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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.
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From the bimah to ‘Squid Game’: A rabbi finds Torah in unexpected places
(JTA) — Jamie Field was still a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College in New York City when she watched the first season of “Squid Game: The Challenge” and saw a call to action flash across the screen: “Could this be you? Apply now.”
It was 2023, and Field, who had long gravitated toward other reality television shows like “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race,” said she saw something deeply Jewish in them.
“The really beautiful thing about these shows is that when you’re in such a pressure cooker, for me, it’s not about the challenges, although those are fun to watch, but it’s about watching people be people and make mistakes and grow and foster connections between one another, and I’ve found so much Torah in these moments,” Field said in an interview. “I know it’s very rabbi to say.”
Two years later, Field is bringing that approach to the Netflix show’s second season, which premiered Tuesday. She was chosen to be one of over 456 contestants from around the world competing in a series of physical and mental challenges for a $4.56 million prize.
While Jewish contestants have competed on a number of reality TV shows, ordained rabbis have been rarer. Field said she went into the experience feeling a weighty responsibility around portraying Jewish clergy even as she was shackled to a team of players and competed in a relay race of mini games like stacking a house of cards and swinging a ball on a string into a cup.
“I never expected to be the very best of the challenges,” she said. “I’ve always said, I have a heart of gold, but I’m not very dexterous, and so for me, it was about trying my best and giving it my all, and also trying to be true to myself and bringing my values and wisdom and sense of community and representing the rabbinate as best I could into the show.”
Field grew up in Los Angeles and where her family attended Temple Ahavat Shalom, a Reform congregation in the San Fernando Valley.
After graduating from Boston University in 2017, she worked for the Washington Hebrew Congregation, a Reform synagogue in Washington D.C., before enrolling at HUC in 2019, spending her first year in Jerusalem.
After being ordained in 2024, Field began working as the director of education at Beth El Temple Center, a Reform synagogue in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Just four months later, she received a call back from “Squid Game: The Challenge’ asking her if she was still interested. She was soon on her way to London for an extended break for filming.
A year later, in a post on Instagram announcing her appearance on the show, Field said her experience reminded her of what she has learned from Jewish tradition.
“I often share that the Torah is a sacred story of people being people — of being hurt, of making mistakes, of building connections, of adventure, and of finding the divine in it all,” she said. “I felt this so deeply during my experience on Squid Game.”
Among her co-competitors was a NFL cheerleader, a former bomb technician and an Anglican priest with whom Field said she connected on set.
“I had a really good conversation about religion and what it means to sort of be a faith leader on the show with the priest,” said Field. “I actually found that I had conversations about faith with almost everyone I talked to because, you know, people bring things up when you tell them you’re a rabbi.”
The post From the bimah to ‘Squid Game’: A rabbi finds Torah in unexpected places appeared first on The Forward.
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Arizona man sentenced to 4 years in prison for antisemitic threats to Jewish NYC hotel owner
(JTA) — An Arizona man who sent hundreds of threatening messages to a Jewish-owned hotel in New York City was sentenced to 49 months in prison on Thursday in federal court.
Donovan Hall, 35, of Mesa, Arizona, pleaded guilty to making interstate threats and interstate stalking of the Jewish owners of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel in Manhattan. He was also sentenced to three years of supervised release.
The Blue Moon Hotel is “dedicated to Jewish community in every way that we can be,” Randy Settenbrino said in an interview last year from his hotel, which includes rooms named for icons of the Jewish Lower East Side, a kosher cafe and a mural depicting 2,000 years of Jewish history.
At the time, Settenbrino and his employees had just begun to get what prosecutors said were nearly 1,000 threatening messages from Hall. Sent between August and November 2024, the messages threatened to “torture, mutilate, rape, and murder them and their families,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
In October, Hall texted photographs of two firearms and a machete to one of his victims, writing, “I’ve got something for you and your inbred children” and “for the Zionist cowards,” according to his federal indictment.
