Anne Frank was 13 years old when she went into hiding from the Nazis. For more than two years, she lived in an Amsterdam attic, terrified of being discovered, until she and her family were arrested and deported to concentration camps. She died at Bergen-Belsen at the age of 15, before her diary became one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust. She was simply a frightened Jewish girl who wanted to survive.
Now, more than 80 years later, two Jewish writers have turned her story into a musical comedy featuring grotesque Jewish caricatures, jokes about Jewish wealth and a fictional Anne Frank who would rather turn her family in to the Nazis for certain death, than see the establishment of The State of Israel. And people are actually paying to watch this garbage.
The production is called Slam Frank, and it is playing at New York’s Orpheum Theatre. Its creators, Andrew Fox and Joel Sinensky, are both Jewish. Their musical grew out of a 2022 social media debate about whether Anne Frank had benefited from white privilege, an accusation so historically ignorant that Adolf Hitler himself might have found it amusing. Under Nazi racial laws, Jews were considered an inferior race, regardless of their skin colour, appearance, education or level of assimilation. A Jew could have blond hair, blue eyes and generations of German ancestry, and it would have made absolutely no difference. The Nazis did not consider Jews part of their supposedly superior Aryan race, and no amount of assimilation was going to protect them from persecution.
Fox and Sinensky took that premise and reinvented Anne Frank as Anita Franco, a pansexual Latina, while Peter became a gender-questioning climate activist. The story of eight Jews hiding from Nazi persecution was transformed into an Afro-Latin hip-hop musical populated by characters representing contemporary political and social identities. The writers describe the production as a satire of progressive theatre and its obsession with rewriting history to satisfy modern political sensibilities.
Apparently, their solution to the historical revisionism they claim to be mocking was to rewrite the life of one of the Holocaust’s most recognizable victims and turn her suffering into a theatrical spectacle.
According to an October 6 review by New York theatre critic Jonathan Mandell, the production eventually introduces Orthodox Jewish caricatures wearing black coats and prosthetic hooked noses, singing about conquering Palestine, collecting rent and accumulating money and influence around the world. The greedy Jew, the sinister Jew, the Jew secretly manipulating money and world affairs were familiar characters in centuries of anti-Jewish propaganda, later exploited by the Nazis. Fox and Sinensky have taken those same caricatures, dressed them up for the theatre and given them musical numbers.
The yellow Star of David also features prominently in the production’s promotional imagery. The logo depicts a young girl wearing the star while holding a diary above her head in a pose reminiscent of Hamilton. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Jews were forced to sew yellow stars onto their clothing so that they could be identified, humiliated, segregated and eventually deported. Anne Frank wore that star before her family went into hiding. It was a compulsory badge imposed by a government preparing to destroy an entire people, and it has now become part of the advertising for a musical comedy. A symbol that once marked Jewish children for persecution is being used to sell theatre tickets.
The production’s treatment of Israel is equally repulsive. Its fictional Anne questions whether survivors of the Nazi genocide would themselves become perpetrators, while another scene reportedly has her choosing to expose her family’s hiding place rather than allow the future establishment of a Jewish state.
The writers have decided to put contemporary arguments about Zionism and the Palestinians into the mouth of a Jewish teenager who never lived to see Israel established. They have even invented a scenario in which she effectively volunteers her family for Nazi arrest rather than permit Jewish national independence. Somebody apparently considered this clever enough to put on a New York stage.
Mel Brooks spent decades making audiences laugh at Hitler and the Nazis. In The Producers, his outrageous Springtime for Hitler musical number turned the Nazi dictator and his followers into objects of ridicule. Brooks, who served in the American military during the Second World War, knew exactly what he was mocking. Hitler was the fool, Nazism was the target and the murderers were the people being humiliated. He did not need to exploit the memory of Jewish children murdered in concentration camps to get a laugh.
The television series Hogan’s Heroes, which ran from 1965 to 1971, followed much the same formula. Colonel Hogan and his fellow Allied prisoners consistently outsmarted their German captors, while Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz were portrayed as incompetent buffoons. The prisoners were intelligent and resourceful, while the German military establishment was the target of the jokes. Several performers involved in the series had experienced Nazi persecution firsthand.
