(RNS) — “There are some things you simply cannot unsee.”
“It was like watching an automobile accident. You don’t want to watch, and yet you can’t turn away.”
“A national embarrassment … the worst moment in American diplomacy in historical memory.”
It has been more than a week since the disastrous Trump-Vance-Zelenskyy meeting in the Oval Office, and those are some of the responses I’ve heard from friends and colleagues. It was, truly, a moment few of us will easily or soon forget.
A friend of mine said something to me that has stuck in my mind. “Zelenskyy is of Jewish origin; I wonder if that was part of what was going on.”
I did not think so. This was too paranoid — even for me.
But now, I wonder.
Timothy Snyder is my go-to expert on Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the Holocaust and the dangers of tyranny in modern society. Two of his books — “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth” — are, in my opinion, required reading for anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of the Holocaust, and the geopolitics that birthed it.
In a recent sub-stack, Snyder re-visited that Oval Office carnival and concluded there was a dynamic going on, right below the surface.
That dynamic? Zelenskyy (or, as Snyder prefers to spell it, Zelens’kyi) is Jewish.
To wit:
The attempt to humiliate Volodymyr Zelens’kyi in the Oval Office a week ago was an American strategic collapse. It heralded a new constellation of disorderly powers, obsessed with resources, seizing what they can. Inside that new disaster is something old and familiar that we might prefer not to see: antisemitism. The encounter in the White House was antisemitic …
I took in the tone and the body language, and my first, reflexive reaction was: these are non-Jews trying to intimidate a Jew. Three against one. A roomful against one. An antisemitic scene.
Snyder sees many of the antisemitic themes that are common in Eastern Europe, and in particular, Russia: “the mockery of Jewish appearances, the need for Jewish submissiveness, the claims about dishonesty, greed, cowardice, and corrupt conspiracies … A courageous man seen as Jewish had to be brought down.”
Snyder digs deeper into the characters who surrounded Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.
- The man who asked him about his clothes was Brian Glenn — a conspiracy-theory obsessed right-wing journalist who is apparently the partner of Rep. Marjorie Taylor “Jewish Space Lasers” Greene. Never mind that Zelenskyy was dressed in his usual military garb, not unlike the way Winston Churchill dressed when he visited the White House in 1942.
- The man who demanded deference from Zelenskyy was J.D. Vance, who had just returned from Germany, where he defended the far-right in a way that has alarmed German Jews, whose judgment I trust far more than that of Vance.
- As for President Trump, I cannot say he is antisemitic; only that he regularly and reliably uses antisemitic tropes. Recall that he threatened American Jews; had he lost the election, he would have held them responsible.
- And then, there is Elon Musk — he of the bizarre, mysterious arm gesture (since repeated by Steve Bannon), who followed up questions about that arm gesture with jokes about the Nazis. Musk has supported extreme right wing politicians in several countries and has made X a haven for Jew haters and bigots. He has called Zelenskyy a “grifter” — which, as Snyder said, is as antisemitic an accusation as you could find.
Then, there is the dehumanization of Zelenskyy. A spokeswoman for the Russian foreign minister compared Ukrainians to pedophiles and thieves. The foreign minister himself said Zelenskyy was “hardly human.” All comparable to antisemitic canards.
Snyder concludes, “I can’t escape that first reflexive response to that scene in the Oval Office: here is a person of Jewish origin being treated in a very particular and familiar way by non-Jews … what struck me was the circle of bullying gentiles — as in Europe in the 1930s, and in other places and times, at the particular moment when the mob felt that power was shifting … The antisemite really believes that the Jew must defer, that the Jew cannot fight, that a state led by a Jew must duly crumble.”
What is particularly powerful here? To the best of my knowledge, Timothy Snyder is not Jewish. He grew up in a Quaker family in Ohio. To me, his un-Jewishness only serves to boost his credibility; he sees things many of us might not want to see, and he has no emotional investment in the truths he proclaims.
To wit:
In the world of the antisemite, all is known in advance: the Jew is just a deceiver, concerned only with money, subject to exclusion, intimidated by force … But in the actual world in which we actually live, Jews are humans, perilous and beautiful like the rest of us. The United States has never elected a Jewish president, and perhaps never will. But Ukraine has; and that president represents his people, facing challenges that those who mock him will never understand. Those Americans have chosen to add their own to the evil he must confront. But that does not mean that they will control what happens next.
“The United States has never elected a Jewish president, and perhaps never will. But Ukraine has; and that president represents his people, facing challenges that those who mock him will never understand.”
We cannot know to what extent Zelensky’s ethnic Jewish background was of any importance in that meeting, to what extent his vulgar interlocutors even knew or understood that background.
And, surely, not every negative thing that a Jew encounters is antisemitic.
But I salute Snyder. He is a man of overarching knowledge and wisdom about the recent European past, and the implications of that past for the current moment — and for the future. Moreover, his sense of smell is appropriately sensitive; he can discern the whiff of hatred and tyranny, even when the vast majority of us are blithely unaware or resistant to those truths.
And, like I said, he is not Jewish.
Me? I am acutely aware of my enemies.
And, even more acutely aware of my friends. Timothy Snyder is one of them, and for that, I am deeply grateful.
