How Zelensky Gave the World a Jewish Hero
As the Ukrainian president captivates the world with his bravery, he offers a reminder of the inroads Eastern and Central European Jews have made in overcoming their status as perpetual outsiders.
By Gal Beckerman
...
The 44-year-old former comedian turned president has exhibited great patriotism and bravery, joining his fate with that of his countrymen on the streets of Kyiv, refusing to leave despite Western offers of an airlift. If he is now, as he put it, “the No. 1 target” for the Russians, it is because he is the No. 1 Ukrainian. And what is remarkable, truly mind-blowing in the long sweep of history, is that his Jewishness has not stood in the way of his being embraced as a symbol of the nation.
...
Zelensky grew up in the Russian-speaking city of Kryvyi Rih, in the eastern part of Ukraine. And like most Soviet Jews, his parents were highly educated but also limited as to where their ambitions and learning could take them. His father was a professor of mathematics and his mother had studied engineering. These were standard-issue careers for a certain class of Soviet Jews who knew they couldn’t come close to any of the fields that shaped society and culture—one after another turned to the applied sciences as a way to excel.
...
Zelensky and his family were part of the few hundred thousand Jews who stayed, content to assimilate in a post-Soviet world, in which Zelensky found success, first as an actor and then as a politician. Two intersecting trends took place over the past 20 years, both of which transformed the status of Jews in Ukraine. First, the end of the Soviet Union allowed some air to enter Jewish communal life for those who remained. In the eastern-Ukrainian city of Dnipro, not far from where Zelensky grew up, there are now 10 synagogues and a gargantuan community center called Menorah, opened in 2012, that reportedly serves 40,000 people a day—even though there are only 60,000 Jews in Dnipro. By 2019, a Pew Research Center poll found Ukraine the most accepting of Jews among all Central and Eastern European countries.
...
As new opportunities for Jewishness were opening up, the past decade also saw instances when Jews were on the front line of defending a democratic and free Ukraine. Prominent Jewish-identified activists participated in the 2013 Euromaidan demonstrations that forced the ouster of pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych in early 2014. Later that year, the Jewish governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region established and personally helped fund a militia to defend against Russian-backed separatists in the east.
...
In these days of war and uncertainty, the fact that a Jew has come to represent the fighting spirit of Ukraine provides its own kind of hope. Along with all that seems to be recurring—the military aggression, the assault on freedom—there is also something new: inclusion and acceptance in a place where it once seemed impossible.
...
More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/interna...elensky-ukraine-president-jewish-hero/622945/
