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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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Hezbollah Says Ceasefire ‘Meaningless’ as Fighting Continues in South
Israeli military vehicles and soldiers in a village in southern Lebanon as the Israeli army operates in it as seen from the Israeli side of the border, April 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ayal Margolin
Lebanon’s Hezbollah said a US-mediated ceasefire in the war with Israel was meaningless a day after it was extended for three weeks, as Lebanese authorities reported two people killed by an Israeli strike and Hezbollah downed an Israeli drone.
US President Donald Trump announced the three-week extension on Thursday after hosting Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors at the White House. The ceasefire agreement between the governments of Lebanon and Israel had been due to expire on Sunday.
While the ceasefire has led to a significant reduction in hostilities, Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah have continued to trade blows in southern Lebanon, where Israel has kept soldiers in a self-declared “buffer zone.”
Responding to the extension, Hezbollah lawmaker Ali Fayyad said “it is essential to point out that the ceasefire is meaningless in light of Israel’s insistence on hostile acts, including assassinations, shelling, and gunfire” and its demolition of villages and towns in the south.
“Every Israeli attack… gives the resistance the right to a proportionate response,” he added.
Hezbollah is not a party to the ceasefire agreement, and has strongly objected to Lebanon’s face-to-face contacts with Israel.
BUFFER ZONE
The April 16 agreement does not require Israeli troops to withdraw from the belt of southern Lebanon seized during the war. The zone extends 5 to 10 km (3 to 6 miles) into Lebanon.
Israel says the buffer zone aims to protect northern Israel from attacks by Hezbollah, which fired hundreds of rockets at Israel during the war.
Hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel reignited on March 2, when the group opened fire in support of Iran in the regional war. The ceasefire in Lebanon emerged separately from Washington’s efforts to resolve its conflict with Tehran, though Iran had called for Lebanon to be included in any broader truce.
Nearly 2,500 people have been killed in Lebanon since March 2, the Lebanese health ministry says.
ISRAELI MILITARY WARNS RESIDENTS TO LEAVE TOWN
Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli airstrike killed two people in the southern village of Touline on Friday.
Hezbollah shot down an Israeli drone, the group and the Israeli military said. Hezbollah identified it as a Hermes 450 and said it had downed it with a surface-to-air missile.
An Israeli drone was heard circling above Beirut throughout the day on Friday, Reuters reporters said.
The Israeli military warned residents of the southern town of Deir Aames to leave their homes immediately, saying it planned to act against “Hezbollah activities” there.
Deir Aames is located north of the area occupied by Israeli forces, and it was the first time Israel had issued such a warning since the ceasefire came into force on April 16. Posted on social media, the Israeli warning gave no details of the activities it said Hezbollah was conducting in the town.
The Israeli military also said it had intercepted a drone prior to its crossing into Israeli territory, and that sirens were sounded in line with protocol.
WAR-WEARY RESIDENTS SEEK END TO FIGHTING
The continued fighting has angered war-weary Lebanese, who say they want to see a genuine ceasefire put a full halt to violence.
“What’s this? Is this called a ceasefire? Or is this mocking (people’s) intelligence?” said Naem Saleh, a 73-year-old owner of a newsstand in Beirut.
Residents of northern Israel had mostly returned to daily life, but expressed pessimism about the longevity of the ceasefire with Lebanon.
“I believe that the ceasefire is so fragile, and unfortunately it won’t stand long, in my opinion,” said Eliad Eini, a resident of Nahariya, which lies just 10 km (6 miles) from the border with Lebanon.
On Wednesday, Israeli strikes killed at least five people in the south, including a journalist.
Israel’s Ambassador to Washington Yechiel Leiter, in his opening remarks at Thursday’s talks, said “Lebanon should acknowledge the temporary presence of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and the right of Israel to defend itself from a hostile force that is firing on the population.”
