Ukrainian Christmas tradition depiction of Jews draws criticism after New Jersey pageant

Earlocks swaying, the character called Moshko entered the room to the tune of “Hava Nagila,” offered a greeting in mock Yiddish, and announced that he was selling liquor, in a brazen effort to distract the Christians from reverence about the birth of Jesus.

The pageant that took place at St. Mary Protectress Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Clifton, New Jersey, is known as a vertep - a form of theater prominent in Slavic Christmas celebrations. Caricatures of Jewish figures that promote stereotypes about Jews and greed are a longstanding and frequent feature.

Especially as Ukraine has sought to shed any association with antisemitism amid its ongoing conflict with Russia, calls to remove the vertep’s antisemitic components have gained traction. In recent years, some have replaced Jews with Russians as the villainous characters.

But some communities have continued to embrace the Jewish caricature - leading Lev Golinkin, a Jewish author born in Ukraine who has written about antisemitism there, recently to call out the importation of antisemitic stereotypes from the old country to Ukrainian diaspora communities, usually under the auspices of the Catholic church.

Golinkin said in an interview that seeing the Clifton pageant on Facebook, where the church posted a video, was a “jarring” reminder of antisemitism he experienced as a child.

“It feels like a betrayal,” Golinkin said. “America should be where things are left behind, and there are new starts - and there you have this show, this pageant that it seems like it’s a new generation of mockery, teaching kids to mock.”

The Anti-Defamation League condemned the pageant’s contents after learning about it from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

“There is no place for antisemitic stereotypes in any religious celebration,” Scott Richman, the regional director of ADL New York and New Jersey, said in a statement. “At a time when antisemitism is surging to alarming levels, continuing harmful stereotypes - even in the context of traditional religious customs - undermines the efforts built to understand and maintain safety for Jewish communities.”

Richman said his office was reaching out to “local leaders to discuss the harm these portrayals cause,” but said he had not yet been in touch with St. Mary Protectress, a small church in a suburb with a growing Orthodox Jewish population.

“We hope future celebrations will focus on the joy of the holiday season and the shared values that bring us together, rather than reviving centuries-old stereotypes that have no place in today’s society,” Richman said.

St. Mary Protectress, which had invited members to the pageant by saying on Facebook that it would “take us back to our childhood Christmas,” did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did two organizations serving Ukrainians in the United States, the Ukrainian Institute of America and the Ukrainian American Cultural Center of New Jersey.

“There was also a lot of it in everyday Ukrainian life, and this was fed by unacceptability, negligence, or threat,” Klochko said. “There were very many situations that constantly spilled over into what is, one way or another, a very strong antisemitic motif in Christianity itself. And it exists in the vertep, too.”

But she added, “You have to understand that this is history, and it is not mandatory to drag this from tradition, from history, into the contemporary world.”

The St. Mary Protectress pageant conformed to the patterns of the traditional vertep: a retelling of the Christmas story (sans a Jesus character) blended with a satirical take on Ukrainian issues of the day. After discovering that his prospective customers prefer Jesus to alcohol, the Jewish character reports to King Herod, the Roman Jewish king overseeing Jerusalem, about the threat to his power. Herod dispatches soldiers to kill Jesus.

The arc amounts to a romp through antisemitic tropes, from the charge that Jews killed Jesus to the theories that Jews are greedy, use Christian blood in their rituals, and exercise inordinate power. The tropes have been used to justify centuries of violent antisemitism, including but not only by the church.

Evolved from puppet theater, the vertep includes a cast of Ukrainian folkloric characters such as the Cossack, the Pole, the Muscovite, the Lithuanian, the Roma, and the Jew - referred to in the story as Moshko the “zhyd,” a derogatory term for “Jew.”

In the St. Mary vertep, Moshko introduces himself as a “zhyd,” and Sarah introduces herself as a “zhydivka.”

Though the word was once an acceptable word for “Jew” in Ukrainian, it is widely considered a slur today. Still, it remains contested in Ukraine: In 2012, a member of an antisemitic political party in the Ukrainian government referred to Ukrainian-American actress Mila Kunis as a “zhydovka” on a Facebook post, causing immediate backlash from the Jewish community. The country’s justice ministry ruled that the use of the word was acceptable because it appears in the official Ukrainian dictionary.

Hearing the slur being used in his own state felt especially distressing to Golinkin.

“‘Zhyd out’ was ‘kike out’ - just a slogan in my childhood. I saw it written in alleyways, and in bathroom stalls, and it was a call to cleanse Ukraine. When things go bad, and things fall apart, the solution is ‘Jew out,’” Golinkin said, adding, “We left everything in Ukraine to have a life in which you don’t hear ‘Jew, out.’”

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Golinkin wrote about how his sense of identity as a Ukrainian was deepening. The pageant in Clifton, he said, would not erase all that is positive about Ukrainian culture.

“Choosing this filth is just a shameful thing to do,” Golinkin said. “It doesn’t do justice to Ukraine, which has so much more than this.”