Episode in new Netflix series mocks diarist Anne Frank
Netflix: YouTube
The new Netflix series “Historical Roasts,” which mocks the young Jewish diarist Anne Frank, finds itself in the midst of a backlash.
One particular episode features actress Rachel Feinstein as Frank, Gilbert Gottfried as Adolf Hitler and Jon Lovitz as U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. These performers are Jewish.
“Everyone knows you as a hero and a best-selling author, but to me you’ll always be little number 825060,” says Gottfried as Hitler to Anne, adding that, “Of all the accounts that I’ve read, Anne, your book is by far the most flammable.”
Jeff Ross, the host, who is Jewish, dons a yellow Star of David armband and remarks that “genocides continue to take place around the world.”
“If you’re offended by anything you see tonight,” says Ross, “just do what FDR did—and look the other way.”
Groups, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, instantly reacted to the program.
“This is beneath contempt. Irrelevant that Jews are involved,” SWC associate dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper told JNS in an email. “At a time of raging antisemitism and Holocaust denial, there is ZERO that is humorous about mocking Anne Frank.”
The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam labeled the show “tasteless satire,” while the Dutch-based Information and Documentation Center on Israel, which monitors antisemitism, tweeted that the comedy was “unwelcome.”
“If one mocks someone who has wrongly and innocently experienced horrific pain, it indicates that one supports and applauds that horrific pain,” Zionist Organization of America president Mort Klein told JNS. “In this case, it’s sick and antisemitic.”
StandWithUs co-founder and CEO Roz Rothstein told JNS that “Jews cope with the trauma of the Holocaust in many different ways. It is unfortunate that in this case, Jewish comedians chose to deal with it through tasteless, insensitive humor about Anne Frank. As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, I am offended and sincerely hope they will exercise better judgement in the future.”
Netflix referred JNS to comments made by Ross, defending the episode, which he told the Jewish Journal was taped after the Oct. 27 Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that resulted in the deaths of 11 Jewish worshippers during Shabbat-morning services—the deadliest attack in American Jewish history.
“As a comedian, you do things that no one’s ever done, and roasting Anne Frank sounds outlandish, it sounds risky, but to me, the riskier move would be to ignore the most provocative and the most emotional stories,” he said. “People always talk about the Holocaust and they say ‘never forget,’ but young people, I’m sorry, they are forgetting. They need to hear these stories, and I use Anne Frank not just as a hero from World War II but as a cautionary tale of today and antisemitism.”
Ross just doesn’t get it. Mockery has no place in humour when employed in this way. If, as he says, ‘As a comedian, you do things that no one’s ever done …’ and that’s your raison d’etre, then you’ve already succumbed to worse than mediocrity. To be avant garde for the sake of it is merely narcissistic celebration of the self.
What a travesty all this is, of the memory of Anne Frank, and of the Holocaust. Not clever, not funny, and it’s to be hoped that the Jews who took part grow enough in the future to be able to feel shame. Rabbi Abraham Cooper is right: it’s beneath contempt, and I can’t help but wonder at some of the American Jews and their attitudes, different, I think, in the main to Jews in the Diaspora elsewhere.