Anne Frank as a Jewish Icon
Jeffrey Shandler
Presented at the symposium “Icons and Anne Frank,”
convened by the Anne Frank House, 21 March 2016
What is a Jewish icon? And where is Anne Frank situated among the array of
Jewish icons? First, some brief, key observations about Jewish icons generally:
The notion of identifying individuals as Jewish icons—or as heroes, celebrities,
role models—reflects a distinctly modern sensibility and relies on mass media to
render the names, portraits, and biographies of these men and women widely
familiar. Reflecting the wide range of modern Jewish culture, Jewish icons are
quite diverse, They include some individuals who are significant to people who
aren’t Jews as well as those meaningful to Jews, and the same iconic figure can
have different value for Jews and non-Jews. Moreover, Jews’ extensive internal
diversity is reflected in the people they variously champion as icons. Hasidim,
for example, revere their rebeyim (charismatic spiritual leaders), most of whom
are not well known outside their communities. Conversely, hasidim may be
unaware of (or may disregard) the iconic figures that many secular Jews
embrace: political figures, writers, artists, performers, scientists, and so on.
Some of these icons are admired for their relation to being Jewish, which itself
can vary greatly from one figure to another. Other icons are celebrated for
accomplishments having no connection to their being Jews, such as an astronaut
or an Olympic athlete. Anne Frank’s place among the great diversity of Jewish
icons is especially noteworthy, because her iconic status is as complex as it is
widespread. Moreover, her meaning as a Jewish icon has evolved over time and
been the subject of debate.
The challenges that Anne Frank’s status as a Jewish icon can pose is
exemplified by the following recent account: In 2015, American journalist
Jeffrey Goldberg wrote an article titled “Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?”
which includes a discussion of what he terms “The Persecution of Anne Frank.”
The author recounts his visit to the Anne Frank House as beginning with “a faux
pas,” as he assumed incorrectly that the staff member he had arranged to
interview was a Jew. Though aware that “a very large number” of people who
work in Europe’s Jewish museums “are not Jewish,” Goldberg nonetheless
seems disturbed by the lack of Jews on the Anne Frank House staff, including
the fact that “[t]he Anne Frank House has never had a Jewish director.” Add to
that staff member’s explanation that the institution “addresses anti-Semitism in
the context of larger societal ills,” calling attention to “the universal components
1
of Anne Frank’s story” to address issues of “tolerance and understanding,” and
Goldberg dismisses the Anne Frank House as “merely a simulacrum of a Jewish
institution.”1
Goldberg is not the first writer to disparage well-known representations
of Anne Frank that, in the author’s opinion, do not serve well her status as a
Jewish icon. In an article published in Midstream, an American Jewish
magazine, in 1980, literature scholar Edward Alexander wrote that one of the
“most notorious attempts to steal from the Jewish victims of the Holocaust
precisely that for which they were victimized, is the dramatization of The Diary
of Anne Frank,” in which, Alexander asserts, the playwrights “changed Anne’s
particular allusions to her Jewish identity and Jewish hopes to a blurred,
amorphous universalism.” He writes further about the Anne Frank House, which
had then recently presented an exhibition on human rights concerns around the
Israel/Palestine conflict. Alexander deems the exhibition an “obscene travesty”
and concludes that “Jews…have been slow to recognize that failure to claim
sovereignty over something that is rightfully yours is an invitation to others to
lay hold of what is seen as valuable property, whether in land or—as in the case
of Anne Frank—moral capital.”2
This anguish over Anne Frank’s stature as a Jewish icon is revealing on
multiple counts. In particular, these writers’ remarks exemplify a larger
assumption, not confined to American Jews, of an inimical relationship between
universal and Jewish interests. If one indulges the former, both authors posit,
one does so at the expense of the latter. Even as these authors’ writings address
broader concerns, they shed light on the challenges of understanding Anne Frank
as an iconic figure, especially as a Jewish icon.
