At the Russian embassy in London this weekend, there was an impressive turnout. A man drove a classic Mercedes slowly through the crowd of people just outside Kensington Gardens, blaring the Ukrainian national anthem with a giant flag hanging out his car. Parents held children on their shoulders as they craned to see the graffiti chalked on the embassies walls and the red paint splashed against the mansion. A man carried a sign with a caricature of Putin with a Hitler moustache with the phrase "stop Putler" beneath it. Much has been made of the eerie similarities between 1939 and today; the doomed appeasement conference in Munich, the false claims of freeing ethnic compatriots from their oppressors, the emotionally inconsistent nature of the leaders waging the wars. But there’s a key difference this time around.
A Jew is leading the fight against the invaders.
Volodomyr Zelensky has rightly captured the world’s attention this past week. From people discovering his exploits on the Ukrainian Strictly Come Dancing to his heroic selfie-shot videos proving he’s still fighting for his capital, he’s become the nice Jewish boy the world never knew it needed.
A collective sigh went up among diaspora Jews when he uttered his now famous, “I need ammunition not a ride” line as the bar for Jewish masculinity reached unattainable new highs. And his Jewishness has not proven an obstacle to his patriotism. He is hailed among his people as one of them, their leader - a luxury that didn’t exist for his Ukrainian Jewish forebears.
Like most of Central and Eastern Europe, Ukraine’s legacy with the Jews in far from pleasant. Babyn Yar, one of the most brutal massacres of the Holocaust, happened just a stone’s throw from Kyiv and Ukraine in its various forms has had a rich history of pogroms, including a series in 1919 that saw tens of thousands of Jews massacred in the streets of the capital and half a million left homeless.
Fast forward a hundred years and now the son of Soviet Jews leads his nation not just as a proud Jew but as a proud Ukrainian. It’s telling that, when he won the Ukrainian presidency in 2019, the opposition he faced was not from neo-Nazis or other far-right nationalists but from the other Jews of Ukraine. So scarred were they by the legacy of hate, they feared that if he were to mess up, they would suffer the consequences.
At the time, the chief rabbi of Dnipro told the New York Times that while he supported Zelensky, other jews were less sure. He said: "People said, he should not run because we will have pogroms here again in two years if things go wrong.” Three years later, it seems like there’s little chance of that. In the most recent Ukrainian opinion poll, Zelensky received an approval rate of 96% and, so far, Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands. In the face of one of the world’s most powerful nations, Zelensky has resisted.
For once, the madman imperialist is not attacking a Jewish leader for being Jewish. Zelensky’s faith is not seen by any of his countrymen as a barrier to him taking up arms for his people. He has transcended the eternal status of the European Jew as an outsider - far more Doron than Tevye. It’s a trope in the diaspora to crudely label every Jew either a sabra or a kvetcher, a hardened IDF hero or a whiny Brooklynite. The rise of Zelensky as an unlikely war hero may prove to be an anomaly. It’s hard to imagine a British or American Jewish comedian taking on this kind of role, but nevertheless Zelensky is still a cause for optimism.
If a Jew in Ukraine, a country that has seen the darkest depths of antisemitism, can be accepted as a leader and a hero, then surely there’s hope for Jews all over the world.
