Each day seems to offer new lessons for Washington in how perilous it can be to invoke the Holocaust.

The lesson learned on Tuesday by members of the Harvard Lampoon, the vaunted satirical magazine founded in 1876, was a bit different.

Best not to photoshop the head of Anne Frank, the German-born Jewish diarist who perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, onto a shapely, bikini-clad body, the student humorists realised. Best, also, not to circulate the image and flippantly call it an addition to “your list of reasons the Holocaust sucked.”

The undergraduate publication, which has launched staff from the Ivy League campus to the writing rooms of comedy shows such as Saturday Night Live, came under fire this week for the crack that appeared in an issue distributed over the weekend.

The doctored image ran below the headline, “Gone Before Her Time: Virtual Aging Technology Shows Us What Anne Frank Would Have Looked Like if She Hadn’t Died.”

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

Students on Sunday began circulating a petition demanding that the magazine be held accountable, the Harvard Crimson reported. And Rabbi Jonah Steinberg, executive director of Harvard Hillel, a hub of Jewish life on campus, wrote in an email to Lampoon editors that the image recalled Nazi propaganda.

“It is an image one can imagine Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Stürmer, producing and celebrating,” Steinberg wrote. What the students had depicted was “the sexual violation of a child – one who, in life, was subjected to the most hideous of crimes.”

Among the students who took offence was a Harvard sophomore who posted the cartoon on Facebook. When the image ran afoul of the site’s community standards and was removed, the student, Jenny Baker, turned instead to a Google Doc. She included an image of the page in question and enumerated her objections.

“Holocaust jokes? Never okay,” she began. “Sexualising a young girl’s body? Never okay,” she continued.

“Sexualising ANNE FRANK and saying it is a shame she was ruthlessly murdered because of her religion because she would have been hot? So unbelievably not okay,” she emphasised.

Baker delivered a recommendation to the staff of the Lampoon: “Try to find other ways to be funny rather than sexualising and trivializing the murder of a young girl and an entire population of people.”

She concluded, “This is trash.”

The backlash reached beyond campus. Robert Trestan, the director of Anti-Defamation League’s Boston office, tied the “outrageous, insensitive, sexualized” image to a rising tide of anti-Semitism, saying the student-run organisation had crossed a line between humour and bigotry. He called for an apology.

The Lampoon provided one on Tuesday evening.

“We realise the extent of offence we have inflicted and understand that we must take responsibility for our actions,” the magazine’s leaders wrote in a statement posted online. Pledging to revise their editorial review process, they underscored that the Lampoon “condemns any and all forms of anti-Semitism.”

The magazine, known for high jinks at its turreted headquarters blocks from Harvard Square, boasts a roster of distinguished alumni, including late-night host Conan O’Brien and novelist John Updike. The Lampoon has embraced honorary members as disparate as Winston Churchill and Kesha.

It has not shied away from the national spotlight. In 2015, Lampoon members, posing as the staff of the Crimson, convinced then-candidate Donald Trump that he had earned the endorsement of the undergraduate newspaper. They smiled for a photograph with the real estate tycoon, who flashed a thumbs-up sign.

Cartoon imagery invoking Jewish history and identity has proven especially fraught in recent weeks. The New York Times apologised last month for a caricature of Trump blindly following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, rendered as a guide dog with a Star of David hanging from his collar.

Concerns about corrosive imagery come as the Anti-Defamation League documents “near-historic levels of anti-Semitism.” The organisation recorded a total of 1,879 attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions last year in the United States, making 2018 the third-highest year on record, according to an audit released in April. In Germany, anti-Semitic episodes rose nearly 20 per cent between 2017 and 2018, according to figures released Tuesday by the Interior Ministry.

Survey data suggests that anti-Semitic incidents are increasing as understanding of the Holocaust diminishes, testing the rallying cry, “never forget.” Forty-one percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, are unable to say what Auschwitz was, according to a 2018 survey commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Fifty-two per cent of Americans believe Adolf Hitler came to power by force when, in fact, he was elected in 1933.

Frank’s diary, published posthumously in Dutch in 1947 and translated into English in 1952, has been an enduring source of global Holocaust education. “The Diary of a Young Girl” delivers stark moral truths, such as, “What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.”

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The diarist also wrote of the respect owed to her gender, asking, “Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn’t women have their share?”

And before she died at the age of 15, she declared her own worth as a young person.

“Although I’m only fourteen, I know quite well what I want,” she affirmed. “I know who is right and who is wrong, I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child, I feel quite independent of anyone.”