PROTOCOLS: An Erasure

An exploration of power, memory, belief, and the dangers and possibilities of language.

PROTOCOLS: An Erasure transforms the world’s most inﬂuential antisemitic document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, into an erasure poem exploring questions of power, history, and language. By redacting words from the original document, the book-length poem breathes space into a text dense with hatred, excavating new meanings and questions. It asks what forms power can take other than oppression and control and how language, weaponized and eroded, can be a tool for healing. And it calls for unity and human connection at a time of polarization and fear.

Accompanying the poem, a lyric essay excavates my deep personal connection to the source text, weaving personal and collective history by traversing former concentration camps, immigrant communities in New York City, and remote desert wildernesses.

In my writing and visual art, I work with memory. I visit the edges of life (clear cuts, concentration camps, dying glaciers) to forage for flowers, rocks, and bones and to write. From these experiences, I make pigments, poetry and prose as a way to explore how art might shift memory and, in turn, our future.

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. Survivors were ghosts living out broken lives.

Traumas live on like stars. We feel their effects long after their ends. Fear and fury raged across Europe years ago and it’s all still alive in me, searingly so. In many ways, it's been the most dominant force of my life.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has persisted as a key instrument of antisemitism since its initial publication in 1903 and remains available today in an array of languages in print and online. It's been exposed as a forgery countless times yet continues to be presented (and accepted) as a genuine account of a plot for world domination by a powerful Jewish cabal. The Protocols is a zombie, refusing to die. For more than a century, this book has been gasoline on our collective fire of fear.

Fear of the future. Fear of the past. Fear of the Other. Fear of the Jew, the Muslim, the Black. The Democrat, the poor, the Republican, the Socialist…

Oppression feeds on fear. Power feeds on fear. Hatred feeds on fear.

I wrote this book to help The Protocols die, but I approached this task as a poet, not a journalist or a judge. So rather than trying to (again) disprove the document’s veracity, I listened below the screed, below its hate, to the fear upon which it feeds. Word by word, I carved away the accusatory conspiracy to create a different message, one that counteracts fear by upholding civil kindness and connection, asserting a different version of power. I did this to change my own fears and memories and with the hope that it might do the same for others.

In my studio, one wall is lined with shelves holding glass vials of pigments made from materials gathered around the world: an archive of memories and potentials. The vivid gold of my mother’s marigolds in Vermont sits next to the pale green of ground elder from Płaszów, a camp in Poland where my grandparents were imprisoned. I can hold these vials in my hand, I can write and think with them, I can paint with them and create something new.

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Read a review by Andrew Esensten in Ha'aretz

Praise for PROTOCOLS

“This book is oracular, tender, and absolutely brilliant. Daniela Naomi Molnar looked into a foundational antisemitic text and traced a radiant meditation on power and being. Her essay about her grandmother Rosalie contains some of the best writing I have read about ancestry, inheritance, and survival. This book is a blessing, a transmutation of suffering into a spacious body of language and light.”

—Rachel Jamison Webster, author of Benjamin Banneker and Us

“Daniela Naomi Molnar’s ingestion of The Protocols’ verbal poison confronts the monstrousness of a ‘zombie text refusing to die’ and brings about a momentary reversal of trigger and trauma, valence and polarity. The heart of this audacious erasure glows in a darkness that’s ancient and very much of our moment. Disturbing and generative.”
—Peter Cole, author of Draw Me After: Poems

“‘We are repeat children,’ poet Daniela Naomi Molnar writes in this searing, necessary meditation on inherited trauma, cycles of violence, and the possibility of healing. PROTOCOLS: An Erasure is a fragmented psalm, an outcry, a fractured cultural memoir, and a gripping and timely reflection on how human beings can choose to use language to destroy—or to rebuild.”
—Alicia Jo Rabins, author of Fruit Geode and Divinity School

“PROTOCOLS: An Erasure is a text that holds within it the complexity of inherited Jewish trauma, the courage to reject exceptionalism and its supremacist logics, and the tenderness to honor loss and cradle the grieving body across generations. In PROTOCOLS: An Erasure, Daniela Naomi Molnar asks: ‘How to not be history’s accomplice?’ This book is a master class on grief and the creative, regenerative impulse, metabolizing trauma and loss into a form that both mourns and resists. Brave, meticulous, haunting, and brilliant, this book is a journey of transfiguration, a widening of my mind.”
—Mónica Gomery, author of Might Kindred

"Erasing the world’s most influential antisemitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Daniela Naomi Molnar’s PROTOCOLS: An Erasure repurposes the violence, theft, and mutilation of its source text, reducing The Protocols to only what is needed to express the effects and affects of living in antisemitism’s snare—to only what is needed to show what it means to be bound by history to language that seeks to erase your being—to only what is needed to untie the constraints of that language."

—Adie Steckel, writer and editor of Fonograf Editions

“At once a reckoning and a declaration, Daniela Naomi Molnar demands of the past a yielding to something new. Leaving traces of historical violence visible while aspiring to ‘that / which cannot be / individual,’ Molnar carves through the pages of histories’ hauntings to sculpt a new surface, textured with liberatory possibilities, laced with the temptations and catastrophes of belonging, and reaching towards care—towards ‘a new, spacious body through which to speak.’”
—Rachel Kaufman, author of Many to Remember

“In her unflinching work PROTOCOLS: An Erasure, Daniela Naomi Molnar reexamines one of the most antisemitic documents in world history, asking us ‘to return to the / center / to be / nothing / honestly.’ Molnar’s brilliant erasure reveals her generous, undaunted craft, inventing new sites of possibility that emerge—even from the abhorrent ruins of the source text. Molnar lyrically asserts that, even amid despair and cynicism, ‘our hands exist / as love, a boundless / agriculture / of intelligence.’”
—Rosebud Ben-Oni, author of If This Is the Age We End Discovery