Anne’s iconic stature is, in fact, manifold. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and
I observed in our introduction to the volume Anne Frank Unbound,
Anne Frank has been widely invoked… as a figure for an array of paradigms: as
an archetypal Jew, Holocaust victim, human rights champion, girl, adolescent
writer, diarist, or feminist voice. At the same time, in none of these paradigms
does Anne prove to be a perfect fit. An ongoing concern in Anne Frank
remembrance is how to deal with her exceptionalism: she is an atypical victim of
Nazi persecution; her sense of Jewishness strikes some observers as limited; her
diary is an unusual example of the genre from a formal standpoint and, for some
critics, is problematic as Holocaust literature; she has no record of activism, as
do the other figures in the pantheon of human rights heroes among whom she is
1
Jeffrey Goldberg, “Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?” The Atlantic, April 2015
(http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/is-it-time-for-the-jews-to-leave-europe/386279/
2
Edward Alexander, “Stealing the Holocaust,” Midstream, November 1980, 48.
2
often placed.3
To understand what is exceptional about Anne’s stature as a Jewish icon,
this must first be distinguished from how Anne herself understood Jewishness.
The most direct source for her thoughts on the subject are passages, most of them
brief, scattered throughout her diaries. Friends and relations who knew Anne and
wrote or spoke about her after the war have little to say about Anne’s
Jewishness, compared to their recollections of her personality, family life,
intelligence, or literary talent. On the issue of Anne’s Jewishness, the views of
her father, Otto Frank, are of particular importance, given his central role in
publishing Anne’s diary and authorizing other forms of remembering her life and
work. Moreover, given his influence on Anne as a much-adored father, Otto’s
sense of self as a Jew is as important to understanding Anne as a Jewish icon as
are her own thoughts on the subject.
Anne’s diaries offer little direct evidence of her thoughts on Jewish
religiosity. In one entry, she reports reluctantly reading some prayers at her
mother’s request and comments, “[t]hey don’t convey much to me. Why does
she force me to be pious, just to oblige her?”4 (This may reflect the fraught
relationship between mother and daughter as much as Anne’s feelings about
Judaism.) The diary offers a cursory description of observing Hanukkah in the
entry of December 7, 1942; Anne devotes much more attention in this entry to
gift exchanges on St. Nicholas Day, which, she notes, nearly coincided with
Hanukkah that year.5 Anne mentions several other Christian holidays in diary
entries—Christmas, Good Friday, Pentecost6—but no other Jewish holiday. The
only other apparent reference to Jewish ritual is her mention of a candle lit on a
Friday night (the start of the Jewish Sabbath).7
Anne occasionally discusses Judaism in relation to the religious
convictions of others. She is troubled by Peter van Pels (van Daan) expressing
his “dislike of religion”8 and his wish that, after the war, no one know he is
3
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler, eds., “Introduction,” Anne Frank Unbound: Media,
Imagination, Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 17.
4
October 29, 1942, Versions b, c, The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition, prepared by the
Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation; Introduced by Harry Paape, Gerrold van der Stroom,
and David Barnouw; With a summary of the report by the State Forensic Science laboratory of the Ministry
of Justice, compiled by H.J.J. Hardy; edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, translated by
Arnold J. Pomerans and B.M. Mooyaart-Doubleday (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 310. Hereafter
referred to as RCE.
5
December 7, 1942, Versions b, c, RCE, 341-343. A short description of the first night of Hanukkah on
December 5, 1944, appeared in Version a (per RCE, 341).
6
Diary references to Christmas: December 22, 1942, December 22, 1943, December 24, 1943, December
27, 1943; to Good Friday: April 11, 1944; to Pentecost: May 26, 1944, May 31, 1944. Additional
references to St. Nicholas Day: November 3, 1943, December 6, 1943.
7
March 3, 1944, Versions a, c, RCE, 530.
8
June 13, 1944, Versions a,c, RCE, 697.
3
Jewish.9 Anne herself wondered whether anyone would ever “overlook Jew or
non-Jew, and just see the young girl in me.”10 And a passage from her entry of
April 11, 1944, reflects the processual nature of Anne’s thinking about
Jewishness:
We Jews must… trust in God. Surely the time will come when we are people
again, and not just Jews…. Who has made us Jews different from all other
people? Who has allowed us to suffer to so terribly up till now? It is God that
has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we
bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews,
instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example. Who knows, it might
even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for
that reason and that reason only do we have to suffer now. We can never be just
Netherlanders, or just English, or representatives of any country for that matter,
we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too.11
As this passage indicates, Anne conceptualized being Jewish primarily as a
member of a stigmatized people. From her contemplation of the anti-Semitism
that had defined her life since childhood, she posited a rationale of Jewish
suffering in paradigmatic terms, in which Jews figure as what the prophet Isaiah
called a “light unto the nations.”12 As a moral exemplar with universal
significance, being Jewish transcends, but does not obviate, national loyalty.
Though Anne read prayers with her mother reluctantly, she does mention
praying to God in several diary entries, and she ponders God’s role in her life,
the lives of fellow Jews, and of humankind generally. These passages indicate
an understanding of God as a generalized savior and source of ethical guidance.
The preponderance of these discussions appear in the diary’s last five months,
when Anne was rewriting her diary as a work for publication after the war, while
also composing new entries. This development may indicate how Anne’s
thinking had evolved while in hiding. Or this may reflect her sense that
religiosity was a subject she should address in her published book.
In sum, Anne Frank’s understanding of Jewishness was centered on the
ethical injustice of Jewish persecution. Anne understood Jewishness as
something indelible, though more by dint of a communal historical experience of
Otherness than of a religious or cultural heritage, let alone the Nazi racial model.
She seems not to have shared her sister’s apparent interest in Zionism or that of
her friend Hello. Instead, Anne’s diary reveals a strong commitment to a Dutch
identity, mentioning her fascination with Dutch royalty and her wish to become a
Dutch citizen after the war. The diary also testifies to her devotion to Western
9
February 16, 1944, Versions a,c, RCE, 513.
December 24, 1943,Versions a,c, RCE, 451.
11
April 11, 1944, Versions a,c, RCE, 622.
12
Isaiah 42:6, 49:6.
10
4
European culture: reading works of Dutch, English, French, and German
literature, listening to classical music, studying Greek mythology and art history,
even following the latest movies, while in hiding.
In this respect, Anne resembled her father. As was typical of his
generation of German Jews of an upper-middle-class background, with nominal
ties to Reform Judaism, Otto Frank expressed his Jewishness through a
cosmopolitan engagement with the German concept of Bildung. As author Ruth
Gay writes:
To the German Jews Bildung represented [an] intellectual and emotional
home…. [C]ulture had an almost redemptive quality, fulfilling the promise of the
Enlightenment by making Jews like other people and an integral part of the
society in which they lived. With its universal nature, high culture did not
require any particular pedigree of its practitioners, and through this free universe
the Jew could join Western civilization.13
Also typical of German Jews of his background, Otto Frank’s politics were
moderately liberal, not nationalist or leftwing. These views of culture and
politics informed his approach to how Anne’s life and work should be
memorialized, which evolved as public interest in her diary burgeoned in the
1950s. Thus, Otto explained that he received many letters from “young people”
inspired by Anne’s writings, who “reflect on the persecution of the Jews during
the Hitler regime and make comparisons to the world today…. For me this is
proof that the diary speaks to the hearts of people everywhere.”14
Otto’s vision for the Anne Frank House, which opened in 1960,
epitomized his approach to his daughter’s legacy. An essay published a decade
later on the mission of the Anne Frank House reports that Otto “insisted from the
beginning that the Annex should not be a war museum or a shrine, but a meeting
center for young people of all nations, [where they]… could seek ways to work
for peace.” This led to the establishment of an International Youth Center at the
Anne Frank House, which organized annual “meetings and conferences, at which
the problems of discrimination, democracy, cross-cultural communication,
religion, and international cooperation are discussed.”15
Though the Anne Frank House has changed tactics over the years, its
various exhibitions, educational programs, publications, and other endeavors
reflect this foundational sense of mission, which situates the particular
circumstances of Anne Frank’s life and death, as a Jewish victim of the Nazis’
genocidal anti-Semitism, as an exemplar of the challenges facing the pursuit of
human rights universally. This approach exemplifies a larger response to the
13
14
Ruth Gay, The Jews of Germany: A Historical Portrait (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 184.
