{"id":1731357,"date":"2022-11-09T06:47:45","date_gmt":"2022-11-09T11:47:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1731357"},"modified":"2022-11-09T06:47:49","modified_gmt":"2022-11-09T11:47:49","slug":"volodymyr-zelensky-is-no-jewish-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/volodymyr-zelensky-is-no-jewish-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"Volodymyr Zelensky Is No \u2018Jewish Hero\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">12<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fvolodymyr-zelensky-is-no-jewish-hero%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1731357&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>In the course of a\u00a0Rosh\u00a0Hashanah sermon this year, one of our cantors characterized American support for Ukraine as a just, moral, and necessary cause. In a ham-fisted attempt to make the point more relevant to the Jewish gathering, he called the president of Ukraine a \u201cJewish hero.\u201d This was also Gal Beckerman\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/international\/archive\/2022\/02\/zelensky-ukraine-president-jewish-hero\/622945\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">term of choice<\/a> earlier this year in The Atlantic.<\/p>\n<p>Volodymyr Zelensky is a lot of things \u2014 including, to be sure, a \u201chero\u201d to many. But to anyone who takes Jewish identity, Jewish tradition, and, especially, Jewish survival at least somewhat seriously, he certainly should not be considered a \u201cJewish hero.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Zelensky was born to Jewish parents. Like that of most Jews from behind the Iron Curtain, his upbringing was markedly secular. As Beckerman rightly points out, \u201cJewish identity didn\u2019t exist in the Soviet Union, because it couldn\u2019t.\u201d That said, there were Soviet Jews who found their way to some form of Jewish identity after the breakup of the communist empire. Indeed, more than a million immigrated to Israel in a wave that started in earnest at the beginning of the 1990s.<\/p>\n<p>But Zelensky did no such thing. \u201cZelensky and his family,\u201d Beckerman concedes, \u201cwere part of the few hundred thousand Jews who stayed, content to assimilate in a post-Soviet world.\u201d Zelensky has never even shied away from making light of this reality. For instance, in a 2019 interview with the French newspaper Le Point, Zelensky <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lepoint.fr\/editos-du-point\/bernard-henri-levy\/bhl-deux-heures-avec-volodymyr-zelensky-04-04-2019-2305770_69.php?fbclid=IwAR22av3lMWd0w2mkVMDLbB8EXVXSOMpXnhtz7PR0KIXZv0ZimEThTahjxYs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">quipped<\/a>, \u201cThe fact that I am Jewish barely makes 20 in my long list of faults.\u201d<\/p>\n<p> Not Jewish <\/p>\n<p>Zelensky married a non-Jewish woman who was baptized, and he and his wife baptized their two children in the Greek Orthodox tradition, according to press reports. Boleslav Kapulkin, the spokesman for Chabad Lubavitch in Odessa, Ukraine, was even <a href=\"https:\/\/www.timesofisrael.com\/is-ukraines-top-presidential-candidate-jewish-even-his-spokesman-wont-comment\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">under the impression<\/a> that Zelensky himself had converted to Christianity. Eduard Dolinsky, executive director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, went further. He attested that Zelensky is \u201ca Ukrainian with Jewish ancestry; he\u2019s not a member of the Jewish community, he\u2019s not religious, doesn\u2019t keep Jewish traditions and never speaks of himself as a Jew.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a long-running and complex debate over what constitutes Jewish identity. But there\u2019s no question that Zelensky\u2019s life choices have been inimical to the survival of the Jewish people and the Jewish faith.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Since the end of the Holocaust, Jews have spoken of a 614th additional commandment to the Torah: Thou shalt not grant Hitler posthumous victories. Despite what the secular left and large swaths of liberal Jewry claim, interfaith marriage is an exponentially greater threat to the Jewish people than white supremacy. In 2019, then-Israeli Education Minister Rafi Peretz described the intermarriage rate among Jewish Americans as being \u201clike a second Holocaust.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Zelensky, like anyone else, is of course entitled to decide whom to marry, what faith to practice, and how to raise his children. But he should not be immune to criticism for being a hypocrite in exploiting his otherwise non-existent Jewishness.<\/p>\n<p> Hostility to Israel <\/p>\n<p>Recently, Zelensky has started to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To anyone who takes Jewish identity, tradition, and survival somewhat seriously, Zelensky should not be considered a \u2018Jewish hero.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1520,"featured_media":1731360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1731357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1520"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1731357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1731360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1731357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1731357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1731357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}