Lebanon’s Ambassador to the United States Nada Moawad, in a written statement sent to Reuters, called for the ceasefire to be fully respected and said it would allow the necessary conditions for meaningful negotiations.
Lebanon has said it aims to secure the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from its territory in broader talks with Israel at a later stage.
Trump said on Thursday that he looked forward to hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun in the near future, and said there was “a great chance” the two countries would reach a peace agreement this year.
Hezbollah attacks killed two civilians in Israel after March 2, while 15 Israeli soldiers have died in Lebanon since then, Israel says.
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Only Five Ships Pass Through Strait of Hormuz in 24 hours
FILE PHOTO: A map showing the Strait of Hormuz is seen in this illustration taken March 23, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
Only five ships, including one Iranian oil products tanker, have passed through the Strait of Hormuz in the past 24 hours, Friday shipping data showed, after Iran seized two container ships this week and the US continues to blockade Iranian ports.
Shipping traffic passing through the crucial waterway at the entrance to the Gulf during an uneasy ceasefire between Washington and Tehran represents a fraction of the average 140 daily passages before the Iran war began on February 28.
“For most shipping companies, they will need a stable ceasefire and assurances from both sides of the conflict that the Strait of Hormuz is safe to transit,” said Jakob Larsen, chief safety and security officer at shipping association BIMCO.
“In the meantime, shipping will be restricted to using routes close to Iran and Oman. Due to their confined nature, these routes cannot safely accommodate the normal volumes of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz,” Larsen added.
The Iranian-flagged oil products tanker Niki, which is subject to US sanctions, was among the few vessels that sailed out of the strait with no destination listed, Kpler analysis and tracking data on the MarineTraffic platform showed on Friday.
It was unclear what would happen if it continued to sail further east towards the blockade line imposed by the US Navy.
Nearly two months after the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran, there is little sign of peace talks resuming.
Container shipping group Hapag-Lloyd said on Friday that one of its ships has crossed the strait but did not provide any information on the circumstances or timing.
The Comoros-flagged supertanker Helga arrived at an offshore oil loading terminal in Iraq’s southern Basra port on Friday, the second vessel to reach Iraq since the strait’s closure.
Iran’s use of a swarm of small, fast boats to seize two container ships near the strait on Wednesday has heightened concerns among many shipping and oil companies.
“The latest seizures make clear, even an ‘open’ Strait of Hormuz is not a safe Strait of Hormuz for seafarers, ships and cargo,” Peter Sand, chief analyst with ocean and air freight intelligence platform Xeneta, said in a note.
Between April 22 and early April 23, seven vessels transited the strait, six of which were involved in Iran-related trade, analysis from Lloyd’s List Intelligence showed.
The closure of the strait has disrupted a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies and triggered a global energy crisis.
Hundreds of ships and 20,000 seafarers remained stranded inside the Gulf with war risk insurers and oil companies watching for any sign that the risks may have eased so they can prepare to sail through.
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11-Year-Old Girl Succumbs to Wounds from Iranian Missile Strike
A photo of Nesya Karadi. Photo: courtesy of her family.
i24 News – An 11-year-old girl has died nearly three weeks after being critically injured by an Iranian missile strike on her family home.
Nesya Karadi passed away Friday at Sheba Medical Center, becoming the 21st civilian fatality in Israel since the current conflict began on February 28.
The attack occurred on April 1, just hours before the start of Passover. Officials confirmed the strike involved an Iranian missile equipped with a cluster warhead; a sub-munition directly hit the Karadi home, wounding 14 people.
Among the injured was Nesya’s father, a volunteer with the Magen David Adom paramedic service. In a final act of heroism before losing consciousness from his own injuries, he reportedly administered life-saving first aid to his daughter.
Hanoch Zeibert, the Mayor of Bnei Brak, expressed the city’s deep grief over the loss of a “pure child whose whole life was ahead of her,” pledging the municipality’s full support to the Karadi family during their ordeal