“Donovan Hall targeted Jewish victims with a sustained campaign of intimidation, terror, and harassment,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in a statement. “The approximately 1,000 threats he sent to these New Yorkers were alarming and brazen.”
Hall’s messages coincided with a boycott campaign against the hotel launched after Settenbrino’s son, an Israeli soldier, was identified as having posted videos of shooting at destroyed buildings and detonating bombs in homes and a mosque in Gaza.
Hall, who has been held at New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center since his arrest last year, apologized for his actions in a sentencing submission to the court, writing that he “wanted to champion for a cause and hunt down the bullies, not realizing that it was me the whole time.”
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after Hall’s sentencing, Settenbrino said “baby killer” had been spray painted on the windows of his hotel, and flyers were posted around Manhattan calling for its boycott and referring to his son, Bram, as a “war criminal.”
“We’re sitting at a pivotal time in New York City, where we’re feeling the encroachment of hate and antisemitism in the West, like our brethren are feeling it in Europe, and so it’s very scary for everyone concerned,” said Settenbrino. “It’s very important that there are strong sentences handed out to this, not just for us, but for klal yisrael [the Jewish people] in general.”
The post Arizona man sentenced to 4 years in prison for antisemitic threats to Jewish NYC hotel owner appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel, India Sign Deals to Boost Defense, Industrial, Tech Cooperation
Israel’s Defense Ministry Director General Amir Baram and Indian Defense Secretary Shri Rajesh Kumar Singh sign new agreements in Tel Aviv to expand defense, industrial, and technological cooperation between the two countries. Photo: Screenshot
Israel and India on Tuesday signed new agreements to expand defense, industrial, and technological cooperation during high-level talks in Tel Aviv, as both nations aim to deepen ties amid shifting Middle East power dynamics and rising regional tensions.
Israel’s Defense Ministry Director General Amir Baram and Indian Defense Secretary Shri Rajesh Kumar Singh signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) during the annual bilateral Joint Working Group meeting.
“This strategic dialogue with India takes place at a critical juncture for both countries. Our strategic partnership is based on deep mutual trust and shared security interests,” Baram said during a joint press conference.
“We view India as a first-rate strategic partner and are determined to continue deepening cooperation in the fields of defense, technology and industry,” the Israeli official continued.
Strengthening Defense Cooperation: Israel MOD Director General and Indian Defense Secretary Sign Strategic Memorandum of Understanding
@SpokespersonMoD
Read more: https://t.co/ito3P1sCQg pic.twitter.com/FjxBkwFf1C
— Ministry of Defense (@Israel_MOD) November 4, 2025
As part of the visit, the Indian delegation — which included senior officials from the Ministry of Defense and the Armed Forces — met with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and participated in a forum with CEOs of Israeli defense companies to advance industrial-defense cooperation between the two countries.
Among other areas of cooperation, the newly signed agreement aims to advance joint efforts in defense manufacturing, research, and technological development.
Israeli-Indian diplomatic relations have been steadily growing since India established full diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992.
Since then, the two nations have signed multiple agreements to deepen cooperation across industries, further strengthening defense and security ties.
In recent years, trade between the two countries has been rapidly expanding, with India now being Israel’s seventh-largest trade partner globally. Israeli exports to India rose from $200 million in 1992 to $2.5 billion in 2024.
Over the past decade, Israel’s exports to India have grown by about 60 percent, and investments in the tech sector are becoming increasingly significant.
Military cooperation has also grown, with Israel selling billions of dollars’ worth of weapons systems to India and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Indian military regularly participating in joint exercises.
India is one of the largest consumers of Israeli military equipment, accounting for almost 40 percent of Israel’s total arms exports.
According to media reports, India is set to acquire rockets for its ground forces and surface-to-air defense missiles developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) for approximately $3.75 billion.
IAI is also expected to convert six commercial planes into Indian Air Force refueling aircraft for $900 million.