Would They Tear Down Anne Frank Too?
Never again is now.
When I was growing up, two to three decades after the Shoah, it was assumed that you would read The Diary of Anne Frank, and you understood that, in a way, she represented every victim of the Holocaust. Just invoking her name engendered each emotion every Jew feels when thinking about what had happened to our people. In fact, coming from a secular leaning family in the Los Angeles of the 70s and 80s, there were very few things that connected me, and those like me, to our Jewishness.
This is before Chabad had a shul in every single Jewish (or Jewishy) neighborhood in L.A. (and the rest of the planet).
The list was fairly short: Fiddler on the Roof, whatever deli our family went to on Sundays, Hebrew school, the observance of some Jewish holidays, but always Chanukah, my father’s unshakeable Jewish pride, Jewishy books like My Name Is Asher Lev, Jewish humor, some Yiddish, the occasional playing of “Hava Nagila,” and The Diary of Anne Frank.
That last one was the bedrock of my initial understanding of the Holocaust. That was true of almost everyone in my age group. I knew Holocaust survivors, and the book is what gave me my first real insight into what they had gone through. That was also the case for almost every other kid I knew. It was synonymous with the entire concept of “Never Again” and Holocaust education.
We all assumed that the memory of Anne Frank was inviolable. The depth and emotional resonance of her short life was something that any human, at any time, would find deeply moving. Her story would always be cautionary shorthand for the pure evil that is antisemitism. As Jews, her story is our story and, we thought, would always be the best way to communicate the horror of the Shoah to the rest of the world.
Right?
This Monday (November 7), I woke up to the news that a place called the Anne Frank Daycare Center, in Tangerhütte, Germany, was being renamed. Why? (The Orwellian Newspeak ahead appears in quotes) According to the school, it caved to the demands of “migrant” parents, because the name “Anne Frank” caused a “controversy,” in which those parents felt “uncertain” about the school’s name.
Not to be outdone in the grotesque display of woke absurdity, the city’s mayor said: “The renaming is part of a broader concept that aims to celebrate the diversity of the children attending the daycare center.”
Once again we see that leftism is poison and is a favorite tool of antisemites. We also see that the West, and especially Europe, is intent on committing societal suicide. Apparently, with as much alacrity as it can muster.
Obviously “diversity” doesn’t include Jews. Which should surprise exactly zero Jews because we have never been included in the Left’s diversity calculus.
So, what is really happening here?
A few things, chief among them is that this is yet another avenue for Holocaust denial. Jew-haters hate to be reminded of the Shoah because they hate to be reminded of anything that causes the world to be sympathetic toward us. That is why it has become trendy among the pink haired, but physically puny, hordes of wokesters across the United States to tear down posters of missing Jewish children.
In fact, the favorite pastime of people who hate us is to inflict everything on us they can think of, so that they can then claim to be the victims of that very behavior. They murdered 1,500 innocent Israelis, and then claimed victimhood. That was even before Israel did what every other nation would do in the same situation. Now that Israel is taking care of business, and their business is keeping Jews safe at all costs: the whining has expanded exponentially.
But you can’t “tear down” Anne Frank like the hostage posters. Her face, her story, and in a weird way, even her voice, are embedded in the Western psyche. She can’t just be wished away. So instead, they are attempting to erase her name.
The school’s new name is to be “World Explorers.” That’s as catchy as tangling with the IRS. It reminds me of when a certain Washington DC football team was renamed the “Commanders,” and a certain Cleveland baseball team was renamed the “Guardians.” The fact that the previous names were rooted in both teams’ history, and related to the warrior quality valuable to the psyche of competitive sports, or that the new names were related to…nothing…was meaningless. The point was that the few had deemed the thing loved by the many to be “offensive.”
The trend is to rename anything that is deemed “distasteful” (or inconvenient) to some non-descript, non-threatening, generic name. Doing so allows the re-namers to pretend that they vanquished some imaginary evil. They feel virtuous, while the rest of us lose a piece of our shared culture.
Which is the entire point. They diminish, demonize, and destroy, while the replacement is ALWAYS something deemed “acceptable,” i.e. generic and boring. Because generic is always boring and boring is harmless. Boring doesn’t cause people to think, feel, or to be curious. Boring is non-threatening.
The memory of the Shoah is threatening. Or, let me put it this way, if you are threatened by the memory of the Shoah, you are an antisemite.
I am NOT comparing the names of sports teams to Anne Frank. But what we can learn from those incidents is that Arab Islamists, Jew haters, have learned the language and tactics of Western leftists to become more effective at marginalizing Jewish communities. Part of that strategy is to always play the victim. No longer content with committing heinous acts of terror, they have internalized the lessons of these Orwellian tactics, lessons which have taught them that language controls not just thought, but feelings. And when you control thoughts and feelings, the inversion of reality become possible. So, the Jews become evil colonizers, while Hamas terrorists are their righteous victims.
Stripping the Anne Frank Daycare Center of the name of the most famous Jewish girl in history, is then shifted from a heinous act of despicable Holocaust revisionism, to a “sensitive” act of “inclusion,” designed to satisfy the needs of “migrant” parents.
That this is allowed to happen in Germany should be like a sudden hard punch to the face. But it is not. We have been watching the West travel down this road, with intent, for decades. But it’s hard to imagine that a few decades ago this would have been possible. Not because antisemitism had been eliminated in Germany (I almost fell over laughing just typing that), but because the West, particularly Germany, still felt enough shame about the Shoah to at least PRETEND to still try to be atoning for it.
(Spoiler alert Germany: there is no atoning for it).
In a final note of woke idiocy, also relayed in Orwell’s Newspeak, the town newspaper said this:
“Ultimately, the parents and employees wanted a name that was more 'child-friendly' and 'better suited to their concept.' Their needs are more important than the global political situation.”
Which, of course, makes no sense. Anne Frank is one of the most famous children ever to have lived. Their true “concept” is for the facility to be judenrein. And it can only be “in concept” because there are so few Jewish children in Germany today, I doubt that there are any Jewish kinderlach within 50 miles of the place. The daycare center must be free of actual Jewish children, and free of anything that humanizes the Jewish people.
The reason for why there are so few of us in Germany, the Holocaust, and why Jews, an obvious minority, don’t matter in the “diversity” calculation is exactly why erasing Anne Frank’s name should be seen as a major cultural capitulation by a weak, pathetic, and feckless West.
As for their mention of the “global political situation,” that just proves again that what is happening in Israel was never about land, imaginary occupations, or any other fake grievance: it is about us, the Jews.
All of us.
This definitely has all of the ingredients of 1933 part deux.
Or should I say “part zwei”?
No. What I am going to say is: WAKE UP. The West can’t afford to remain complacent once more while evil is allowed to grow unchecked. Never again is now.
Never give up. Never give in.
Am Yisrael Chai.