Daniela Naomi Molnar’s Erasure of Antisemitism’s Source Text

A new book by American poet Daniela Naomi Molnar is challenging readers to confront the enduring legacy of antisemitism through a radical act of literary deconstruction. PROTOCOLS: An Erasure, published by Ayin Press in 2025, takes as its source text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous antisemitic forgery that has fueled hatred for over a century, and systematically erases it.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion first appeared in Russia in 1903, purporting to reveal a Jewish plan for global domination. As Molnar details in accompanying essays within the book, the text was quickly exposed as a fabrication, a plagiarism of earlier satirical works. Despite being debunked by journalists and courts worldwide, it has persisted as a potent tool of antisemitism, finding renewed life in Nazi propaganda, the writings of Henry Ford, and contemporary extremist circles.

Molnar’s approach isn’t one of reasoned rebuttal or deconstruction in the traditional literary sense. Instead, she physically alters the text, redacting words and phrases from a 1920 English-language edition, leaving behind a fragmented and haunting residue. The resulting “PROTOCOL” poems, as she calls them, are formed entirely from the remaining words of the original text, yet imbued with a new and unsettling resonance.

“The erasure results in a scattering of words and phrases across pages of wide emptiness,” notes a review of the book. “Her task…is to disfigure literally what is disfigured morally, in search of any indwelling nonobscenity she might find.”

The poems retain a quality of pronouncement, echoing the original text’s conspiratorial tone, but are simultaneously weakened and destabilized. Phrases appear adrift on the page, their original intent obscured, sometimes resolving into unexpected moments of moral clarity. One excerpt reads: “allow death / touch it with love / what was it like / remembrance of / make a house for it.”

Molnar’s project is deeply rooted in her personal history. Her four grandparents survived Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, a trauma that continues to resonate through generations. In accompanying essays, she explores the ways in which the past shapes the present, and the challenges of inheriting a history of loss and persecution. She describes a “chronic condition of life” marked by the weight of inherited trauma and the struggle to find meaning in the wake of unimaginable destruction.

The book has garnered significant attention, being named a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards in the category of poetry, according to Ayin Press. The work is described as a “rite on a mythic spleen,” an attempt to extract something redemptive from a source of profound evil. Molnar’s method, the review states, is to “force the source text to speak as Molnar does,” creating a ghostly echo of the original that simultaneously exposes its hatred and hints at the possibility of healing.

Molnar’s work also engages with the complex Jewish concept of remembering and forgetting, specifically the commandment to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek” although simultaneously being commanded to remember their actions. She seeks to navigate this paradox, erasing the text while preserving the memory of its dangers, and attempting to transform a source of hatred into a lament for the lost.

The book concludes with a series of fragmented lines and questions, leaving the reader with a sense of unresolved tension. “Is the form of existence unlimited freedom or / is the form of existence stupendous suffering?” Molnar writes, ultimately offering no simple answers, but instead inviting continued reflection on the enduring power of hate and the possibility of finding light within darkness.