Primrose Road

Next month, a stage musical based on Anne Frank's diary opens in Madrid. The Guardian reports:

"The Anne Frank Foundation, which jealously guards the rights to the diary - it once turned down Steven Spielberg when he wanted to make a film - has given its support. Jan Erik Dubbelman said: "This production respects the message of tolerance, within the tragedy, that we want to keep alive.""

Tolerance.

The Anne Frank Foundation is promoting "tolerance" via performers who sing and dance a Holocaust story.

The officemates who hid the Frank family -- and, of course, the thousands of Dutch citizens who hid and rescued Jews in the 1930s and 1940s -- seem to have done a bit more than simply tolerate their neighbors. It seems a bit off, therefore, to translate their acts into a feel-good message of tolerance for the twenty-first century.