This Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov justified the accusation of Ukraine being a Nazi state by suggesting that Zelenski is Jewish, which makes him antisemitic somewhat like how Hitler was distantly Jewish.
More specifically, he said “самые ярые антисемиты, как правило, евреи,” which translates to “the most severe antisemites, well, are usually the Jews.”
As nonsensical as this statement is, it shows quite cleanly how antisemitism is so prevalent that it’s literally used in the context of who is perpetrating antisemitism. As the foreign minister of Israel pointed out, accusing Jews of complicity or even responsibility for the holocaust is one of the worst forms of anti-Jewish racism. Anti-Jewish sentiments are not uncommon in politics, although they’re usually cleverly disguised—masked as some unseen force that pulls all the strings and is responsible for every little bad thing that happens. This is a remnant of the Weimar Republic’s own “stab in the back” scapegoating, where it was convenient and expedient to blame the loss of World War I on some hidden Jewish hegemony.
In a similar vein, the blood libel that originated from the middle ages is still prevalent, as we see alt-right assertions that Jewish ceremonies or dishes use blood or human sacrifice. The rumor originated from land-owning gentry’s frustration with the “middle” class Jewish population, who were often pigeonholed into tax-collecting or trading due to their limited privileges under the various empires of Europe.
The question is, why are people still clinging to beliefs that proliferated when we thought witches were real or cigarettes were a panacea? There are a myriad theories on the permeation of antisemitism, but the short answer is that the simplest, most tribal explanation always wins. For example, it’s much easier to take on the theory that the Jews call all the shots in Hollywood in order to control the minds of the masses rather than come to terms with the complex reality: refugees from the various world wars and the ramping anti-Jewish violence of the holocaust took to movies in the early 20th century because it was a lowly fledgling industry, nearly all of them were destitute after the migration but with experience in trading, and the films of their contemporary were idealistic and offered a welcome escape from the horrors of their home countries. They are a storied and vital part of American culture and the expertise of Jewish inventors, financiers, actors, and scholars gave us everything from technicolor film to the famous mass-energy equivalence formula. Despite all this, it’s just simply easier to blame all of your problems on a group that is ethnolinguistically distinct from you- at the end of the day, it’s much more comforting for someone to tell you that the problem always lies with someone else.
Lavrov pins the blame of antisemitism on Zelenski and his Jewishness because it’s an easy explanation for how Ukraine is infiltrated by Nazis, as it plays into the underlying conspiracy that Jews are always responsible for everything wrong in the world. This, unfortunately, works- many people are partial to a demarcation that ultimately pardons them; the Ukrainian Nazis must be Jewish, and if they’re fundamentally different from us by virtue of being Jewish, then they must be in the wrong.
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