Anna G. Steenmeijer, ed., A Tribute to Anne Frank (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1971),
7.
15
Ibid., 114-115.
5
Holocaust as a paradigmatic event that serves to caution humankind about the
dire consequences of civil societies’ failure to recognize the innate rights and
dignity of all people, a failure that can—and repeatedly has—ultimately
devolved into genocide. The term “genocide” was coined in the Holocaust’s
immediate aftermath to identify an emblematic crime, defined by Raphael
Lemkin as “a conspiracy to exterminate national, religious or racial groups.”16
This understanding of the Holocaust as an exemplum of genocide informs not
only the mission of the Anne Frank House but also many other Holocaust
educational and memorial endeavors worldwide. Moreover, this approach is key
to understanding how Anne Frank is conceived of as an icon.
Complementing this response to the Holocaust is one that resists viewing it
as a paradigm and insists on the Holocaust’s singularity, unique to the
circumstances of European Jewry, for which Jews both figure centrally as
subjects and play a leading role in its remembrance. This view has engendered
its own array of memorial works, including some that involve Anne Frank as an
iconic Jewish victim of the Holocaust. Debates over her iconic value have
sometimes split along these divergent approaches to Holocaust remembrance.
The first well-known example is the dispute, beginning in the 1950s, between
American author Meyer Levin and Otto Frank over the dramatization of Anne’s
diary—a clash not only over legal rights to the work but also over the “right
way” to present Anne’s story. Levin—and, subsequently, his champions—
argued that his dramatization appropriately foregrounded Anne’s Jewishness, in
contrast to the authorized dramatization by Frances Goodrich and Albert
Hackett, disparaged as restraining the particular circumstances of Anne and the
others in hiding as victims of Nazi anti-Semitism in favor of a universalized
portrait of their suffering.
Over time, Anne Frank’s value as an icon has evolved. During the 1970s,
innovative responses in the United States to Anne’s life and work both altered
and interrogated her status as a Jewish icon. In 1974, Anne made what may be
her first appearance as a virtual “guest” at a Passover seder, when an excerpt
from her diary appeared among a wide array of supplementary readings in a new
edition of the Passover haggadah issued by the Reform movement’s Central
Conference of American Rabbis. (The excerpt, which includes the famous line,
“in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart,” has
since appeared in several other American haggadahs.) As religion scholar Liora
Gubkin has noted, familiarity with Anne’s life and work has enabled the creators
of this and subsequent innovative Passover haggadahs to use a citation from the
diary to “link Anne’s aspirations with their own within the rubric of the seder”17
16
17
See Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide,” American Scholar 15, no. 2 (April 1946), 227–230.
Liora Gubkin, “Anne Frank, a Guest at the Seder,” in Anne Frank Unbound, 211.
6
as a celebration of Jewish liberation from persecution, extending from ancient
times to the modern age.
Complementing this embrace of Anne as a Jewish icon in a religious
context, albeit one that speaks more to liberal American Jews’ religiosity than to
Anne’s understanding of Jewishness, is a landmark interrogation of her symbolic
stature: Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer. In this 1979 novella Roth critiqued the
American (and especially American Jewish) beatification of Anne Frank in the
1950s by his imagining her as surviving the war. But Roth’s imaginary Anne
concludes that her survival must remain a secret. In the novella, she explains: “I
was the incarnation of the millions of unlived years robbed from the murdered
Jews. It was too late to be alive now. I was a saint.”18 Media scholar Leshu
Torchin observes that “Through this fantasy, Roth considers the implications of
fetishizing Anne, who in the early postwar years had already become so
burdened with meanings that extended beyond the actual girl that they threatened
to leave her behind.”19
Rethinking and debating Anne Frank’s iconic stature has continued, as
new generations read her diary and learn about her life, and as the passage of
time both suggests other possibilities for ascribing symbolic value to Anne and
raises new questions about the practice of doing so. By the turn of the
millennium, a spate of critics had disparaged this expansive attachment to Anne
Frank, disturbed by what they perceived as its tendency toward universalism and
optimism. Some of these critics called for corrective measures that would deal
more forthrightly with the brutal circumstances of Anne’s murder and the
specificity of her persecution as a Jew.
