#16, February 11, 2024

How Antisemitic are Ukrainians?

Many American Jews are convinced that Ukrainians are extremely antisemitic, based on what they heard from their grandparents about pogroms and Ukrainian collaborators with the Nazis. It continually amazes me that people draw firm conclusions from these stories. Tell them that 4.5 million Ukrainians fought against the Nazis in the ranks of the Red Army, and that 1.3 million of them died in combat fighting the Nazis, and they are in disbelief. The number of Ukrainian Red Army soldiers was probably ten times as large as the numbers of members of Ukrainian Fascist organizations (OUN and UPA) and of the Ukrainian auxiliary police. But let’s not let facts get in the way of preconceptions.

The other assumption seems to be that nations are static entities. If a group harbored antisemitic attitudes eighty years ago, it must be the same today. In a rare exception, most Jews acknowledge that the Germans have changed, but they assume that the Ukrainians have stayed the same. There is a similar phenomenon among Jews who emigrated from Ukraine in the 1990s, when antisemitism was at its peak. They assume that its level is the same today as when they left the country. What we need is empirical data and analysis – and a community that is open to drawing conclusions based on the facts.

Antisemitic flyer from 1991, “Holodomor, 1932-33. Remember who killed your people”.

For many years, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology has been conducting surveys on xenophobia in Ukraine. It has asked respondents to score their attitude toward various ethnic and national groups based on the Bogardus Scale of Social Distance. The Bogardus scale asks people whether they would agree to accept members of a group 1 – as members of their family, 2 - as close friends, 3 - as neighbors, 4 – as colleagues at work, 5 - as residents of the country, 6 – as visitors to the country , 7 – no at all, would not admit to the country. The respondents to the survey choose one answer. A higher score indicates a higher level of xenophobia.

If you must know the bottom line immediately, the level of antisemitic attitudes in Ukraine has dropped dramatically in the last five years. The level of xenophobia toward certain other groups has remained high or even risen.

The survey conducted in October 2023, with 1,000 respondents, indicates that the overall xenophobia level in Ukraine on the Bogardus scale is 3.7, and that the level of antisemitic attitudes is 3.39, below the overall level.

The lowest level of social distance is unsurprisingly toward Ukrainian speaking Ukrainians (2.03) and Russian speaking Ukrainians (2.95). The highest levels of social distance (xenophobia) are toward Africans (4.69), Roma (4.75), Russians who live in Ukraine (4.96), and, as you might guess, Russians who live in Russia (6.38).

The survey also measured social distance from foreign groups that have virtually no presence in Ukraine - Frenchmen, Americans, Germans - but I am leaving those groups out of my discussion. Unfortunately, the survey did not ask about Muslims or Crimean Tatars.

When asking about Jews, the survey specified “Jews, residents of Ukraine”, presumably in order to distinguish them from Israelis or other foreign Jews.

In short, Jews scored by far the lowest social distance score among all non-Slavic groups in Ukraine.

Here is another highlight of the data: 33.4% of respondents would accept Jews as members of their family. Only Ukrainians (both Ukrainian speaking and Russian speaking) and Poles had higher percentages in this category. (For Poles: 34.4%). The lowest percentages for acceptance as members of their family were for Russians (4.6%), Roma (13.9%) and Africans (15.4%).

The Bogardus scale figure for Jews has been dropping for the past several years. Back in the early 2000s, it was extraordinarily high, hovering around 5.1 and 5.2. [See Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Identity in Post Communist Russia and Ukraine, p. 212]. In September 2018, before Zelensky’s election as president, it was 4.44. In September 2019 - after Zelensky’s election, but before the full-scale war with Russia - it was 4.07. Now in 2023, it is 3.39 . Those numbers are extraordinary.

In general, the Kyiv surveys have found that younger people (between 18 and 29) are less xenophobic than their elders, though I could not find a breakdown by age for attitude toward Jews in particular.

Other surveys, using other methodologies, have reached the same overall conclusion – antisemitic attitudes in Ukraine have been declining.

In Spring 2019, a survey by the Pew Research Center across Europe asked “do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Jews?”. In Ukraine, the survey questioned a sample of 1,046 people. 11% of respondents said they had an unfavorable view of Jews. That was the lowest figure for all of Eastern Europe. In Russia, the figure was 18%, in Poland – 31%, in Lithuania – 26%.

Using a much smaller sample back in 2011, the Pew survey found that 22% of respondents in Ukraine had an unfavorable view of Jews. This drop from 22% to 11% over eight years is significant. (The results for the 2023 Pew survey on antisemitism have not yet been released.)

Pew Research Center Survey in Europe, 2019

Something of an outlier in this regard is the ADL’s global 100 survey , where the results for Ukraine have been quite volatile over the years. The ADL survey asked people whether they agreed with eleven common antisemitic stereotypes: “Jews have too much control over global affairs”, “people hate Jews because of the way Jews behave”, etc. Respondents who said that six of the eleven stereotypes were true or probably true, were ranked as harboring antisemitic attitudes.

The ADL global 100 showed that in 2015, 32% of Ukrainians harbored antisemitic attitudes. But in 2019, the percentage jumped to 46%, in contradiction to the findings of the surveys by the Kyiv Institute and Pew in 2018 and 2019. In 2023, the ADL Global 100 found that the percentage of Ukrainians with antisemitic attitudes dropped to its lowest level since the survey was introduced – 29%. This percentage was lower than in Poland or Hungary (and equivalent to Russia).

