Book Review: Jewish-Ukrainian Relations and the Birth of a Political Nation
Vladislav Davidzon’s new book is a brilliant celebration of Jewish life
Vladislav Davidzon is a writer who focuses on post-Soviet politics and culture. He is also the former publisher of The Odessa Review, one of the producers of Sean Penn’s Ukraine war documentary Superpower, and a correspondent at Tablet Magazine, where he covered my recent firing in the essay “Hitler and the Seattle Times.” I also consider him a friend, and so when he told me of his new book, I eagerly read it and am proud to say my review was originally published in glossy print in Business Ukraine magazine and available at newsstands in central Kyiv. What follows is an expanded version after I have reinserted passages from the original draft that did not make the final cut due to the space limitations of print. Enjoy.
Europe and the Middle East now burn with war in what have become the world’s two bloodiest ongoing battles, instigated when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and Hamas massacred 1,139 people on October 7. In one, a Jewish president defends against a fascist invasion. In the other, a Jewish prime minister combats genocidal terrorists. In both, the lives of Jewish people are at the heart of the matter.
The story of Israeli democracy triumphing over Islamofascism is of course the story of Jewish people thriving in Israel. But in his new book, Jewish-Ukrainian Relations and the Birth of a Political Nation, journalist Vladislav Davidzon posits that this is true also of Ukraine, a country that is still struggling to emerge from centuries of obscurity and disinformation. Davidzon seeks to enhance our understanding of today’s Ukraine by exploring the remarkably rich history of the Ukrainian Jewish community. This is a timely endeavor. Under the banner of blue and yellow, Ukrainians are currently defending the ideals of Western liberal democracy and, Davidzon writes, “Ukrainian Jewry is at the very core of these historical events.”
In the clearing fog of revolution that took place after the fall of pro-Kremlin puppet and Ukrainian President Viktor Vanukovych in February 2014, Ukraine experienced a cultural renaissance and nobody was better suited to chronicle its passage than the literary critic Davidzon himself, who traveled to the country to co-found the literary journal The Odessa Review together with his wife. Born in Uzbekistan to a Jewish family and raised in Brooklyn, Davidzon helmed the journal until its closure in 2019. He followed this in 2021 with his first book, From Odessa with Love, an essay collection that spans a decade of trenchant reporting on post-Soviet Ukraine.
Five months later, Russia invaded Ukraine and Davidzon, who now lives in Paris with his wife, responded by burning his Russian passport in front of the local Russian embassy while former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves held the lighter.
Another Jewish literary critic and essayist, Lionel Trilling, the Oscar Wilde of America, encouraged liberals in the 1950s to reject the mindless radicalism of the day and return to the first principles of political sanity. Trilling denounced Stalinism and rejected the simplistic moral binaries of leftist thought in favor of nuance and moral complexity. Later in life, he remarked in his diary with some surprise that he was no longer merely a critic, but had become a literary figure himself.
With his new 248-page essay collection, Davidzon, a correspondent for the Jewish magazine Tablet and nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council, fixes himself as the Trilling of our time, peaching the same sermon against radicalism (now woke progressivism), Stalinism (now Putinism), and binary leftist thinking. Also like Trilling, he has now crossed over from the role of literary critic to become a leading voice himself on Ukrainian affairs.
This is not your traditional history in which the musical notes of chronology are sounded out in a dull, descending scale. To borrow Lincolnian language, it is a book in which the mystic chords of memory swell the chorus of the Jewish voices of Ukraine, and the music plays from the moment your eyes alight upon the first page.
After a delightful foreword by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Davidzon launches into an introduction in which he nimbly disentangles the web of Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish identities. He illuminates the cogwheels of Kremlin conspiracy, explains how Putin has inadvertently strengthened Ukrainian national identity, and details an artistic revival centered around Kyiv, as well as the creative bounty with which Ukrainian Jews have enriched and ennobled their nation.
Often, as in the essay “The Jews of Ukraine,” Davidzon describes the resiliency of Jews within Ukrainian society. He recounts their history, from the myths and legends surrounding the medieval Khazars to the birth of Hasidism, and on through Soviet persecution and the Holocaust. This voyage through the centuries eventually arrives at the post-Soviet revival of Ukrainian Jewish life and, as the title of the book suggests, the birth of a modern European nation with Jewish heritage at the heart of its democracy.
Davidzon is attracted to the complexity of people and past events, while remaining stubbornly unswayed by the stumbling groupthink of public opinion or the sloppy spin of shoddy journalism. Like Trilling, he has a bad allergy to false binaries. He rejects the claim that Putin is antisemitic, and reminds us that the Russian dictator has deep ties to the Russian Jewish community as well as genuine respect for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while shrewdly observing that what looks like bigotry is more likely a willingness to deploy antisemitic tropes whenever useful.
This trait also shines through in his 2014 interview with Boryslav Bereza, a devout Jew and then spokesperson for the nationalist and allegedly fascist Right Sector movement. Or his take on Andrey Sheptytsky, the Greek Catholic archbishop of Lviv during World War II, who initially greeted the invading Germans as liberators but later protected Jewish children and rabbis.
Davidzon also has much to say about a controversial new Ukrainian statue honouring Symon Petliura, who led the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic in the early twentieth century. Tens of thousands of Jews were killed in pogroms during this period, yet Petliura was also a philosemitic liberal who introduced the death penalty for murdering Jews.
In “The Arc of History Bends From Ukraine to Israel and Back Again,” Davidzon covers a symbolically charged meeting between Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv in 2019, unfurling the tapestry of history between Ukraine and Israel and the ongoing debate over the recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide, a sensitive topic for both nations.
In a series of essays on the Babyn Yar massacre, he explains how the work and career of director Ilya Khrzhanovsky raises questions about the line between the portrayal of tragedy and sensationalism. And in “The Holocaust and Historical Memory,” he depicts the uniquely evil nature of the Holocaust—in which his own ancestors were buried alive in Belarus—while tracing the surge of European nationalism to legitimate grievances over the failure to properly acknowledge the suffering of other groups under Nazi rule.
The book also contains some fascinating profiles, from the richly captured life of Yiddish rock star Arkady Gendler and the “mobbed-up Soviet Sinatra” Iosof Kobzon, to the colorful and allegedly criminal adventures of former Kharkiv Mayor Hennadiy Kernes. Each one is a rewarding study in the psychology of identity and the deeper meaning of cultural connection.
There is much more to mine from these pages, which as a whole offer a collection of Jewish-Ukrainian thought and personality that is as beautiful and complex as the people described within. This is the story of Ukraine’s national journey, an ode to the country’s Jewish community, and a masterclass on the ways in which they are intertwined for the benefit of both.