Was Anne Frank “bisexual?” Keen to claim her as one of their own, some queer activists are citing previously overlooked passages from the complete and unabridged second edition of Frank’s diary as evidence that the world’s most famous Holocaust victim swung both ways. “I remember that once when I slept with a girl friend I had a strong desire to kiss her, and that I did do so,” Frank wrote about a sleepover with her best friend. Disregard, if you can, the strange fixation with the sexuality of a hormonal adolescent girl; seizing upon the private musings of a 14-year-old about her school crush as prima-facie evidence of bisexuality does little to illuminate, and much to occlude, the reason she and her family were hiding in the attic, which is that they were Jews. It is of a piece with other, modish forms of historical revisionism driven by contemporary political demands, like the claim that Muslims are “the new Jews,” that Syrian refugees are the modern-day equivalent of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, or that detention centers holding individuals who voluntarily cross the internationally recognized border of a democratic country are akin to “concentration camps” where people—based upon their ethnicity—were forcibly herded prior to their mass extermination at the hands of a ruthlessly efficient totalitarian state.

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