Why has antisemitism been dropping in Ukraine? That is a matter of interpretation. Clearly, the election of a Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is both a result and a cause of this drop. People didn’t mind voting for Zelensky in 2019, notwithstanding the well-known fact that he was Jewish. His ethnicity just wasn’t a factor in their political choice. But since the beginning of the war, Zelensky’s Jewishness has taken on a positive valance. It has been highlighted in the press to refute Russia’s charge that Ukraine is a neo-Nazi state. The West has rallied around this fact, retorting “How can Ukraine be Nazi, if its president is Jewish”? It is not an exaggeration to say that Ukraine has garnered so much Western support, support that rescued it from Russian conquest, in part thanks to the fact that its president is Jewish. Having a popular Jewish president has no doubt effected Ukrainian public opinion on Jews.

More generally, Ukraine has chosen a Western, European path of development. That is what the 2014 Maidan was about, and what this war is about. Among other things, joining Europe means accepting minorities and diversity in society. All minorities – ethnic, religious, sexual orientation. As part of that process, the percentage of Ukrainians with a negative attitude toward LGBTQ persons has also dropped dramatically – from 60.4% in 2016 to 38.2% in 2022. In 2023, the figure for negative attitude toward LGBTQ persons was down again to 33.9%.

In the context of Ukraine’s European aspirations, open antisemitism is just not socially acceptable today. The one openly antisemitic force in Ukrainian politics, the “Svoboda” Party, is polling at about 4%, below the 5% electoral threshold for parliament.

So it is time for generalizations to catch up with realities and to acknowledge that antisemitic attitudes have shrunk dramatically in Ukraine.

Commander in Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forced Valery Zaluzhny (who was replaced just this week) marking Chanukah with Chief Rabbi Moshe Asman.

News Updates

Russian TV propagandist: Ukraine is under Jewish Occupation

On January 27, a commentator from Donetsk spoke on one of Russia’s top propaganda talk show. His message: The Russian and Ukrainian peoples are one; the problem is that Ukraine is controlled by a Jewish occupation regime. Gone is the argument that the Zelensky regime is made of neo-Nazis. Now its simpler: the war is driven by Jews.

Here is the political scientist Alexander Semchenko’s exact quote:

No one on the air interrupted the speaker or objected to his statement.

The head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine Andriy Yermak has been open about his Jewish roots on his father’s side. Former Commander in Chief Valery Zaluzhnyi isn’t Jewish, but after antisemitic comments by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, he trolled the Russians, and changed his Facebook profile to say that he was a Jew born in Jerusalem. The new Ukrainian Commander in Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi is actually an ethnic Russian.

The Russian ultra-right continues to spread the canard that that Ukrainian elite is entirely Jewish, that General Zaluzhnyi’s real name is Zalman, and General Syrskyi is actually named Siegel.

There are several antisemitic conspiracy theories circulating in legally sanctioned Russian media. This past summer, Pravda, the organ of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation published an article claiming that Zelensky was using the war to kill as many Ukrainians as possible at the front, because, as a Jew, he hated Ukrainians. Zelensky, the article claimed, wanted to destroy Ukrainians as a form of Jewish revenge for past pogroms. Like the TV commentator, the Pravda author claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were brothers, but the Jew Zelensky was war-mongering for nefarious reasons. This would be laughable if it weren’t published in the organ of the second largest political party in the Russian Federation.

Later, in October, another conspiracy theory arose: Israel had a plan to settle millions of its citizens in Ukraine, in case of a military emergency. The Israelis would establish a new Jewish state in Ukraine called “the Heavenly Jerusalem”, which would be a revival of the medieval Khazar Kingdom, where Judaism was the official religion. According to this theory, Zelensky was in cahoots with the Israelis to transfer six southern provinces of Ukraine to Israeli control. The theory gained traction on several Youtube videos which attracted more than 750,000 views, and in articles in the far right Russian press. From there it spread on social media.

The Lithuanian state press agency released a long feature article debunking the “Heavenly Jerusalem” conspiracy theory, and warning about the rise of extremist antisemitism in Russia.

So when a commentator on Russian state television says that Ukraine is ruled by a Jewish junta occupation regime, he is pointing to such theories, and encouraging their growth.

Mendele and Sholem Aleichem Triumphant in Odessa

In Odessa as in other cities, there is an ongoing process of renaming streets, to replace their Russia and Soviet names. The Odessa city council recently held an online vote among local residents to replace 46 place names. As a result, Tolstoy Street will be renamed Sholem Aleichem Street (194 votes for, 143 votes against), and Tolstoy Square will be renamed Mendele Moykher Seforim Square (214 votes for, 169 against). Mendele Square lost out to Tolstoy Square in a previous vote in September (See The War in Ukraine: Jewish News, #2), but this election overturns those results. The Odessan Sholem Aleichem Street will join at least nine other cities in Ukraine with a street named after the Yiddish classic. (Kyiv, Lviv, Dnipro, Chernivtsi, Bila Tserkva, Zhitomir, Khotyn, Poltava, Uman).

Plaque in honor of Sholem Aleichem Street in Kyiv.

Map of Ukraine with its major cities