One of the more problematic aspects of Volodymor Zelensky’s rise to global consciousness is that he’s really raised the bar for Jewish comedians. I mean, some of us have played Wembley Arena and released a song that’s gone to Number One four times, but frankly it’s all looking a bit meh next to protecting your country, and possibly the free world, from the New Fascism.
It’s particularly an issue for those of us who have graduated from doing some funnies on stage and telly to thinking of ourselves as also able to tackle the serious stuff. I mean, I might as well hand in my Jewish-comedian-but-can-turn-his-hand-to-gritty-important-subjects-when-necessary card now, because no-one is tackling the serious stuff like Zelensky.
When, Hashem willing, me and Volodymor meet backstage at JW3 for a Rebuilding Ukraine benefit gig, I’m not going to be insisting he reads Jews Don’t Count, that’s all I’m saying.
But on that note: there is, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, something very weird going on re Zelensky and his Jewishness. Because nothing proves the horseshoe theory of politics — the theory, that is, that political extremes are not opposites, but stand in touching distance of each other, like the two ends of said horseshoe, particularly when it comes to attitudes to Jews — than the way that Zelenksy being a Jew has been questioned by both far right and far left.
On the left, recently, the rapper Lowkey, who had been due to speak at the NUS conference but exited following a controversy about how Jewish students were told by the NUS that if they found his ideas offensive, they could gather in a holding area outside the conference hall — Jews love that — nothing uncomfortable in our race memory about being gathered in a holding area, obvs — Lowkey said that the mainstream media (a phrase very beloved on both sides of the horseshoe) had “weaponised Zelensky’s Jewishness” in order to “stave off” inquiries about far right groups in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the horseshoe, the right-wing Trumpist commentator Candace Owens tweeted that “President Zelensky is a very bad character who is working with globalists against the interests of his own people”. To which I replied — it was the combination of the word globalists, with the idea of bad character, and undermining one’s own people from within that, y’know, somehow echoed with me — that I really thought it would be quicker and easier just to say that he was Jewish.
What is going on here is that both far right and far left have a mad urge to give creedence to Putin’s bollocks — can I use that word? It is, I think, the mot juste — about De-Nazification. Zelensky’s Jewishness, not least the fact that his grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, is of course a thorn in the side of this urge, which is why they are all trying to find ways to say, “he’s Jewish but that doesn’t matter”.
If they really wanted to find a way to think about Zelensky’s Jewishness that would help Putin, the person they should look to is Putin. In 2018, the Russian Godfather — sorry, President — said, in response to questions about Kremlin meddling in the 2016 American election, that the people responsible, “maybe they are not even Russians, maybe they are Ukrainians, Tartars or Jews.” Meaning Russian Jews, in other words, are not real Russians (that somewhat contradicts his present insistence that Ukrainians are).
A deeper element to this was provided by Kremlin loyalist Maria Butina, who was on Radio 4’s Today saying that Zelensky is a Nazi, Jewish or not. Nazism, she said, should not be seen as being about one particular race. She said this because Putin’s Ukraine disinformation involves a deeply antisemitic idea, which is that the Holocaust wasn’t really about Jews. The main victims of Hitler’s killing machine, Putin would have you believe — and I think believes himself — were Russian Orthodox Christians. Jews, like Jews do, are just hogging the atrocity spotlight.
Which means it indeed doesn’t matter if Zelensky is Jewish, because what do Jews have to do with the real Holocaust? In fact, taking things even further, Maria Butina made sure to mention rumours of Russian Orthodox Priests being tortured in Ukraine: which ethnicity might want to do that, you might think? Tie this into Putin’s recent ramblings of Russia’s need for self-purification, specifically to purify the country from a traitorous “caste” who “doesn’t live anywhere except in their own slavish consciousness” and you realise that this propaganda is committed to the idea that the murder of Jews in their millions by Nazis should not stop a present reclassification of them as Nazis, or at least, as a personification of evil.
It’s all very depressing. And not really a subject for comedy. I’m not sure I can make it funny. If I were you, I’d call Zelensky.
