Natalie Portman uses Anne Frank to slam US policy

Natalie Portman is the latest celebrity to jump into the controversy over whether it is appropriate to compare US policy on migrants to the Holocaust and she comes down firmly on the side that it is.

The Israeli-American actress posted a photo of herself on Instagram on Wednesday that she said was of herself at 16 visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and wrote: “When I was 16 I visited Anne Frank’s house with Miep Gies, the woman who bravely hid Anne and her family when the Nazis were rounding up Jews in Amsterdam and much of Europe. Today, I shudder at the thought of a young girl hiding somewhere in my own country, afraid to turn on her light or make a noise or play outside lest she get rounded up by our government.”

Portman played Anne Frank in a Broadway revival of the play, The Diary of Anne Frank, in 1997.

While over a quarter of a million liked the post, others criticized it, saying that migrants who try to enter the US illegally should not be compared to those persecuted during the Holocaust.

One commentator who was critical, Collin Gregory Maddox, was representative of those who disagreed with Portman, saying, “I have just as much sympathy for Anne Frank as you do but this would not be happening now in the United States if they would come in legally. What is so hard to understand about that?”

Portman’s post comes on the heels of a tweet by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman Democratic New York congresswoman, that said, “This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying.”

At least five American Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, and many public figures let Ocasio-Cortez known they thought she was wrong to compare migrant detention centers on the southern border to concentration camps.

Deborah Lipstadt, the Emory University professor and scholar whose fight against a prominent Holocaust survivor was the basis for the movie, Denial, tweeted following Ocasio-Cortez’s statement: “Talk about the horrific conditions & not historical analogies. Don’t give those who are behind this policy a chance to piously claim they are being wrongly accused. Use of Holocaust analogies to condemn US immigration policy is a distraction.”