by Julia Glauberman “I’ll do it… I’ll be the Gentile, because I could pass best,” says the narrator of Nathan Englander’s recent short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.” This declaration comes as Englander’s characters are engaged in a game they blithely refer to as the Anne Frank game, the Righteous Gentile game, or, most bluntly, Who Will Hide Me? But it quickly becomes clear that it isn’t really a game; these characters are, in seriousness, mulling the benefits of passing. The term “pass,” popularized by Nella Larson’s 1929 novel Passing, is often used to describe racial, ethnic or religious misrepresentation. Passing relies heavily on the existence of prevalent notions regarding fixed identities. Such static impressions of identity largely explain why we’re always so surprised to learn of a celebrity’s newly revealed...

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