Brazilian parents protest teaching of new Anne Frank diary containing sexual descriptions
(JTA) — Parents in Brazil are protesting a school’s teaching of Anne Frank’s famous Holocaust diary, citing what they say is sexual content inappropriate for seventh graders.
In a letter sent to the management of the Sao Paulo branch of Escola Mobile, a network of private schools, more than 90 parents complained about Frank’s descriptions of female genitalia and her attraction to women, according to Revista Oeste magazine.
The parents were complaining about passages in the latest edition of the official diary of Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who chronicled her two years hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam before she and her family were caught, deported and murdered during the Holocaust. Frank’s father, who was the family’s only survivor, cut the passages when he published the diary because he was embarrassed by them, the Anne Frank Foundation said in 2017 when it released a graphic-novel version of the diary with some of the redacted content restored.
The additions include Frank’s description of exploring her own body and of experiencing attraction to other girls during her early adolescence before going into hiding with her family just after her 13th birthday. “I must admit, every time I see a female nude, I got into ecstasy. I wish I had a girlfriend,” Frank writes in one passage.
The Brazilian parents wrote that they recognize “the importance of Anne Frank’s writings to Holocaust education. But we disagree with teaching a version with pages with inappropriate sexual content to 12-year-olds, which for them obscures the main theme, which is the Holocaust.”
The Anne Frank Foundation, which owns the family’s archives, says Frank’s complete diary is important for understanding the full picture of the girl whose ordeal and murder have come to symbolize the tragedy of the Holocaust. “Times change and there is a growing desire for get to know the many aspects of the real Anne Frank and so it was decided to published after Otto’s death the full diary, including for the first times parts that Otto took out,” the foundation, known as the Fonds, told Veja Sao Paolo this week.
The passages in question were first published more than 30 years ago, in a book that was written for scholars titled “The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition,” the Fonds noted.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Make a Passover Gift Today!
Most Popular
- 1
News Student protesters being deported are not ‘martyrs and heroes,’ says former antisemitism envoy
- 2
News Who is Alan Garber, the Jewish Harvard president who stood up to Trump over antisemitism?
- 3
Opinion What Jewish university presidents say: Trump is exploiting campus antisemitism, not fighting it
- 4
Opinion The dangerous Nazi legend behind Trump’s ruthless grab for power
In Case You Missed It
-
Yiddish פֿילאַנטראָפּ אלי הירשפֿעלד שענקט פֿאָרווערטס די אינטערנעץ־אַדרעסן Yiddish.com און Yiddish.orgPhilanthropist Eli Hirschfeld donates domains Yiddish.com and Yiddish.org to the Forward
די מתּנה וועט דערמעגלעכן מער אָנהענגערס פֿון ייִדיש צו געפֿינען די ייִדישע ווידעאָס, אַרטיקלען און שפּילן פֿונעם פֿאָרווערטס.
-
Fast Forward Antisemitic incidents on college campuses rose over 80 percent last year, says the ADL
-
Fast Forward As the last generation of Holocaust survivors ages, advocates call for their testimonies to be heard
-
Fast Forward Jewish Federations CEO privately opposed a Jewish open letter criticizing Trump’s campus arrests
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
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 comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag 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.