What Hasidic girls are really like. Writing that first novel. Half-Jewish, or married to a non-Jew, or not Jewish enough. Readers reveal how Anne Frank touched their lives.
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In 1960, U.S.S.R. authorities decided to “import Anne Frank’s diary, perhaps the only Holocaust document that managed to break through the “Iron Curtain.” Ironically, according to official Soviet history, the Holocaust... Read more »
Laura Simms, a storyteller, is the director of The Gaindeh Project using story with youth in crisis throughout the world. Her new book, love stories for adults, is The Robe of... Read more »
Elka Brandt is a senior at Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. When I write, I can shake off all my cares.—April 5, 1944. Anne Frank’s journal was a hiding place within... Read more »
Daisy Maryles is Executive Editor of Publishers Weekly. I am a child of Holocaust survivors. I was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Ulm, Germany in 1947, the same year... Read more »
Ilana Kurshan works in the editorial department at Alfred A. Knopf in New York. As I recorded in my own diary years ago. I met Anne Frank along with another Anne, Anne... Read more »
Alice Shalvi, who has lived in Jerusalem since 1949, headed the Pelech Experimental High School for Religious Girls, was founding Chairwoman of the Israel Women’s Network and chairs the Executive of... Read more »
Nava Semel’s children’s book Becoming Gershona received the 1990 National Jewish Book Award. My first teacher in writing was Anna Frank, She is the one who taught me that it was possible to... Read more »
Social worker Rita J. Kaplan is the CEO of the Rita J. & Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation. Anne Frank and I were within a year in age. I cannot remember when... Read more »
Jane Gottesman is co-curator with Geoffrey Biddle, of the photographic exhibition and book Game Face: What Does a Female Athlete Look Like? As a kid, I studied the family portraits displayed on a... Read more »
Carolyn Mackler wrote the teen novels The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things and Love and Other Four-Letter Words. One thread of the journal that has taken up permanent residence in my mind is Anne’s... Read more »
Anne Frank’s Diary appears “almost like a character” in Aidan Chambers novel Postcards from No Man’s Land (HarperCollins. 2002). He lives in England. I was a boy in my mid teens when I came across The... Read more »
Beverley Naidoo was born in Johannesburg, where she was jailed as an anti-apartheid activist. She began her writing career in exile in England and is the author of The Other Side of... Read more »
Joan Abelove is the author of Go and Come Back (1998) and Saying It Out Loud (1999). What was wrong with me? How could I not like it— it was such an important book, everyone... Read more »
Yona Zeldis McDonough’s first novel is The Four Temperaments (Ballantine). Her children’s biography, Anne Frank (Henry Holt, 1997), was illustrated by her mother, artist Malcah Zeldis. When I first read The Diary of Anne Frank in 1968,... Read more »
Letty Cottin Pogrebin is the author of the novel. Three Daughters and the memoir Deborah, Golda, and Me; Being Female and Jewish in America. I read the diary when it was first published in the United... Read more »
Lara Vapnyar came to the U.S. from Russia in 1994. Her short star)’ collection is There Are Jews in My House (Pantheon, December 2003). She says, “Like most Russian Jewish people... Read more »
Andrea King is a Hollywood screenwriter. I still have the 35-cent Pocketbook paperback. I’m sure it was my mother’s. On the cover is a photo of an exquisitely beautiful, doe-eyed Millie Perkins.... Read more »
Rachel Kadish is the author of the novel From a Sealed Room (Putnam, 1998). Last spring I taught a course, “Writing About Place,” at Boston College. The students read the sections of Anne’s diary... Read more »
Leslie Hollis Margulies is Lilith’s advertising manager and a cabaret singer. Her first CD will be released in November. I read the Diary of A Young Girl: Anne Frank when I was ‘ turning... Read more »
Susan Goldman Rubin is the author of more than 35 books for children and adults. Her most recent title is Searching for Anne Frank: Letters From Amsterdam to Iowa (Abrams, 2003). My older... Read more »
Dara Horn is 26 and lives in New York City. Her novel In the Image (W.W. Norton) was published last fall. [See page 29] I read Anne Frank’s diary when I was 12, ravenously,... Read more »
Dr. Ruth Westheimer is the psychosexual therapist who pioneered the field of media therapy. Anne Frank’s diaries have had a tremendous impact on how I’ve tried to live my life. This year... Read more »
Her husband has lost his ability to reason, but not his car keys. What happens next?
Where were you when you first read Anne Frank’s diary? Naomi Danis asks 23 readers—Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Dara Horn, Susan Goldman Rubin, Leslie Hollis Margulies, Rachel Kadish, Andrea King, Lara Vapnyar, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Yona Zeldis McDonough, Joan Abelove, Beverley Naidoo, Aidan Chambers, Carolyn Mackler, Jane Gottesman, Lynne Reid Banks, Rita J. Kaplan, Nava Semel, Alice Shalvi, Ilana Kurshan, Daisy Maryles, Elka Brandt, Laura Simms—-to tell us how Anne touched their lives.
What does it take to write a novel? Three first time novelists—Amy Koppleman, Dara Horn and Nina Solomon—dissect the craft.
When no one is home, I open the box and take one out, one of the five white linen sheets my father brings down from the attic to hang on... Read more »
We have trespassed; we have dealt treacherouslywith our desire, coercing a rebirth from bone; we have acted perversely; we have done wrongin our bodies, wishing them hollow as folly; we... Read more »
I think I throw up into the darkness, and I push because I can’t help it. My tichel, the sweaty black headscarf, slips over my eyes and I leave it so... Read more »
A hundred generations after Tamar, in the year of her own jubilee, a woman still hungers for Torah. She will be cold on the bimah alone. Gone are the arms of... Read more »
Married to a non-Jew, she’s the expert on ritual, law, and Hebrew pronunciation.
She says that she isn’t missing a thing, and that her ability to live in two worlds is shared by more and more of her peers.
What’s a twentysomething newly religious woman to do when she find out that her own mother’s conversion wasn’t kosher enough?
What Hasidic girls are really like: to find out, the author lived for a year with Brooklyn’s Lubavitch Jews. Meet student "Malkie Belfer": who offers strength, spunk—and more backtalk than you’d expect.
Rabbi Balfour Brickner, outraged by American government policies that trammel women’s reproductive rights, tells us why these fly in the face of Jewish law and good sense.
