Netherlands: The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is merely a simulacrum of a Jewish institution

Jeffrey Goldberg writes in the Atlantic ("Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?") about the iconic House of Anne Frank in Amsterdam and reveals that it "has never had a Jewish director" and that "it is widely understood in Amsterdam’s Jewish community that Jews should not bother applying for the job". For Goldberg, and he is right, it is merely a simulacrum of a Jewish institution.  Excerpt:

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Many institutions are devoted to memorializing the Shoah, but very few are as iconic as the Anne Frank House, in Amsterdam.

Each year, more than 1 million visitors—many of them Dutch students—make their way up narrow flights of stairs to the perfectly preserved “secret annex” where Anne Frank and her family hid until they were betrayed.   The Anne Frank House, which is now encased inside a multimedia museum, is a significant operation, employing 112 people.

 I went one morning to talk with its head of education, Norbert Hinterleitner, about how the Jewish crisis in Europe is shaping the house’s pedagogical mission. There has always been tension in the public portrayal of Anne Frank. The specifically Jewish qualities of her life have often been marginalized in literature, onstage, and in film, replaced with a more universal and, to some, accessible message.

I began the interview with a faux pas. A very large number of curators, guides, and directors in European Jewish museums, in my experience, are not Jewish. This is due in part to the general lack of Jews, and to the very large number of museums—Europe is a vast archipelago of Jewish museums. And yet somehow I made the assumption that Hinterleitner was Jewish. “I’m Austrian, actually.” He didn’t know how many employees at the museum were Jewish, but, he said, “there are some people who have Jewish lineage.”  He then added, in what I took to be an effort to explain my initial confusion, “Some people here think I’m Jewish, because I’m dark and I have a big nose.”

The Anne Frank House has never had a Jewish director (though Hinterleitner pointed out that at least two members of the board must have a “Jewish background”), and I would learn later that it is widely understood in Amsterdam’s Jewish community that Jews should not bother applying for the job.

Hinterleitner said that the museum addresses anti-Semitism in the context of larger societal ills, but also that it recently issued a strong press statement condemning anti-Semitic acts in the Netherlands and elsewhere. He said the museum has made an intensive study of anti-Semitism in the Netherlands, and has learned that most verbal expressions of anti-Semitism in secondary schools come from boys and are related to soccer.

The Anne Frank House is merely a simulacrum of a Jewish institution in part because, as its head of communications told me, Anne’s father said that her diary “wasn’t about being Jewish,” but also, Hinterleitner suggested, because a museum devoted too obsessively to the details of a particular genocide might not draw visitors in sufficient numbers. “We want people to be interested in this issue, people from all walks of life. So we talk about the universal components of Anne Frank’s story as well. Our work is about tolerance and understanding.”

When I left, two policemen were patrolling the narrow street outside the museum. A temporary surveillance post had been erected just across from the entrance. I asked one of the officers whether this level of security was normal. He said the government had increased security around the museum last spring, shortly after a massacre at another Jewish site: On May 24, four people were murdered at the Jewish Museum of Belgium, in Brussels, allegedly by a French Muslim of jihadist bent named Mehdi Nemmouche. Two Israeli tourists, a French volunteer, and a Belgian employee of Muslim and Jewish descent were killed. Nemmouche had recently returned to Europe after a term with ISIS in Syria, where, according to a former French hostage of ISIS, his specialty was torturing prisoners.

“If you have an anti-Semitic attack on Anne Frank’s house, it won’t be the first,” I said to one of the police officers. We have never had an attack, he said. Not on his watch. But it is fair to count the August 4, 1944, Gestapo raid on the house, which resulted in the arrest of the Frank family, as an anti-Semitic act. Anne died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, roughly one month before it was liberated by British forces. Anne Frank has become an obsession of modern anti-Semites. More.