
PROTOCOLS: An Erasure
An urgent, poetic exploration of power, memory, belief, and the dangers and possibilities of language.
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PROTOCOLS: An Erasure transforms the world’s most influential antisemitic document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, into an erasure poem exploring essential questions of power, history, and language.
By redacting words from the original document, Molnar created a book-length poem that breathes space and light into a text dense with hatred. She patiently uncovers the questions buried within the source text: What is the true nature of power, and how is it tied to a fear of the unknown? How can language, weaponized and eroded, also be a tool for healing? And how can silence help us reckon with history and shape the future?
Accompanying the poem, a lyric essay excavates the poet’s 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, and posing new possibilities for a less deterministic, more spacious and peaceful world.
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Preorder from Ayin Press
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Will be published June 24th, 2025
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Praise for PROTOCOLS
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“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
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“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
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“‘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
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“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
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“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