Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

The Anne Frank Center Is No Longer Apolitical — And Has Limited Ties To Frank Family

The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, the small New York nonprofit that has grown in prominence over the past year due to its new executive director’s incendiary rhetoric toward President Trump, reportedly does not consider itself a “pro-Jewish” group — and has only tenuous ties to the Frank family.

The Atlantic reported Monday that, contrary to the organization’s claims, the Anne Frank Center was founded without any direct involvement from Anne’s father Otto.

Since executive director Steven Goldstein joined the organization in June 2016, the center, which is independent of the foundations that run the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and own the rights to her diary, has had 100% staff turnover, disbanded its committee of Holocaust scholars, shut down its New York museum and is refocusing on social-justice organizing.

“It isn’t our focus to be pro-Jewish or to be just a Holocaust-education [organization],” new board chairman Peter Rapaport told The Atlantic. “We want to use the knowledge of the Holocaust and go further.”

Correction, 3:38 p.m.: An earlier version of this article said that the Anne Frank Center “reportedly no longer considers itself a ‘pro-Jewish’ group.” In fact, they have never officially considered themselves to be a Jewish organization.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter at @aidenpink.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.