Sundown: Anne Frank Site Burns

• A “suspicious” fire destroyed the barracks in which Anne Frank slept in a Dutch work camp before her transfer to Auschwitz. The barracks, most recently used to store farm equipment, was ready for transport back to the site of the work camp, which now contains a Holocaust memorial. [JTA]
• With the news that Britney Spears is considering converting to Judaism for her new boyfriend, Jason Trawick, The New Yorker imagines her “conversion diary”. “Got verklempt last night with Jason when I told him how close I was to joining his tribe and all. Felt kinda guilty that my spiritual journey has been so easy, what with my already being mostly Jewish, but then Jason explained that feeling guilty just makes you Jewisher, so it’s all good.” [NYer]
• The golf course at Long Island’s Woodmere Club contains hundreds of old Jewish gravestones along its shore with Reynolds Channel. [NY Post]
• Adam Yauch, one-third of the (three-thirds Jewish) Beastie Boys, announced via candid YouTube the “pretty heavy news” that he has cancer in a lymph node. “This is something that’s very treatable and in most cases it’s, um, they’re able to completely get rid of it,” he says. [ArtsBeat]
• Mongolian neo-Nazis have co-opted Nazi imagery, rhetoric, and racial philosophy in the service of Mongolian nationalism and anti-Chinese sentiment. [Time]
• And as we commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing, it’s fascinating to remember that the Lubavitcher Rebbe believed that space exploration and scientific discovery generally served to buttress the Torah’s teachings by throwing previously-held scientific consensus into increased doubt. [Chabad.org]