope John Paul II, 15 years after the document’s publication, moved into high gear in pushing the implications of its teachings into the Catholic mainstream. He was a fierce critic of antisemitism during the second world war in Poland, and witnessed from his underground seminary the ravages of the Holocaust.
Under his pontificate, he established full diplomatic recognition of Israel through a 1993 Fundamental Agreement, which obliquely acknowledged the religious dimensions of this new reality.
He established good relations with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. He begged God’s forgiveness for the Church’s persecution of the Jewish people.
Informally, in non-authoritative speeches, he showed an awareness that the return of Jews to their biblical land had religious dimensions.
The Church and the Palestinians
This is half the story of the history behind Pope Leo’s decision-making today.
The other half concerns Catholic support for the Palestinians, and Catholic concerns about Arab Christians, of whom there are an estimated 10-15 million in the Middle East.
The Vatican has long supported Palestinian refugees through its charitable agencies. While Pope John Paul II established stronger ties between the Vatican and Israel, he also, in 1999, spoke of “Palestinian’s natural right to a homeland,” and concluded a Fundamental Agreement with the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 2000.
After the U.N. accepted Palestine as a non-member observer state in 2012, the Vatican recognized the state of Palestine in 2015. Internally, none of this was seen as incompatible with the Vatican’s close relations with the Jewish people and the state of Israel.
But the Israeli government thought otherwise, as the Vatican had recognized a state that, in Israel’s eyes, did not exist.
Pope Leo’s immediate predecessor, Francis, did some damage to the Vatican-Israel relationship, including through his citation of a biblical text often deployed against the Jews to speak of evil on the first anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, and his implied criticisms of Israel’s incursion into Gaza in its early days as terrorism. (I think Francis’ more controversial choices regarding Israel were related to his temperament, rather than indicative of a change of course regarding the basic orientation of the Catholic Church.)
Pope Leo’s first moves
On the day of his election, Leo wrote to Rabbi Noam Marans, director of interreligious affairs at the American Jewish Committee. “Trusting in the assistance of the Almighty,” he wrote, “I pledge to continue and strengthen the Church’s dialogue and cooperation with the Jewish people in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration Nostra Aetate.”
Twelve days later, when speaking to Jews and Muslims at a meeting convened in Rome, he reiterated: “The theological dialogue between Christians and Jews remains ever important and close to my heart.” He continued, “Even in these difficult times, marked by conflicts and misunderstandings, it is necessary to continue the momentum of this precious dialogue of ours.”
To my mind — although he hasn’t asked my advice! — Leo might consider developing the Church’s teachings on the Jewish people in one way.
In past Church teachings, Jews were expelled from Israel as part of their punishment for the death of Christ. But since the deicide charge has now been rejected, that punishment is no longer tenable. Is it time for Catholics to teach that the Jewish return to the land of Israel may well be part of the promises made by God that are irrevocable?
This is not to affirm the extreme religious nationalism of far-right Israeli ministers like Bezalel Smotrich or Itamar Ben-Gvir, but rather to provide breathing space for moderate Zionism. Moving to such a teaching would also not undermine the Church’s support for the Palestinian people, but rather give responsible credibility to the Vatican’s continued support of the two state solution.
It is also not to suggest that Leo should cease to be outspoken about the suffering of Palestinians. Like the pope who came before him, his empathy for Palestinians has so far been a hallmark of his papacy.
After the only Catholic Church in Gaza, the Church of the Holy Family, was hit by shrapnel — or shelled directly — on July 17, Leo called for the end of the “barbarity of war,” the protection of religious sites, and proper respect for civilians. He subsequently received a call from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who apologised for this incident.
He met Israeli President Isaac Herzog in September discussing the urgent need for a ceasefire, humanitarian access for Gaza and a two state solution. He plans to visit Lebanon soon to show solidarity with Middle Eastern Christians. His papacy will be characterised by his efforts to reconcile differences — as he has been doing so successfully within the Catholic Church.
As the Middle East moves carefully toward peace, in the wake of the recent ceasefire, Leo must walk this tightrope, keeping these two deep commitments in careful balance: a love of the Jewish people and a love of the Palestinian people. This is his signature statement: seeking peace between peoples and nations using all the power of his office.
The post War strained the Israel-Vatican bond. Will the pope use the ceasefire to heal those wounds? appeared first on The Forward.