Thursday, August 21, 2025
From Ian:
The Holiest Hatred
The Holiest Hatred
We should think deeply about the aesthetics of anti-Zionist ritual—about how much it owes to the liturgical imagination of Christian Europe, where the sacred victim is elevated for adoration and the scapegoat is driven back into exile. Christ is paraded before the crowd in agony, while the Jew is cast out as the enemy of love.Israel Isn’t a Danger to Jews — Jew Haters Are
In the anti-Zionist moral cosmology, the “suffering Palestinian” has become the consecrated victim whose pain redeems the sins of empire, while the Jew, displaced from that role, is rendered the contaminant to be expelled. This figure functions as the key symbol through which anti-Zionism unifies all the world’s evils into its constructed image of “Israel,” the source of all wrong. The claim that Jesus was Palestinian is not only a silly anachronism. It’s also a symbolic anchor.
Like the coming together of two rivers, the Islamist figure of the shahid— the martyr, suicide bomber, and human shield—now flows seamlessly into the icon of the Palestinian Christ, until West and East resonate together in one shared cult of death.
These symbols, tropes, and rhetorics form the backbone of anti-Zionist ideology: its sacrament of accusation, its passion play rewritten for the age of NGOs, academic conferences, and algorithmic amplification. Anti-Zionism has gone institutional, now woven into the worldview of Western elites, which frames the expulsion of the Jewish state from the community of nations not as a tragic necessity, but as a redemptive consummation—proof that the world still knows how to purify itself through pogroms and revolution.
And yet, despite this emerging megastructure of institutional anti-Zionism, its adherents have immunized themselves against recognizing their majoritarian power over Jews, through a familiar conspiratorial reversal: the Jew no longer as a vulnerable minority, but as the symbol of global domination. The more Jews are imagined as “powerful,” the more powerful the accuser feels in attacking them. It is a transference of strength. The blandest bigotry, the erosion of all decent standards, and that raw commitment to believing the libels—these are enough to turn resentment into sanctimony, envy into enlightenment.
During the campus riots of 2023 to 2024, activists marshaled the aesthetics of protest as “dissent,” acting out the conspiracy that “Zionists” control universities and governments in the very performance of protesting against the Jews. The result is freedom of speech for the Gentiles, but not for Jews, who are met instead with social ostracism, exclusion, and the demand to renounce their collective identity. School rules, and liberal principles, break like dams in the face of anti-Zionism’s energetic floods of accusation.
Antisemitism-as-justice is raw power with a humanitarian face. It is the stirrings of totalitarianism and the flouting of the law, coded in the language of law, now jammed into academic settler-colonial theory’s jargon of libel. Legal and moral evaluations are cast aside, irrelevant before the fixed drama that casts the Jew as the genocidal settler and the Palestinian as the natural force of Indigenous resistance. Once the roles are set, every outcome is already decided. The show trial of the Jew is set.
So yes, the “humanitarians” may be seething with bitterness and corrosive envy—but they believe themselves righteous. In this respect, nothing has changed. The medieval priest defending Christ from the enemies of love itself, the Enlightenment reformer purging the stubborn particularist from the universal order, the Romantic moralist rescuing culture from aesthetic corruption—all saw themselves as defenders of justice. Anti-Zionism inherits the same role, transposed into the register of human rights and international law while destroying their foundations in the process.
When hatred wears the robes of justice, it is immune to moral appeal. It will always claim the higher ground because the hate itself is the proof of one’s virtue. It will call itself a critique, and you will be the defendant on trial.
That is what makes this antisemitism of righteousness so persistent and so dangerous: It not only distorts the truth about Jews but also corrodes the very space in which truth and justice could be spoken at all.
Now, to be clear, I believe that Israel’s actions to defeat Hamas, which massacred over 1,200 people, raped women, and took 251 hostages, are righteous. But let’s just tease out the argument made by Friedman and Patinkin, and echoed by others, and assume that Israel’s actions in Gaza are making a lot of people very angry. In any other case, the left would strenuously oppose anybody who lashed out at all members of a group for actions taken by some members of the group. Yet when it comes to Jews, this somehow no longer applies.Musical with Anne Frank as pansexual Latinx has audiences wondering, ‘Is this for real?’
As an example, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, there was a huge emphasis on the idea that people should not take out their anger on Arabs and Muslims. This wasn’t even a sentiment confined to Democrats. With the rubble still smoldering at Ground Zero and search and rescue efforts still underway, Rudy Giuliani warned against engaging in group blame against Arab communities in New York City; George W. Bush talked about Islam as a “religion of peace.”
Similarly, after October 7, progressives weren’t screaming that Hamas’s actions put a target on the back of Muslims everywhere. They were, instead, blaming Israel for creating the conditions that led to the Hamas attacks, or trying to restrain Israel from responding. Had American Jews started harassing Muslims leaving mosques in the wake of the attacks, the left-wing outrage would have been against the Jews, not against Hamas.
Yet when it comes to Israel, and to violent criminals venting their anger by carrying out attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions all over the world, the left is directing its ire at Israel rather than on the actual perpetrators.
The reality is that a lot of people in the world want to do harm to Jews, and while the excuses may change, this has been the case for thousands of years. Does the left really need a refresher on how secure world Jewry was in the years prior to the founding of Israel in 1948? Are we to believe that its first 75 years of existence did not inflame antisemitism everywhere, and that this started to become a danger only after its response to October 7?
What exactly is “Slam Frank,” the purported hip-hop musical that reimagines the Holocaust’s most famous victim as a pansexual Latinx girl today?
Is it a real show with real actors and real songs constructing a real story for real audiences? Or is it an elaborate social media prank designed to pillory the left and rage-bait the right? Or could it be both?
The show’s Instagram account, its primary engine of promotion, has stoked the confusion.
Co-creator Andrew Fox posts snippets of songs, rapping in character as Anne Frank — or Anita Franco, as she’s named in the play — about being “straight from the barrio” and calling people “gringos.”
“Storytellers like me are trying to make the Holocaust diverse,” Fox said in one Instagram post. “Because you watch movie after movie after movie and everybody looks like this — white, white, white,” he remarked, pointing to a still from “Schindler’s List.”
The posts range from sneak peeks of the show to broader, seemingly tongue-in-cheek commentary. Fox, who is Jewish, frequently posts on the account about being a Latinx artist (through his father’s Ecuadorian third wife) and his efforts to “decolonize Broadway.” Another post satirizing inclusivity issues decries the fatphobia of both Broadway theaters and Nazi concentration camps. (“Neither of these environments were built to accommodate people of size.”)
Fox and the “Slam Frank” team have built a social media campaign that is, like the premise of the show itself, inclusive to a fault. Many don’t know what to make of it, or whether this build-up is leading toward a real production.
“You guys are joking right?” one Instagram user commented. “I genuinely can’t tell in this political landscape.”
“You can’t actually think that making this is a good idea,” another user pleaded in a DM.
Among the at least dozens, and often hundreds of comments on each “Slam Frank” post, you can be sure to find commenters asking something along the lines of, Is this real??
But lately, as the show has opened workshops to critics and sold out the first eight nights of its upcoming Off-Broadway run, its devoted but somewhat befuddled fan base has started to trust that there might really be a full performance ahead — one that bears out its billing as “The Diary of Anne Frank” meets “Hamilton” meets “South Park.” According to Fox, the show will start a developmental run, meaning the script might still be tweaked for later performances, at Asylum NYC on September 17.
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