Jewish Ukraine Fights Nazi Russia

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This makes me proud to be a Jew

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Incidentally, speaking recently on the evening news, the mufti of the Ukrainian Muslim community, Said Ismagilov—appearing straight out of central casting in a flowery black robe embroidered with golden flowers, a white turban, and steel-rimmed glasses—made such a stirring defense of the loyalty of Ukrainian Muslims to the Ukrainian state that he brought the newscaster who was interviewing him, a young woman, to tears.

Ismagilov demonstrated at once the absurdity, the soft decency, and the astonishing heroism of Ukraine, a country where a bunch of blood-and-soil nationalist types don’t care if you are a Greek or Tatar or Swede, as long as you have the right tattoos and are fighting under the command of their Jewish president. None of which is understood by either Putin or his self-righteous “new right” social media cheerleaders in the West. Zelensky’s Ukraine represents the hyperspecific and beautiful contradictions that stem from the acceptance of contradiction, the multiethnic tolerance, and the polyglot nationality of a thoroughly traumatized nation that just wants to exist, and to escape from the toxic bonds of world war and holocaust and gulag and famine that its revanchist neighbor has imposed on its population in the absence of its own ability to provide a normal life.

The Russian bombardment of the Kyiv television tower, which is located near the Babyn Yar memorial, was reported to have hit a part of the ravine inadvertently. The television tower stands right above the killing fields, overlooking the location of the memorial. There was no attack on the memorial complex itself, but the symbolism was hard to ignore. Zelensky called on world Jewry to “wake up to the threats posed by Russia’s invasion,” adding that “Nazism is always born in silence.” A translation of his speech into Hebrew was soon uploaded to the presidential Facebook page. The statement had as much to do with geopolitics as it did with his personal identity—Ukrainians have become frustrated over the past week with what they see as Israeli diplomatic equivocation, regardless of the evident needs of Israeli security, which must take into account the Russian military presence in Syria.

Zelensky had never seemed to me, including the one time that I discussed the issue with him over dinner, to be particularly comfortable with deploying or inhabiting his Jewish background in public. Despite the fact that Ukrainians enjoy pointing out his national success as an indication of a lack of antisemitism in the country—and the fact that his Jewishness was not a liability during the 2019 presidential campaign—it felt to me like his uncertainty about his identity would prove an awkward and evident tension. But now here he is, effortlessly deploying it for the greater good of the state. Zelensky is doubling down on his Jewish heritage, at the same time that he represents a sort of postmodern version of Pinocchio, stepping out of the television set and into the real world, where he has become a real boy.

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1. Zelenskyy 's reaction to the bombing of Holocaust memorial

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[tanyev]

2. Kick.