Both Brooks and the people behind Hogan’s Heroes demonstrated that it was entirely possible to produce enormously successful comedy about Nazi Germany without reducing its victims to racist caricatures.
Slam Frank, meanwhile, has found an appreciative audience. Its earlier developmental run played to sold out houses, and the current production has attracted enthusiastic reviews. Some audience members have reportedly walked out, while others have praised its humour and willingness to provoke.
The thought of people purchasing tickets to watch this spectacle is mortifying. These are not obscure historical references requiring an academic degree to understand. They are recognizable elements of one of the most thoroughly documented genocides in human history, yet audiences are willing to sit through them and applaud.
Imagine somebody producing a musical comedy about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955 and turning his kidnapping, torture and murder into a theatrical spectacle, complete with blackface, grotesque racial caricatures and cheerful musical numbers about lynching Black children in the American South.
The writers could even reinvent Till as a contemporary political activist, giving him opinions he never expressed and transforming the circumstances of his murder into an elaborate joke. A respected New York theatre could agree to stage it, critics could praise its daring satire and audiences could buy tickets to laugh and applaud.
The condemnation would be deafening, and deservedly so. The writers, producers and theatre would face enormous public pressure to answer for what they had created. Yet when the child is Anne Frank, grotesque Jewish caricatures become musical numbers, the yellow star becomes promotional artwork and the whole spectacle is praised as provocative entertainment.
Fox and Sinensky’s Jewish identities make their choices particularly repulsive. They know what happened to Anne Frank, what the yellow star represented and where those exaggerated Jewish noses and accusations about money and influence originated. Ignorance is hardly a plausible explanation. Their musical has generated controversy, publicity and paying audiences, while the memory of a murdered Jewish child supplies the material.
Calling it satire does not erase the images on stage or diminish the contempt shown toward the people whose suffering has been appropriated for entertainment. There is nothing daring about provoking an audience with the suffering of a child.
There is another obscenity in the choice of venue. The Orpheum Theatre stands on Second Avenue, once the heart of New York’s thriving Yiddish theatre district, an area known as the Jewish Rialto. Generations of Jewish immigrants helped establish that neighbourhood as a centre of Jewish theatrical and cultural life. Now a theatre occupying part of that historic district is hosting a production built around Anne Frank, incorporating some of the very stereotypes that Jewish communities spent generations fighting to overcome.
And where is the Jewish outrage? Broadway commentator Joy Rosenthal launched a petition in April 2025 calling for the production to be stopped, and individual critics have condemned it. But where are the major Jewish organizations and Holocaust remembrance institutions that regularly remind us of the need to confront anti-Jewish hatred? A search of public statements found no condemnation of this production from the ADL, American Jewish Committee, Simon Wiesenthal Center or Anne Frank Center.
Jewish organizations have spent decades educating the public about Nazi propaganda and the dangers of Holocaust distortion. A musical exploiting the memory of Anne Frank, staged in a city with one of the largest Jewish populations in the world, should be generating considerably more opposition than an online petition and scattered criticism.
Anne Frank was not a fictional character invented by a playwright. She was a real teenager who argued with her mother, worried about boys, dreamed about her future and wrote about the frustrations of living in confinement. Her father, Otto Frank, survived Auschwitz and returned to discover that his wife and both daughters were dead. He published Anne’s diary so that the world could hear the voice of the daughter he had lost. The extraordinary success of that diary was never an invitation for theatrical opportunists to rewrite her experiences into a contemporary political fantasy.
The entertainment industry, which regularly congratulates itself on its sensitivity toward persecuted minorities, has apparently found room for a musical featuring anti-Jewish caricatures and the exploitation of a Holocaust victim’s memory. The writers have managed to combine historical ignorance, grotesque racial stereotypes and contemporary political grievances into a production that encourages audiences to celebrate its supposed cleverness.
The Nazis forced Anne Frank to wear a yellow star as a mark of humiliation. Eight decades later, that star is helping advertise a show carrying her name. The fact that this production has found a theatre willing to stage it and an audience willing to applaud it is a disgrace.
Anne Frank deserved better than to have her suffering exploited by people looking for a laugh, a headline and a quick buck.
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