Anne Frank’s face is unmistakable, in her cheerful smile and short dark hair. Anne Frank is a symbol of tragic fate, a life cut short, of wasted potential. But perhaps most recognizable in Anne Frank’s face is the spirit of a girl longing to live a normal life from the confines of a hidden attic, a young girl who wrote with sensitivity, grace and humor.

But Anne Frank never wrote again after The Diary of A Young Girl. Anne Frank died in 1945 at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, succumbing to illness, starvation, or both. However, the exact cause of her death is unknown, and in 2015, The Anne Frank House released a report showing Frank’s date and location of death may have been incorrect. Despite the inconsistency, most believe diarist Anne Frank died at the age of fifteen.

For Israeli actress, Chen Drachman, the reporting surrounding Anne Frank’s death sparked thoughts about death’s supposed definitiveness. In her screenplay, Ruth’s, Drachman asks the provocative question: What if? What if Anne Frank was alive today? What if Anne Frank was living among us? And what if Anne Frank was your grandmother? Such is the premise of Drachman’s short screenplay in which Lizzy confronts her grandmother, Ruth, at a Passover gathering about her real identity, a secret Lizzy has long suspected. In a chilling moment, Lizzy says to her grandmother, “It’s you, isn’t it?”

Part of Ruth’s success can be attributed to the appearance of Tony award-nominated actress Tovah Feldshuh in the lead role, (The Walking Dead, most currently, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) during a reading fundraiser this past November at the JCC in Manhattan.

The screenplay focuses on themes of guilt and celebrity fetishism, as well as the ties that bind us together as family and most interestingly, the millennial generation’s fixation with “doing good.” As the older Anne wisely suggests, some secrets are best left buried. The adult Anne Frank is adamant about maintaining secrecy, stating that she’s paid her dues and deserves peace and quiet. The dialogue between the snappy Feldshuh and the idealistic Drachman is vibrant and realistic; Feldshuh provides a portrait of the wry and quick witted Jewish grandmother with ease.

Although the screenplay is short, hovering just around 10 minutes, the larger questions Drachman brings up feel limitless. What price do we pay when we’re transformed from human to symbol?

Drachman, who is a third generation Holocaust survivor is acutely aware of the negative feedback she could receive from imagining such a scenario, the boldness of revising history. But what is art if not our outlet to imagine other dimensions and reality? What child didn’t want to go through the wardrobe and into Narnia?  

Drachman has raised about a quarter of what she needs to make the screenplay into a movie by submitting to a variety of diverse festivals both mainstream and niche around the world. (Individuals are welcome to donate online, as well.) The screenplay has been recognized several times, including the NYC Independent Film Festival. Ruth’s is sponsored by a 501(c)(3), non-profit, From The Heart and with runaway successes like Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, it’s a good idea to keep your ears open to smaller projects with big hopes.

Photo of Drachman, left and Feldshuh by Oren Korenblum.

The post ‘Ruth’s’: Giving Anne Frank Another Life appeared first on Jewcy.

About that mawkish make-out scene from The Fault in Our Stars movie: no, say comedians Tracy Soren and Jessie Jolles. Just, no. And we in turn say: thank you, Soren and Jolles. God bless you. At long last, that cheap, sentimental ploy for feeling gets the irreverent smack-down it deserves.

“Do you need a lesson in Judaism?!”

“Rule number one: Don’t kiss in the Anne Frank House.”

“Rule number two: Don’t clap in the Anne Frank House.”

(Image: YouTube)

The post Rule #1: Don’t Kiss in the Anne Frank House appeared first on Jewcy.

Anne Frank would have turned 85 today, and to honor her legacy, Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House asked followers to tweet about the impact the iconic teen diarist had on their lives, using the hashtag #AnneFrank2014. If you’d like to have your spirit lifted and your faith in humanity (and social media) restored, we recommend checking out the stream of tributes. Here are a few favorites:

Because “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” is my mantra. #AnneFrank2014 http://t.co/Q5QPGVtDn1

— Caiti Ward (@coolcaiti) June 13, 2014

#annefrank2014 She showed me both the great evil & good men are able to do. She taught me I cannot falter when I’m tired, that I must go on.

