Blot Out and Remember

Daniela Naomi Molnar’s new book confronts the source text of modern antisemitism with a project of excision, explication, and preservation.

By Jason FranciscoMarch 21, 2026

• Poetry

• Cultural Studies

I will write songs against you,
enemies of my people; I will pelt you
with the winged seeds of the dandelion;
I will marshal against you
the fireflies of the dusk.
—Charles Reznikoff, from Separate Way (1936)

I AM ON AN AIRPLANE, and I fall into conversation with the passenger next to me, which lasts for hours and allows, by turns, an unusual frankness. My seatmate is a young woman returning to the United States from a solo trip to North Africa, a graduate student in nursing. At some point, she asks me about my background. “I’m a Jew from California,” I tell her. “You know,” she says, “there’s something I’d like to ask you.” And after a pause that communicates “please don’t take this the wrong way,” she asks: “Is it true that you own the media, and the banks, and basically the government?” And to whatever was the look on my face she adds, “Well, not you, but the Jews. Because that’s what they say—”

“Because that’s what they say.” The way she ends her question all by itself sums up the problem. Here is that ambiguous “they,” standing in for the conspiratorial truth-whisperers wherever they lurk. How to reply to this question nonsarcastically, nondefensively? Contesting the canard of ever-hidden Jewish power feels to me as pointless as trying to disprove the existence of lilliputian polka-dotted elephants. The credulous will always reply: “Just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t exist!” It is, as the Yiddish-speaking generations of my family would have said, a “narisheh zakh,” a fool’s errand, to try to vanquish kitchen-table gossip, or capture phantoms.

She and I resolve it, as any two friendly people might—with a question and a laugh and understanding. But I begin with this anecdote because bigotry’s native realm is fable, and fable is often where it lives. As authorless as certain fables are, as diffused into popular consciousness, it is also true that specific texts cohere them and catalyze their dispersal. Whether my airplane interlocutor has actually read it or not, a specific book of pernicious fable is very likely the source of that “they say.” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been a significant source of bigotry and surely the single most significant work of anti-Jewish propaganda of the passing century.

The text’s 24 chapters or “protocols” are purportedly the meeting notes of a Jewish secret society that convened in Basel, Switzerland, at the time of the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The text first appeared in serial form in a Saint Petersburg newspaper in 1903 and was collected into its most recognizable form in 1905. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the end of the First World War, conspiracy theories mushroomed across Europe concerning “Judeo-Bolshevism”—the idea that Jews were to blame for communism (though in Russia itself, for capitalism). Translations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion quickly appeared: in German, English, French, and Japanese (1920), Italian (1921), Polish (1923), and Arabic (1925).

Already in 1921, as quickly as it rose in mass culture, investigative journalists in Britain, the United States, and Germany debunked the text as a forgery and a fake, a plagiarized mélange of a little-known 1864 French political satire and an 1868 German novel with a chapter set in the Jewish cemetery of Prague. While the exact writers or editors of The Protocols remain unclear, it was likely created at the behest of the Okhrana, the Russian Empire’s secret police, as a ploy to discredit the gathering movement for reform in early 20th-century Russia. Notwithstanding that it was subsequently discredited as a hoax in multiple court cases around the world, the text’s popular reach has only grown over the past century. It was, unsurprisingly, a staple of Nazi propaganda, and likewise a key resource for the drivel published by Henry Ford’s widely read newspaper The Dearborn Independent. Today, editions of the book circulate in dozens of languages, its paranoid inventions feeding malign pseudo-knowledge on the right and the left alike, across cultures and media types.

No one is counterfactually superpowered to erase an untruth, and yet the American Jewish poet Daniela Naomi Molnar gets remarkably close. Her book PROTOCOLS: An Erasure (2025) takes on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by going around the reasoned corrections of standard criticism and the labors of deconstruction, which would evaporate the text of its claims to stable signification, truth, or the power of presentment. Instead, Molnar subjects the text to a (formally) violent countermeasure, a literal erasure, in which she goes line by line, effacing, blotting out, obliterating most of the words of a 1920 English-language edition. The result is altogether surprising. The erasure results in a scattering of words and phrases across pages of wide emptiness. Her task, as she seems to give it to herself, is to disfigure literally what is disfigured morally, in search of any indwelling nonobscenity she might find, as if to decoct some tonic from its bile. There are precedents to this method. For related works in documentary poetics, see Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (1938) and Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975). The ruin of each protocol is a poem, or perhaps more accurately a mutant poetic utterance, whose words are entirely provided by the original text, but whose spirit belongs to Molnar.

