The Diary of Anne Frank, a Play Based on the Book, Debuts in New York

Yet the question of Anne’s relationship to her Jewishness became a point of controversy between her father and the playwrights and dramatists. The 1955 Broadway play was written by two non-Jewish playwrights, while the play written in 1952 by the Jewish writer Meyer Levin (1905–1981) was rejected because, as the publishers who rejected it told Otto Frank, it was too Jewish, an assessment in which Otto Frank acquiesced. “I always said that … it was not a Jewish book,” he wrote to Levin, “so please do not make it into a Jewish play.” The version written by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich was more universal and especially less anti-German than Levin’s; in the United States of the 1950s—the period of the Cold War, the McCarthy era and the fight against the Soviet Union—Communist ideology was the principal enemy and the hostility to Germany of the 1940s was set aside. Several researchers of literature and film believe that the diary, which presented Anne’s character as an impressive human figure who clings to liberal-democratic values, increased the identification of Jews with these universal values, which coincided with the desire of American Jews to be part of the culture of the country that took them in, to assimilate into it, and to emphasize the Holocaust less since it bore out the uniqueness of the Jewish people.

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/frank-anne