— Schwanenlied (@dark_swan) June 13, 2014

Courage and optimism in the face of unimaginable fear and disparity. She taught me to value life at a very young age. #AnneFrank2014

— Amber Hampton (@iMayNotFollow) June 12, 2014

Other ways to remember Anne—aside from reading her book, of course—download a free copy of the audiobook (thanks, Random House!), make a donation to the Anne Frank House, and watch the lovely, powerful two-part 2001 miniseries based on her life, “Anne Frank: The Whole Story.”

Also, here’s an assemblage of interesting Anne Frank-related links we came across while perusing the internet today:

The Prescient Poem 10-Year-Old Anne Frank Penned in Her Schoolmate’s Friendship Book (h/t the ever-wonderful Brain Pickings)

A Kiss in the Anne Frank House (h/t Sarah Seltzer, The Forward) — interesting piece about the controversial ‘make-out’ scene which takes place in Anne Frank’s attic in teen tear-jerker “The Fault in Our Stars.”

Extraordinary new play brings Anne Frank’s secret world to life (CNN) — A new play based on Anne Frank’s life is receiving rave reviews in Europe.

Someone Made an Anne Frank Video Game (Tablet) — Bizarre, true.

Meyer Levin’s Anne Frank: A controversial radio play of the famous diary—rejected in 1952 as too Jewish—gets a second airing (Tablet) —  Podcast!

http://youtu.be/VFAVWmFMLVE

http://youtu.be/GHeRd7L_9SA

The post Anne Frank Would Have Turned 85 Today appeared first on Jewcy.

I very much hope this pulpy take is the result of benign ignorance, or illiteracy, or a series of devastating but irreversible technical errors. Did the designer accidentally switch the cover art for Anne Frank’s diary with the cover art for a novelization of the 1987 B-grade classic, Mannequin? Did they hear the word “attic” and conflate Anne and Peter’s tentative romance with a racier, Flowers in the Attic-type affair? Also, SHOULD WE TELL JUSTIN BIEBER? ‘Cause I think we might’ve found his Belieber.

The post The Weirdest Anne Frank Book Cover Of All Time appeared first on Jewcy.

Beyonce took a break from her rigorous European tour schedule to visit the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam today. Judging by the photos posted to her Instagram account, it was an appropriately sombre affair, and no embarrassing Justin Bieber-esque gaffes were committed.

The Internet immediately broke into a frenzy of praise and analysis, the general tenor of which was: “Stars, they’re just like us: they visit Holocaust museums and feel sad!” This might seem like an absurd thing to Tweet about (and even sillier to blog about), but the cultural significance of the moment runs deeper than a “like” or two (or in this case, 648,000 Instagram “hearts”): millions of young people—many of whom might have only a superficial knowledge of the Holocaust—follow Beyonce on social media, and I’m guessing at least a few thousand of them will be curious enough to pick up a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank after seeing these photos. That can only be a good thing.

Writes Marc Tracy over at The New Republic:

As we scrolled through our Instagram feeds, past selfies and cat pictures, we were jarred to come across the world’s most famous pop star mugging with the iconic black-haired murdered Jewish girl. The Holocaust is jarring, and it serves us well to be jarred anew by it every so often. This picture allows us to recover our sense of wonder at its enormity and awfulness. Good for Beyoncé for putting us in that place.

Queen Bey, you’re all class.

Related: Beyonce Could Be Coming to Israel in June

The post Beyonce Visits Anne Frank House in Amsterdam appeared first on Jewcy.

Ari Folman, director and star of the Academy Award nominated Waltz with Bashir, is at it again, but this time, he’s writing and directing an animated film about the life of Anne Frank. Frank’s father Otto has given Folman full access to the archives at Anne Frank Fonds Basel, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“Bringing the Anne Frank Diary to all screens is a fantastic opportunity and challenge,” Folman said. “There is a real need for new artistic material to keep the memory alive for younger generations.”

Folman’s new film will be family-oriented, unlike his past films and television shows. It begins production in 2014.

The exploration of memory, trauma and history is nothing new for Folman, who excavated his own memories of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to make Waltz With Bashir. He also created the En terapia, the Israeli TV series about psychoanalysis adapted by HBO as In Therapy. But the move to more family-oriented material will be a new one for the Israeli writer/director.

Let’s hope that Ron Ben-Yishai can get a role in this film, too. That deep, deep voice should play a prominent part of every film from here on out. Hear, hear!

If you don’t remember, or haven’t seen, Waltz with Bashir, watch a trailer here and get reacquainted with Folman’s unique cinematic style.

The post ‘Waltz with Bashir’ Director Making New Film About Anne Frank appeared first on Jewcy.

With songs called “Angus Bangs Sheep,” and “The Schlong Song,” as well as a duet number that features Helen Keller moaning while Anne Frank shushes her, one would think that Turner’s routines would cause more of a shock. Only once, though, has she gotten guff from an angry audience member, outraged at Turner’s bit about Googling god.

Another time, a table full of senior citizens left loudly in the middle of her set. “I guess I offended them,” she said. “They got up so abruptly that I really made a big deal, because it was noisy and rude and interrupted my show. It turns out one of them was having a heart attack. I felt really bad.”

Despite her off-color lyrics and song themes, Turner is by no means a vulgar person off-stage. She spends most of her time with her husband, comedian Ralphie May, and their two young children. Turner met May when she started doing comedy 14 years ago, and she regularly opens shows for him on the road when not headlining clubs herself.

In addition to performing, Turner recently completed the treatment for a sitcom based on her life with May. She also plays a teacher in the upcoming film, Teacher of the Year, and will appear on an episode of The Dog Whisperer.

But for Turner, the journey—which included years of waiting tables and cleaning houses—has been worth it. “Just the other day I got an email from someone who said they had a bad day and seeing my show changed everything,” she said.

“Laughter is the best medicine. It can heal a hurt heart. I love to laugh. Who doesn’t love to laugh? The rush of being on stage and getting people to laugh together is an amazing feeling.”

The post Singing Along with Lahna Turner appeared first on Jewcy.

Rabbi Newmark sat down to face us where we had gathered at a table stacked with empty pizza boxes. She looked to me then like a person for whom it is impossible to imagine eating anything without a fork. And then she told us: “Anne Frank was a brat.”

In the late 1930s—when Newmark was not much younger than I was upon hearing her tell the story many years later—she was living in a German-Jewish refugee neighborhood in Amsterdam, a few houses down from the Frank family. Their parents were friendly. Helga was three years younger than Anne, who had invited all the other girls from their block to her birthday party. “Everyone except me,” Newmark explained bitterly to my class.

Frank Talk [Tablet Magazine]

Photo: Anne Frank, second from the left, at her 10th birthday party in 1939 in Amsterdam. (Anne Frank Fonds)

The post One Woman’s Lifelong Grudge Against Anne Frank appeared first on Jewcy.

If you believe the British press, the new novel Annexed by Sharon Dogar is a XXX parody of The Diary of Anne Frank, a heated-up redux of the story we all know: A boy and girl, terrified and fairly certain that they would be killed, locked away from the world at the very age when their hormones are taking over their brains. It could be hot, right? Take away the context and it’s basically the bad-parts version of Go Ask Alice.

Now I have to make a confession: I nearly puked when I wrote that paragraph.

