Putting the Crime in Crimea
It took me a long time to work out the question of Ukraine. Along with Poland, there was a lot to wrestle with: parallel Jewish histories of tension and release, enormous creativity and grotesque destruction. At the end of WW I, there was an orgy of pogroms that left a hundred thousand Jewish heads in the streets. By the end of the next war, it was nearly a million. Larger scale, greater efficiency. For decades, survivors offered the same grim testimony. The Nazis were bad, but the Ukrainians were worse.
I’ll save the potted histories for another time, but that’s the way it works with the Jews. At least when it comes to European civilization: we are always weighing the pros and the cons. How many died in which spasm of savagery? How many babies were smashed against a wall?
What changed for me was more attention paid. I don’t think I was alert in 2014, when Russia first occupied parts of Crimea. I was drowsy, distracted by other things. I knew two-and-a-half factoids about the history of Crimea: the famous photos of Roger Fenton, and Jewish agricultural settlements in the 1920s. I had actually performed a jaunty Yiddish folksong about Jews reclaiming their masculinity in Zhankoye.
But suddenly it dawned on me that there were still Jews in Zhankoye, and about 400,000 in the whole of Ukraine. That’s a hot mess of Jews and a boatload of Ukrainians who were ready to be led by a Jewish comic who made a name for himself by impersonating a president. Different times. Different Ukrainians. It was like a Shalom Aleichem story come to life, the surrealistic career of Jews in the world. The unflattering upshot is that I started to care. All it took was a shot of ethnocentrism, Holocaust consciousness, and Jewish self-interest. I’m better than that, but, regrettably, not always.
Now, of course, I’m really paying attention. Trump has been wavering in the last few hours, but it won’t be enough to protect Ukraine. That is of a piece with his American First-ism: a disturbing calculation of costs and benefits, and visceral contempt for our European allies. They rightly argue that there is a world order at stake. However many times Crimea has ping-ponged, it was part of Ukraine at the end of World War II. That means it was supposed to remain Ukrainian forever, even after the break-up of the Former Soviet Union. It’s exactly what NATO was invented to protect: the inviolability of post-war borders and the containment of Russian imperialist impulses. I’m personally not afraid of Marxist economics, but Vladimir Putin is simply evil.
If there is a question here, it’s the Trump-Putin bromance. Is it mutual admiration, the power of the pee-pee tapes, or some interesting amalgam of threat and love? Whatever it is, it bodes poorly for civilization and points toward the end of the Western consensus. Going back to my deeply embedded ethnocentrism, that has to be really bad for the Jews.
In the meantime, it’s time for another show of commitment. My saintly next-door neighbor to the east has mounted a Ukrainian flag on his porch and we are about to do the same. How’s that for an historical irony? A Jew in Tulsa in the heart of Maple Ridge professing deep public support for Ukrainian nationalism?