The resulting “PROTOCOL” poems retain from their Protocols source the quality of revelatory pronouncement, as if a disclosure of the insights necessary to dissipate some basic confusion about how the world works.

The poems have opinions, generally truistic, replete with prognostication. And yet they are patently enfeebled, adrift on the page; their erstwhile confidence has become a stray thought echoed in darkness. What they once called out they now stutter. Sometimes it seems the words themselves have become strange and flailing. But often, remarkably, their thoughts resolve into moral clarity, even tenderness. “PROTOCOL 18” enjoins:

                                allow death

                        touch it with love

                what was it like

        remembrance of

                                make a house for it

                        and for vanishing

                and for blind protracted chattering

        of confined fear

                        allow it to be a flock of secrets

                then let them escape

        understanding

                the true audacity

                        of this ordinary moment

                                is absence as order

                                        attenuating itself

It is an arch, highly subversive gesture to force the source text to speak as Molnar does, for at least two reasons. First, it is a rigorous speaking in the ways the poems overtly choke on themselves, swallow their own tongues in the enunciative act, and finally yield silence, withdrawal, unsayable blankness. If it is generally the case that silence is the counterpart of any poem, and the counterpartage can be elaborated through various metaphors—silence as the poem’s frame, or the field into which the poem is enunciated, or the hand organizing its parts—with Molnar’s poems, silence is a substance. If the poems were insects, erasure would be their bodies and words their antennae feeling a way forward. (I reprimand myself: gah, do not creaturize the silence. No work of art should need to prove itself by way of some lesser seduction.) It is enough to say that the qualities of silence in these pieces—like the medium that silence is—change from poem to poem, subtly registering the energies of the erasure, ranging from cold neutrality to turbulent repression to something like placid repose. Most of all, it is ghostly. Molnar’s dismemberment of the original manages to revoice it hauntingly, as if to force sound from the empty mouths of specters, which in turn seem constantly poised to reincarnate the original text as its own self-haunting.

Second, a strongly idealistic conception underwrites Molnar’s project: there are books, artifacts of culture, and there is The Book, the mythopoeic sanction by which worlds are conceived and within which they are sustained, without which they do not cohere. The Book as a metonym for world-making is also a classically Jewish notion, a way of understanding the act of writing as charged with the holy task of discovering a greater unfurling of meaning in time. It is exactly this sense of possible holiness—if I can use this word without its usual religiously overwrought connotations—that distinguishes Molnar’s approach. In breaking the book to silence and teasing out the still small voices within it, Molnar in effect conducts a rite on a mythic spleen. Her silence-expansive process lets poetry act on savagery. From something wretched she metamorphoses something beautiful, a needful force deep within the human psyche, insisting that ethical truth also be sensual. Her pages bless the vital shift as it seeks its own shape. What were venal lies begin to stir with compassion and justice, with the reader as their witness.

From the beginning of “PROTOCOL 12”:

        The word                        can be

                useful to us                        it will

                                                                        permit

                        empty

                                                reins

        to

                turn

                        order to

                                                        touch

                                                                                                                to

        reach

                                                        through                control

                                                                                                        (power)

                                                                        to

                                                                                        allow

                                                                        eyes

                                                                                        access to

                        disobedience

Molnar’s PROTOCOLS is a distinctly Jewish project in other senses. To assert that a given book shelters silence and hidden renewal within itself, that it options and indeed demands return to a more primary unfinished seeking—this is essentially to approach poetic making as teshuvah, the Hebrew for “return” to a state of spiritual wholeness, a core value of the Jewish religious tradition.

Molnar’s work also touches one of the epochal fractures within Jewish memory culture: Amalek, the historic enemy of the ancient Israelites, and later the symbolic name for Jewish enemies transhistorically. The Nazis, in Jewish memory, are Amalek’s contemporary expression. In the book of Exodus, Amalek ambushes the Israelites wandering in the desert after escaping enslavement in Egypt, and after the Israelites win the battle, they are commanded, in Deuteronomy, to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven” when they reach the Promised Land. At the same time, they must “remember what Amalek did to you on your journey” in perpetuity. The contradiction is evident. What does it mean to blot out and yet to remember? How to continue to remember what has been erased from the world? How to tame traumatic memory such that it does not continue to retraumatize? At what point does just remembrance morph into malremembrance? Molnar’s creative process—blotting out the words in the spirit of prophetic ache—seems to answer the ancient impossible double commandment: Remember rigorously, not rotely. Erase correctively, not obliteratively. Do not separate hatred of us from hatred within us. When you remember hatred, include your own. When you erase it, erase your own.