Something about the book Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl makes those of us who have bonded with that book feel fiercely protective of it. Even that word feels insufficient: protective. What would you do if someone through your child in front of a train? When I first read the book, Anne was a friend, a confidante in a world and a school where I couldn’t trust anyone. I got older, old enough to read the unedited version (although it hadn’t been published then)—or, at least, to understand what was happening between Anne and Peter Van Daan—and I had a luminescent crush on her. Now I have grown up, she hasn’t, and I think of her like my two daughters—like if anyone hurts her or tarnishes her name, I’ll break their face.

Which gets me thinking about Sharon Dogar. A few years ago, my best friend died, and I didn’t know how to write about that, so I wrote a book about us. A 13-year-old me, a loser and a cutter locked away in his room with only books, hears a knock at his closet door. It’s Anne Frank, who’s discovered a passage from the Secret Annexe. We hide out and tell each other stories, avoiding the greater issues in our lives together, much the same way that the real-life Anne did with her journal. For a very brief period, I tried to sell it—fielding suggestions from my well-intentioned agent like “Could you make it funnier?” and “Feels like a book for girls, but main character is a boy—mind changing?”

The pages are sitting on the top shelf of my bookcase, collecting dust.

So I know what Ms. Dogar is going through. I know how it must’ve felt to take on this book, to delude yourself into thinking you’re worthy of adapting another person’s voice, one who got it stolen from her way too early. Ms. Dogar is a gambler, and she is brave.

And I know, one false step and I will kill her.

To my surprise, Annexed wasn’t very sexed-up at all. We always downplay book covers—why not judge a book by it, anyway?—but this one does a remarkable job of selling the story’s mood and subject: a teenage boy, sepia-toned, melodramatic, a Jude armband in an exaggerated yellow around his forearm. The prose inside is overwrought and pleading: a riddling of exclamation points, boatloads of repetition, lots of one-word and one-line paragraphs that have the queasy effect of being both exposition and awkward character development (“Is that the only reason we want to [kiss]? / I don’t know. / How do you ever know, anyway?”).

The romance in Annexed is way less subtle than the miscegenation in Twilight—almost to the point where it begins to feel like a parody. Peter’s voice appropriates the gentle smugness of Anne in her diary: He sounds a bit too startled, a bit too proper, like older people translating the voices of younger people.

Which is exactly what The Diary of Anne Frank was, and what Annexed is. Just as Otto Frank was probably the worst person to edit his teenage daughter’s diary, a middle-aged woman is probably not the best person to write the voice of a teenage boy with overactive hormones and control issues. But that’s what writing is all about, right? Imagining. Putting yourself into another world, taking surface lies and spinning them into a fundamental truth.

The thing that’s annoyed me about a lot of young-adult books is how so many of them are geared toward girls these days; the male characters aren’t real guys so much as they’re approximated caricatures of boys, the sort that only exist inside teen girls’ conversations. That’s not the Peter of Annexed. Dogar has given him flaws, and quirks, and dorkinesses—he’s a fleshed-out character who is largely relatable and sometimes detestable.

But her Peter is very rarely unpredictable—there’s a scene at the beginning where he’s walking through the streets after having taken off his Jude armband, imagining the thoughts of the people around him (all of whom, he’s convinced, can tell he’s a Jew, and are thinking that he’s a dirty Jew bastard)—and it might be true, but it’s exactly what you’d expect him to be thinking, with no poetry and no surprise. It’s the limitation that fan-fiction writers have, trying to alter a history that someone else has control of, and it is Ms. Dogar’s Achilles’ heel as well. No matter what thoughts she puts into Peter’s head, or what modifications she makes to his romance with Anne, there’s nothing she can say that hasn’t been said already, with more immediacy and by one of the participants. I wanted to like Annexed, and in a way I really do, but I like it in the same way that I like reading reviews of movies I’ve already seen. I want to catch a dull glimmer of that blindingly good story.

Do I blame Ms. Dogar for diminishing Anne, or stealing some of the light herself?  Of course not. In her own way, she’s making the original shine brighter. Like my crush and my suppositions about what good friends Anne and I might have been, Annexed is a fan letter to the same Anne Frank I wrote to. We just have two very different relationships.

