In July 1944, weeks before she was arrested, Anne Frank wrote one of the most hopeful sentences to emerge from history’s darkest chapter: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Months later, she was dead at Bergen-Belsen. She was 15.
For 80 years, the world has remembered her. We have read her diary, staged her story, built museums in her name, and taught generations of children two words: Never again. But remembering is not the same as learning. Nearly three years after Oct. 7, 2023, the question is not whether the world remembers Anne Frank. It is what the world remembers, and who is teaching it.
My premise is simple: The world no longer learns its history from classrooms and museums alone, but from its loudest voices. When the people with the biggest platforms blur the ideology that killed Anne Frank, they don’t just get history wrong. They give the oldest hatred permission to return.
This summer at Lincoln Center, I watched Kara Young play Fontaine in The Whoopi Monologues. Fontaine is a black woman of the streets: an addict and a thief, profane and hardened, who also holds a Ph.D. in literature from Columbia. On the run from New York, she lands in Amsterdam and finds herself in the Anne Frank House. She sits down. Silence. For a moment, something gets through the armor. Whatever else she has lost, she has not lost Anne.
Whoopi Goldberg wrote that scene and performed it on Broadway in 1984. She understood, better than most, how one girl could reach someone who had stopped letting anything in. Six million is a number the mind cannot hold. Anne gave it a face, a voice, and a handwriting.
Today, Goldberg has something far larger than a Broadway stage. As moderator of The View, she speaks to millions of Americans every weekday. She is one of the most influential voices in the country. In 2022, from that chair, she told her audience the Holocaust was “not about race” but about “man’s inhumanity to man.”
The Nazis thought otherwise. They defined Jews as a race and built their laws, deportations, and death camps on that definition.
She apologized, said she stood corrected, and explained that as a black woman, she had understood race as something you could see. ABC suspended her for two weeks anyway. Ten months later, she repeated the idea in an interview with the Sunday Times of London and apologized again. I take her at her word. That is what makes the moment instructive rather than merely embarrassing. The woman who wrote one of the most moving encounters with Anne Frank ever put on an American stage had still lost hold of what killed her.
This is what happens when history becomes memory and memory becomes symbol. We remember the girl. We forget the ideology. And when the people with the biggest platforms blur it, millions blur it with them.
Education alone was never the safeguard. Nazi Germany was among the most educated societies in Europe. What we learn depends on who is teaching. More and more, the teachers are hosts, celebrities, and influencers with audiences no classroom can match.
An ideology that is forgotten is free to return. On Oct. 7, 2023, it did.
Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel and murdered some 1,200 innocent people: families in their homes, young people at a music festival, children, grandparents, Holocaust survivors. They dragged more than 250 hostages into Gaza. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
For about a day, the world was horrified. Then came Oct. 8.
Before Israel had buried its dead, the justifications had begun. At Harvard, more than 30 student groups declared Israel “entirely responsible.” In Times Square, demonstrators celebrated what they called resistance. Within days, the same slogans were racing across social media, amplified by accounts with millions of followers. The massacre of Jews had been recast as the Jews’ fault.
That was not a shift in opinion. It was a revelation. The gates opened. Not the gates of Auschwitz. The gates of permission.
Permission to say in public what had once been whispered in private. Permission to hold Jews thousands of miles away responsible for an Israeli government’s decisions. Permission for the oldest hatred in the world to return, wearing new language.
The numbers followed. In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 3,697 antisemitic incidents in the United States. In 2024, it recorded 9,354, the most since it began counting in 1979. Even after falling in 2025, the total stood at 6,274, and physical assaults reached a record high.
Then the words became bullets and fire. In Washington, two young Israeli Embassy staffers were shot dead, leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. In Boulder, a man hurled firebombs at people marching for the hostages; an 82-year-old woman later died of her burns. On Yom Kippur, worshippers were killed in an attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England. At Bondi Beach in Sydney, gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration, killing 15.
At a museum, at a march, at prayer, at a holiday party. Not in Gaza. In Washington, Colorado, England, and Australia.
Criticism of Israel is not Jew hatred. That distinction matters, and I will keep making it. But the woman burned in Colorado was not criticizing anyone. Her killer was not debating policy. He was hunting Jews.
Even language has been claimed. This month, The Washington Post reported that some Jewish leaders are debating whether to abandon the word Zionism altogether. Within three years of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the word for Jewish self-determination has become so toxic that Jews wonder whether they can still say it. That is what permission looks like. It is not only what others feel free to say. It is also what Jews no longer feel safe saying.
None of this is new. Jews have been blamed for the plague and for poisoned wells, for capitalism and communism, for being too rich and too poor, for having no country, and now for having one. The accusations change. The target does not. Hatred of Jews has always said less about Jews than about the people who need them.
Is this simply human nature? I refuse to believe it. Human nature produced the Nazis. It also produced the people who hid Anne Frank for more than two years, carrying food up the stairs behind the bookcase at the risk of their lives. Scapegoating is a choice. So is refusing it.
That choice now rests most heavily on the people with the loudest voices. Whoopi Goldberg once used her gift to make audiences feel what Anne Frank meant. Her platform today is vastly larger, and so is her responsibility. The same goes for every host, celebrity, and influencer who shapes what millions believe about history. They can blur the ideology that killed Anne Frank, or they can name it.
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Anne believed people were good at heart. But people who thought of themselves as good let her die. The question is not whether we have good hearts. It is whether good hearts, and the loudest voices among them, will hold the line.
For eighty years, the world has repeated her words. The question now is whether we still have the heart to make them true.
Karen Lehmann is a journalist, photographer, and columnist based in Washington, D.C. She writes on American politics, public policy, Israel, and culture as a blogger for the Times of Israel and a columnist for Man and Culture. A former New Yorker, among other organizations she served on boards, she served on the New York Philharmonic’s volunteer council, focused on education, and spent some 20 years teaching children to appreciate classical music.