And though she does not address it directly, her book of erasures seems to indicate what we should not erase: do not tell of the Nazi war to blot out Jewry without also now telling of the Israeli war to blot out Palestine. It is one cataclysm, one Nakba, one Shoah in two phases.

In the text that supplements Molnar’s erasure poems, “MINUTES: A REMEMBRANCE,” she takes us into the interior of her motivations and connects the dots into a memorial asterism. Accompanied by a chorus of other minds (Adrienne Rich, Charlotte Delbo, Lawrence Kushner, Carl Jung, Jacques Derrida, Naomi Klein, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Báyò Akómoláfé, and many others), she limns her psychic inheritance as a child of a family of Holocaust survivors:

All four of my grandparents survived Nazi concentration camps. Both of my grandmothers survived Auschwitz. There were a few survivors, but my family was murdered. The world from which I come was murdered. Its communities were destroyed. The land was stolen, the property was stolen, the memories were stolen, buried, destroyed. Even those who survived were living out stolen lives. […]

My grandparents—Rosalie, Olga, Jeno, and Marczi—survived the Holocaust. They survived, but they never lived again.

In recollections, flashes, and scenes from her childhood, Molnar describes the subtle ways that the destroyed worlds of the past colonize the worlds-to-come, the ways that progeny like her are conscripted—often lovingly—into a performance of survival, as if living talismans against the return of evil, and the ways that trauma expresses itself epigenetically in her own body. In particular, she draws us close to her grandmother Rosalie, also a poet, whose memories at certain points inhabit Molnar and inform the poems that spin themselves from her when she returns to her ancestral town of Cluj, Romania, and visits Auschwitz—poems interpolated into the essay.

At the heart of Molnar’s reckoning is a paradox that I have elsewhere called the post-genocidal problem of the Jewish nothing: the loss that gains in agency, the lack that gives, the rupture that sustains what is already ruined, a void that remains volatile, a bereftness of meaning that pounds at the door. The Jewish nothing is very much present in Molnar’s work, and she studies it carefully. It seems that she discerns from it two distinct forms of “nothing”: the abyssal nothing of annihilation and its captives, and the liberatory nothing of sacred withdrawal, a primal emptiness linked in Jewish tradition to God’s apartness from what can be created and destroyed—God’s infinity, without limit or edge or name. In the epilogue to the “PROTOCOL” poems, Molnar’s disembodied voices (perhaps these are elders?) ask again:

        is the form of existence unlimited freedom or

                is the form of existence stupendous suffering

                        is the end the same        :        certain Light        certain reveal of lost form

        certain unlimited freedom        finally bonds, belongings, time, labour, history, body,

                all material life                        all                        material life

                        forgiven                                        really

The poem broaches two ways of understanding an elemental absence at the bottom of the human psyche. On one hand, the elemental absence is an unknowable: vast and magnificent, a source of awe and fear, perhaps the first invitation to create. On the other hand, it is a fundamental unmeaningness, a swallowing futility, “the unbearable nothingness […] at the center of ourselves,” as Molnar writes, as if living itself were a narisheh zakh. Toward the end of “MINUTES,” having returned from the null eternity of Auschwitz to a place she calls home, water falling around her and her flowers open, Molnar drops a cascade of infinitives:

to furl
to fold
to hold
insensate pain
dead nub of
having preferred to have died
of seeking to shrug off
the chronic condition of life
I swill this bittersweet medicine
feel it quell the squall somehow

They wanted me to live
prayersharp

Molnar is the kind of artist given to making things that she cannot explain—this is not why these poems exist—but with these lines, her deeper purpose seems to suddenly snap into focus. One phrase meets another: “They wanted me to live” takes the hand of “Because that’s what they say.” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a proxy, and what Molnar has done to—for—that ugly book is what she would do to the immiserated self—erase it to the core of love, scrub it down to the bearable nothing, and set it in a garden, “fireweed poised to bloom.”

To say it better: Molnar has taken The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and transformed it, sharpened it into a kaddish, a prayer sequence of praise recited for the dead, which is in turn a gift for the living in the midst of their grief. She has extruded a praise song from the urtext of hate, depending on the Jewish trust that to change the book is to change what world can arise. Defacing hatred beautifully, mispronouncing bigotry elegantly, disavowing sick ideas—these, for Molnar, are the ways forward.