Matthue Roth is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

The post Anne Frank Gets Sexified…And That’s Okay appeared first on Jewcy.

By Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón

Published by Hill and Wang

Recently the Guardian published a list of Top 10 Influential Women, with a teenage Jewish girl making the list. Anne Frank’s mark in expanding the Holocaust experience to outsiders has been taken a step further this fall in the release of a new publication. Written in collaboration with the museum in Amsterdam, Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography portrays the Franks’ family life in tandem with the contemporary events that displaced and disconnected their lives through the Holocaust. Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s book follows their earlier collaboration on an equally complex subject. Anne Frank transforms artifacts into graphic dialogue in a way that isn’t offensive, and, for the art-minded, it is a treat to have a combo of art and good education.

Based on artifacts from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, including images from their virtual Secret Annex, the book manages to dramatize the Franks’ biography by filling in a familiar narrative within a historical framework. Establishing shots of the political landscape side by side with dialogue make the characters’ circumstances relevant. Lines from Anne’s diary are often presented in her thought bubbles while other diaries, letters, maps, and photographs enrich the story flawlessly. A striking scene where Anne is bicycling with Miep Gies across Amsterdam to their hiding place is vividly depicted further with a map of Amsterdam outlining the route they took.

Its publication in the US this fall follows its marketing in Europe over the summer as a novel for the intended audience of “teenagers who would otherwise not pick up the diary.” While the informality of the authors’ style within the graphic novel genre make it accessible to a teenage audience, the conciseness and fluidity with which Jacobson and Colón uniquely yet accurately deconstruct a difficult subject make this book fair game for a wider readership.

The book’s format does raise eyebrows however, many readers at first glance seeing the Holocaust as trivialized in a medium normally reserved for the Batmans and Charlie Browns of fiction. University of Chicago’s English and Romance Language Bibliographer Sarah Wenzel, a pioneer in the legitimization of the graphic novel in academic collections, has purchased the book in both English and the original Dutch editions. She and the University’s Art and Film bibliographer Nancy Spiegel co-curated an exhibit at the Library titled “&#$!: Graphic Novels as Social Commentary,” on display now.

Beyond superfluous illustrations in books, the vast genres successfully treaded by graphic novelists far surpass the classic comic connotations of many readers. Wenzel has found that, “format should be less important than the message and the way in which the subject is treated.” Furthermore, the use of the graphic novel to discuss social issues is not a new one, often speaking for the disenfranchised or marginalized since the medium’s coming to being in the 1980s. The reticence to adopt this vehicle of communication in academic libraries was also a battle for documentary films, now widely purchased by film-studies bibliographers but still slow on the end of social science librarians.

The melding of graphic novel illustration and biography uses the strengths of two linear storytelling mediums to convey a very complex moment in history. Wenzel’s experience has revealed that sometimes the “combination of visual and textual provides a stronger impact on the reader than either alone,” as in Art Spiegelman’s renditions of xenophobia via zoomorphism in Maus, 1930s racial tension as beautifully depicted in Jeremy Love’s Bayou, and the account of a Muslim girl in Iran during the Islamic Revolution in Persepolis. It is not so far fetched for a nonfiction biography like Anne Frank that is equal in dramatic components without employing allegory to join the ranks.

“For me, this seemingly insignificant child’s diary embodies the real hideousness of fascism more so than all the evidence presented at Nuremberg.” These words of historian Jan Romein that helped Otto Frank publish the diary originally could also be reapplied to Jacobson and Colón’s biography. The concept revitalizes the event for a modern audience. Rather than chastising an evolving social landscape, Jacobson and Colón like Wenzel evolve with the times with the common goal of providing the resources necessary to advance knowledge in public and academic communities.

The post Reviewed: <i>Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography</i> appeared first on Jewcy.