Presidential election Ukraine
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When Volodymyr Selenskyj was still a TV comedian without political ambitions, he joked in his cabaret show about the head of government of Ukraine. He has the Jewish surname Hrojsman, and that's what the unpretentious joke was all about. "Hrojsman sounds like one of us," said Selenskyj, who in the television sketch played a Jew who does not want to pay the electricity bill of his synagogue. Electricity and heating costs are two of the big topics of Ukrainian politics.
Two years later, Ukraine has not only a Jewish head of government, but also a Jewish president. Selenskyj was elected head of state on Sunday with a huge majority, and like Hrojsman he has Jewish roots.
In Israel caused a stir. Ukraine, the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz noted, is now the only country apart from Israel that has both a Jewish president and a Jewish prime minister. Selenskyj's electoral victory is in contradiction to a common stereotype, according to which anti-Semitism in Ukraine is particularly pronounced - and according to which, after the Maidan revolution of 2014, which was supported by nationalist groups, it will be officially propagated. It is a stereotype also used by the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin in conflict with the new government in Kiev since 2014.
Selenskyj's Jewish descent was not an election issue
But the truth is more complicated. Neither is anti-Semitism prevalent in Ukraine, nor is Selensky's election victory a sign that it does not exist.
According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, Ukraine is significantly less anti-Semitic than its Eastern European neighbors. Five percent of Ukrainians say that they do not accept Jews as their fellow citizens. In neighboring Romania, the corresponding share is 22 percent, in Poland 18 percent, and even higher in Russia and Belarus.
It goes without saying that although Selenskyj's background is well known, it never became an issue during the election campaign. There have been many defamatory attacks on the candidate - up to the charge that he is a drug addict. He was considered too friendly to Russia, not enough Ukrainian. But as a Jew, he was not attacked. Not even Selenskyj's close ties to the controversial oligarch Ihor Kolomojskij - one of the most prominent Jews in Ukraine, builder of the country's largest Jewish cultural center - could change that. Kolomojskij is the owner of the TV channel 1 + 1, on which run Selenskyj's comedy programs.
Video analysis of the elections in Ukraine
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Selenskyj himself - unlike Kolomoiski - rarely speaks of his Jewish roots. He did so in 2016, when he protested against a language law that was supposed to put the Russian language in a worse position. "I have Jewish blood, I speak Russian, but I am a citizen of Ukraine and do not want to be part of another country," he said at the time. His Judaism is limited to being the son of a Jewish mother. It is a typical post-soviet, secular identity in which Judaism does not come first.
The role of Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust is suppressed
Jewish jokes are an integral part of his program. In 2013, he even starred in a parody of the US movie "300," in which the plot is relocated to the Holy Land. In it, Selensky plays King Leonid Abramovich, who, instead of Spartans, leads a small group of extremely unwilling Israelites into battle and bids their goodbyes to his overpowering Jewish mother.
In his cabaret show, too, the enterprising Jew is one of the solid stereotypes that keeps cropping up, as does the corrupt traffic cop, the unfaithful husband, the gullible, the dumb nationalist. Ukraine is not the country of political correctness, it is joked quite traditionally.
But to conclude from the said that anti-Semitism in Ukraine is pure Kremlin propaganda is nonsense. The remembrance policy, which has been officially carried out since the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, amounts to a disregard for the Jewish victims. It's not like the Holocaust was denied. But to delineate the new Ukrainian identity from the Russo-Soviet one has heroized those radical nationalists who once fought the Red Army in western Ukraine. That many of them were involved in the Holocaust, which the Germans carried out on Ukrainian soil, is thereby suppressed. It would be a great step forward if Selenskyj's choice changed that.