At this time, the three best-known representations of Anne’s life all
underwent revision. The Anne Frank Fonds issued a new redaction of the
diaries, known as the Definitive Edition; the Anne Frank House renovated the
configuration of visitors’ path through the building; and Goodrich and Hackett’s
dramatization underwent considerable emendation for its 1997 Broadway
revival. Each of these reworkings addressed a different shift in Anne’s iconic
significance since the early postwar years: The new edition of the diary
recognizes Anne’s stature as an iconic young writer by acknowledging her
process of rewriting the diary. The renovated visit to the Anne Frank House
incorporated the building’s front half in a new configuration that highlights the
role of the Dutch people in protecting the Jews hiding in the Annex, thereby
rooting Anne’s iconic stature within the context of The Netherlands under Nazi
occupation. Playwright Wendy Kesselman’s revisions to the diary’s official
dramatization include changes that underscore Anne’s iconic stature as a Jewish
18
19
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 150.
Leshu Torchin, “Anne Frank’s Moving Images,” in Anne Frank Unbound, 133.
7
victim of Nazism: for example, Anne’s discussion with Peter about his wish to
obscure his Jewishness after the war ends with Anne asserting, “I’d never turn
away from who I am. I couldn’t. Don’t you know you’ll always be Jewish… in
your soul.”20
Some more recent engagements with Anne Frank’s iconic power also
address her Jewishness in provocative ways. Of special note is an image of
Anne wearing a keffiyeh, created by the artist known as T., which appeared
beginning in 2007 as street art in Amsterdam and New York and later circulated
on postcards and t-shirts. Here Anne’s familiarity as an iconic Jewish victim of
Nazi persecution is juxtaposed with another icon—the traditional Arab headscarf
often worn as a sign of support for Palestinian liberation. Does the juxtaposition
analogize Jewish victimization during the Holocaust with the contemporary
suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation? Does this juxtaposition ironize
Anne as an archetypal Jew? Does the image present Anne as an exemplary
human rights activist, taking up the Palestinian cause (as some Jews, both in
Israel and in the diaspora, have done)? Or does this configure Anne, as the
eternal rebellious teenager, flouting a Jewish establishment that deems support
for Palestinians inimical to Zionism? This image’s provocation relies on a clash
of icons, made possible by the array of paradigmatic roles into which Anne
Frank has been cast.
Examining Anne Frank’s stature as a Jewish icon reveals a disparity
between how Jewishness is often conceived of in the postwar era and Anne
Frank’s understanding of Jewishness, informed by her father’s sense of self as a
Jew, as well as her own experience of anti-Semitism. Especially challenging for
many people today is the notion, which was foundational for both Anne and
Otto, that Jewishness is not inimical to universalism but rather is realized in its
embrace.
In addition, contemplating Anne Frank as a Jewish icon entails
examining the dynamics of her symbolic value. Indeed, Anne’s iconic stature
exemplifies how the meaning of icons is not fixed; instead, it shifts as notions of
what the icon represents responds to the evolving desires of those embracing it.
Anne Frank’s shifting significance as a Jewish icon reveals changes in
sensibility, among both Jews and others, about Jewishness in the post-Holocaust
era. Even as Otto Frank played a defining role in establishing Anne’s iconicity,
her value as a Jewish icon has ranged beyond his own Jewish sensibility. And,
of course, even though Anne dreamed of celebrity, she could scarce imagine the
wide-ranging significance her life and work would acquire.
20
Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank, “newly adapted by Wendy Kesselman”
(New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 2009), 60.
8