Hip hop Anne Frank ignites debate over taste and trauma

Slam Frank is a new off-Broadway Afro-Latin hip hop musical about Anne Frank. Yes, you read that right. Slam Frank. Anne Frank. Hip hop. Are you offended? Many people are. The show is brilliant, offensive, jarring, Jewish, chaotic, and triggering, and it has ignited a fierce debate across Jewish communities about taste, trauma, and who gets to decide what is sacred, at a moment when simply being Jewish already feels fraught. 
 
The idea for the show emerged from a viral Twitter thread in 2022, where users debated whether Anne Frank ever acknowledged her “white privilege.” Jews were not white to the Nazis; quite the opposite. Slam Frank takes that collapse seriously, building an entire theatrical world out of contemporary absurdity.  

The show imagines how a progressive community theatre company obsessed with identity politics might reimagine Anne Frank’s story into something intersectional, multiethnic, genderqueer, decolonized, and empowering. Except for the first few minutes, when the director of the fictional theatre company steps onstage to introduce the production, the entire performance unfolds as a show within a show. Slam Frank is ultimately less about Anne Frank herself than about the contemporary frameworks through which her story is retold and sometimes distorted. 

This is not a show for the easily offended. The program explicitly acknowledges Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park and The Book of Mormon, situating Slam Frank firmly within a comedic tradition where everyone is a target. In this kind of satire, the more sacred society deems something to be, the more likely it is to be mocked. 

Anne Frank is no longer Anne but Anita Franco, a radically reimagined version of the diarist shaped by contemporary identity politics. In keeping with the show’s origins, Anita is emphatically not “white”: she is a Latina pansexual from the barrios of Frankfurt. Anita’s sister Margot, by contrast, is the only character costumed to fit the historical era and the only one who performs recognizably Jewish rituals, including lighting Shabbat candles and celebrating Hanukkah.