‘Hateful, ignorant, pedophilic’: Harvard magazine slammed for FAKE IMAGE of Anne Frank in bikini

The Harvard Lampoon, a long-running campus satirical magazine, has apologized after publishing a photoshopped image of 15-year-old Holocaust victim Anne Frank in a bikini.

“Gone before her time: Virtual aging technology shows us what Anne Frank would have looked like if she hadn’t died,” read the headline above the fake image, with the accompanying caption, “Add this to your list of reasons why the Holocaust sucked.”

Paulette Schuster, a student at Harvard whose grandfather survived the Holocaust, described the image, which was published and distributed to dorms on the Ivy League university's campus over the weekend, as “unfunny, hateful, ignorant, pedophiliac and dehumanizing.”

Harvard chaplain Rabbi Jonah C. Steinberg said the image went “far beyond the distastefulness and provocativeness,” adding that it was “sexual violation of a child – one who, in life, was subjected to the most hideous of crimes.”

Robert Trestan, New England regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, described the image as “shameful and harmful.”

Amid the outcry and protests from students and Jewish officials from across the US, the editors apologized Tuesday in a statement on the magazine's website.  

“We realize the extent of offense we have inflicted and understand that we must take responsibility for our actions,” the editors wrote.

“We are sorry for any harm we have caused. Furthermore, we want to both affirm and emphasize that the Lampoon condemns any and all forms of anti-Semitism.”

Frank is arguably one of the most famous victims of the Holocaust. She died age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp. Her posthumously published diary is considered by many to be one of the most haunting and poignant historical documents covering the horrors of the Holocaust in which some six million European Jews were systematically exterminated.

The offending image was published amid an ongoing spate of high profile anti-Semitic incidents in the US including two synagogue shootings in six months and the New York Times scandal over its publication of an anti-Semitic cartoon depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog leading a blind Donald Trump wearing a yarmulke.

The ADL recorded 1,879 attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions across the US in 2018.

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