Anne Frank musical shows Holocaust diarist alerting Nazis to stop Israel’s creation
Characters don caricature noses, dip their hands in blood, talk about Palestine - and "Anne" throws a page of her diary out the window to alert the Nazis to her family's presence
A comedy musical based loosely on the life of Anne Frank attempts to swear the audience – and media – to secrecy about the last 20 minutes of the show – in which characters chant about ‘Palestine’, don fake noses and dip their hands in a blood-like substance, with “Anne” throwing a page of her diary out of the window to alert the Nazis to her family’s presence in order to prevent the creation of Israel.
The New York based off-broadway show, titled Slam Frank – with the largely non-Jewish cast singing and dancing while wearing yellow Stars of David, is marketed as a musical satire, which was developed after a widely mocked social media post which asked whether Anne Frank, who was murdered by the Nazis, ever “considered her white privilege”.
Estee Stimler, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, was taken to the show and was horrified by the last 20 minutes, describing how some audience members left, but that she was not seated in a position to leave. Stimler, who is not a journalist, subsequently wrote a comment piece for Jewish News about her experience of the musical.
Within a matter of hours, Jewish News was approached by a public relations firm, stating that “we have a very strict embargo policy for all journalists” and that: “We do have some important messaging around the embargo on the last 20 minutes of the show, while we encourage and welcome conversation, we ask that no details be revealed about the final 20 minutes of the show.”
The PR representative went on to say that “the last act is designed to leave audiences in a state of shock and awe, disoriented, provoked, and compelled to continue discussing the performance long after the curtain falls. Protecting that visceral experience is essential to us, and to the integrity of the work.”
Public debate of the final 20 minutes in online forums is mixed, with a significant number of Jews coming away having been entertained by the rest of the show but appalled by its ending. Others have argued that the final 20 minutes is intended to satirise anti-Zionist Jewish attitudes, but some make the point that even if that were true, there is no context provided for non-Jewish audience members, many who could not make such a distinction.
Stimler told Jewish News, “I’m not a journalist. There was nothing when I paid for the ticket that swore me to secrecy about the last 20 minutes. I didn’t sign an NDA.”
In her opinion piece, she describes how “Slam Frank does not satirise the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It presents Zionism itself as a cynical project of displacement, a master plan to dispossess Palestinians. This was not a joke about the conflict. It was a political stance disguised as comedy. Because it came from Jewish creators, it carried a legitimacy that the same message from non-Jews would not have.”
Jocelin Weiss, a former professional musical theatre actor based in New York, said Stimler misunderstood the show’s purpose. She said: “It is a show within a show about a progressive theatre community who put on a ‘more inclusive’ production of The Diary of Anne Frank ‘so that everyone can see themselves represented as part of the Holocaust’, presented by a caricature of a director who thinks it is the most brilliant show ever written. If one visits their Instagram page, it is crystal clear that it is not Anne Frank but the “progressive” theatre communities who engage in this nonsense that the show is lampooning.”
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