Harvard humor magazine apologizes for 'shopping Anne Frank's head onto the body of a woman in a bikini

Too soon

.

As the Crimson article states:

The image depicts a cut-out of Frank’s face superimposed on an image of a woman in a bikini. It also includes a caption reading, “Gone Before Her Time: Virtual Aging Technology Shows Us What Anne Frank Would Have Looked Like if She Hadn’t Died.”

“Add this to your list of reasons the Holocaust sucked,” the caption continues.

Sure, photoshopping a dead teenager's head onto a pinup model picture is super crass and there's no statement there about Judaism or Jews in the picture alone. They just picked a famously dead young person whose image is probably most recognizable by the broadest group of people. That made the joke what it is (which isn't even that great of a joke).

But the addition of the continued caption about needing this as another reason to hate the Holocaust probably pushes it a bit over the line into anti-Semitic. At that point, you're saying, "It's not just funny to think that she would have turned out hot if she hadn't died young...but it's also funny because she was killed because she was Jewish and caught by the Nazis too!".

It's not the most anti-Semitic joke ever told, but it's also not a joke that needed to be told either given the nature of the victim used as a punchline. Name another famous dead teen and replace Anne Frank with that person instead and ask whether the joke would be as funny, edgy, blue, or black and the answer is likely no, which means it's more about Anne Frank than it is about mocking clickbait headlines with stupid photoshopped pictures like this one.

With the freedom to live how she wanted and believe what she wanted.

The holocaust didn't just happen overnight. It was the result of decades of snide remarks and misinformation about Jews until it seemed "prudent" to make them identify themselves and later isolate (and kill) them in the name of security and nationalism.

It's not a joke and it's terrifying to see it happen again, particularly in this country.

There are literally countless other people who weren't killed in a genocide, and who haven't become a symbol of remembrance of that horrific slaughter, they could have photoshopped. If you're not deeply offended by this, do some soul searching. Or maybe just admit how you really feel.

None of them make even a pretense of civility. They are utterly determined to be as toxic as they can. And they have a platform here.

Deplatforming works.