The Harvard Lampoon has apologized for publishing a sexualized image of Anne Frank in a bikini after it was denounced as anti-Semitic and misogynistic.
A recent edition of the student-run humor magazine depicted the face of the world-renowned writer over the image of a bikini-clad woman, The Boston Globe reported.
{mosads}Above was the text, “Gone Before Her Time: Virtual Aging Technology Shows Us What Anne Frank Would Have Looked Like if She Hadn’t Died.”
“Add this to your list of reasons the Holocaust sucked,” text below the image reads.
The Lampoon’s two co-presidents and issue editor apologized on Tuesday “for our negligence in allowing this piece to be created for and printed in our latest issue.”
Th statement went on to affirm and emphasize that the Lampoon condemns “any and all forms of anti-Semitism.”
“Moving forward, we will approach the content of our magazine with greater care,” the statement read. “We realize that our publishing process lacks sufficient editorial oversight, so we are going to restructure our review process for issues to prevent the publication of content like this.”
Frank was 15 years old when she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after hiding out from the Nazis with her family in Amsterdam for several years.
Her father published her writings posthumously in “The Diary of a Young Girl,” which is considered to be one of the most powerful Holocaust memoirs, the Globe noted.
Rabbi Jonah Steinberg, the executive director and chaplain for Harvard Hillel, denounced the image in a letter to the editors of the Ivy League magazine.
Steinberg wrote that those behind the image “effectively join yourselves to the obscenity of the Nazis themselves and carry it forward.”
“Your depiction of Anne Frank’s face grafted to pinup imagery goes far beyond the distastefulness and provocativeness you obviously intend,” he wrote. “It is the sexual violation of a child – one who, in life, was subjected to the most hideous of crimes.”
More than 250 Harvard College students signed a petition denouncing the Lampoon for the image, according to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper.