Kyiv has denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s diatribe that the West installed Volodymyr Zelensky, an “ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins” as Ukraine’s president to “cover up the glorification of Nazism” as antisemitic. The fact that ethnically, Russian, Ethiopian and Yemenite Jews are diverse, yet share the same heritage, is ignored by Putin’s grotesque classical antisemitic characterization of Jews that is evocative of Der Stürmer.
The dark ironies abound. Despite being accused of being a neo-Nazi plant, Zelensky has stated that his grandfather’s brothers were killed in the Holocaust. Just as Hitler dehumanized Jews before murdering them in his “Final Solution,” Putin uses the same tactics towards Ukraine resulting in him referring to the “anti-human essence that is the foundation of the modern Ukrainian state.”
Putin manipulates the memory of the Holocaust to justify committing ethnic cleansing and genocide to advance his imperialistic ambitions in Ukraine. As part of this strategy, Putin has repeatedly declared that Ukraine is not a real state and should be part of his Russian empire.
The Kremlin has resorted to distorting history and belittling the uniqueness of the Holocaust. In January, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov justified Russia’s war on Ukraine by accusing the US of marshaling European countries to solve “the Russian question” in the same way that Adolf Hitler had sought a final solution to eradicate Europe’s Jews.
In his 2013 book, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, David Nirenberg identified that antisemitism operates as a set of conspiracy theories that are based upon negative stereotypes of Jews that can be applied to any social or historical context. Whether it be the far right across Europe who fear the replacement of white Christians or the alt right in America that fear the influx of Middle Eastern, Central and South Americans, it is the Jews who are vilified for plotting immigration and demographic changes to target white Christians. Facts are deemed incidental to the conspiratorial worldview where antisemitism festers.
On February 27, 2022, three days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of the world’s leading historians and scholars of Nazism and the Holocaust signed a statement: “We strongly reject the Russian government’s... equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime to justify its unprovoked aggression. This rhetoric is factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism and those who courageously fought against it.”
None of the new set of Russia’s elites who guaranteed their wealth by maintaining political ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin or the old set of Russian oligarchs that acquired wealth in the aftermath of the Cold War but who have since divested any interest in Russia have strongly repudiated Putin’s antisemitic rhetoric and minimization of the Holocaust.
This extends to the former president of the European Jewish Congress (EJC), Moshe Kantor who is close to Putin and who the EJC ironically lobbied for him not to be sanctioned by the US and to be removed from the EU’s sanctions list. It would be worthy of satire had it not been tragic that the EJC’s rationale is that sanctioning Kantor would cause the destruction of European Jewish life.
Should Europe’s Jewish life be secured by finances provided by Putin? As has been reported, Kantor is a major shareholder in Russian fertilizer firm Acron, which the UK said provides “vital strategic significance for the Russian government” as it enables Putin to circumvent sanctions and contribute financially to Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.
Antisemitic sentiment popular in Russia
Moreover, should European Jewry be traded for Russia’s Jewish life as Putin’s antisemitic rhetoric is fostering antisemitism in Russia? In 2018, a survey conducted in Russia found that 14% of Russia’s population did not want to have Jews as their fellow citizens. This was compared with 5% in Ukraine. In 2022, Putin threatened to close the offices of the Jewish Agency that was responsible for maintaining Russia’s Jewish communal life for its roughly 150,000 Jews and that had facilitated a mass exodus of nearly one million Jews that emigrated to Israel.
There were 86 members of my family who perished in the Holocaust’s slaughter of six million Jews. I find it shameful for their memory to be distorted by Putin’s attempt to commit genocide in Ukraine today. It is incredibly cynical for Putin’s oligarchs to avoid being sanctioned by associating themselves with the well-being of European Jewry while enabling Putin to circumvent sanctions. Furthermore, failing to decry Putin’s antisemitic pronouncements is to enable him to promote greater antisemitism in Russia and slaughter innocent civilians in Ukraine.
The silence in the face of Russian atrocities in Ukraine runs contrary to Elie Wiesel’s oft mentioned maxim that the Holocaust must make us sensitive to the plight of others. To be silent at false historical equivalences created between the Holocaust and Russia’s conflict in Ukraine in which Putin advances ethnic cleansing and genocide for his own imperialistic ambitions is to do the exact opposite.
The writer is a board member of the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Partnership for Peace Fund and former president of the Advisory Board for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP).