LISTEN: Has the story of Anne Frank been forgotten? US college students answer

This week, as we mark the February 1945 death of Anne Frank and her sister Margot, People of the Pod co-host Manya Brachear Pashman and producer CucHuong Do hit the quad of an American college campus to find out if young people still recognize the famous diarist.

“Diary of a Young Girl,” also known simply as Anne Frank’s diary, resonates with young and old alike, and for decades has been used in classrooms to illustrate the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

Surveys indicate that today’s generation may appear to be dangerously short on facts regarding the Holocaust – but the story of the 15-year-old whose diary was found and published after she died in 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, has always acted as a low water mark when it comes to Holocaust education. Not surprisingly, the thoughts and yearnings of an early teenage girl forced to hide for her life have been integral in putting a human face on statistics of death that can be staggering.

With knowledge of the Jewish genocide seemingly at an all-time low — nearly a quarter of Canadian millennials hadn’t even heard of the Holocaust, and more than half couldn’t name a single concentration camp, including Auschwitz, in a poll conducted last year — is Anne Frank’s story lost to history?

The weekly podcast, produced by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in partnership with The Times of Israel, examines current events through a Jewish lens. In a revealing man on the street segment, university students get to answer the question for themselves: Does today’s college generation know the name Anne Frank?

Then, co-host Seffi Kogen speaks with the director of the AJC’s Africa Institute, Eliseo Neuman, about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent surprise meeting with the transitional leader of Sudan, the northern African Arab-Muslim country which is still technically at war with Israel. Does Netanyahu’s secret meeting with leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan indicate a turnaround in Israel-Sudan relations at the same time as Israel pushes for closer ties with Arab Gulf countries? Neuman weighs in on what this may portend, and whether the meeting was really as unprecedented as popularly thought.

Also this week, The Times of Israel conducted a wide-ranging interview with both incoming and outgoing heads of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella group representing some of the largest and most active Jewish groups in the US today.

Malcolm Hoenlein has become a household name in the over 30 years he’s helmed the Conference, while newly-appointed CEO William Daroff has already long been named as one of America’s most influential Jews by media outlets.

Alongside Times of Israel editor David Horovitz and political correspondent Raoul Wootliff, the pair discuss the newly-revealed Trump peace plan, the state of bipartisan support for Israel in the US, and how anti-Semitism is working to unify Jews worldwide.

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