What’s worse than the Hitler twitter handle that sprung up a few years ago? The new “Hipster Anne Frank” account.
Hipster Anne Frank, who says she’s going to put the bottom two floors of her “loft” on AirBnB and complains that Peter wants her to make him 300 sandwiches, turns an icon into the butt of a joke. The real problem is the jokes aren’t even funny, just offensive. Take some of the handle’s latest tweets:
https://twitter.com/HipstrAnneFrank/status/383593339401936898
https://twitter.com/HipstrAnneFrank/status/382218567917113345
https://twitter.com/HipstrAnneFrank/status/382901289832550400
This isn’t the first time the Holocaust victim has been parodied. A hipster Anne Frank Facebook page has existed since 2011. Family Guy has also made a few tasteless jokes on the topic.
The new handle (earliest tweet dates back to September 22) only has 49 followers, but has already drawn the ire of several Jewish publications, including Haaretz. The Hipster Anne Frank creator has not yet revealed him or herself and won’t respond to direct messages, and Haartez’s The Forward bemoaned how the anonymity of Twitter allows such offensive handles to crop up:
I fear that this kind of tasteless misappropriation of Anne Frank’s memory and legacy, and that of other historical personalities, will only increase now that people can hide behind Twitter handles. The person behind Hipster Anne Frank would probably get less of a jolly out of making these insensitive quips if he or she had to deliver them while looking at his or her audience in the eye. In that case, they’d probably meet with disapproving stares.
At least when Justin Bieber says he hopes Anne Frank “would have been a Belieber” he puts a face to his ignorant comment.