Contemporary narratives about Ukrainian-Jewish relations

• In Event: Lost shared future? Russian-speaking Jews in contemporary Russia and Ukraine

Abstract

On March 19, 2015, the Russian TV Channel 1 aired a 2.5 hour film, billed as a documentary called Crimea: The Road Home (Krym: Put’ na
rodynu). The show, directed by Andrei Kondrashov, spliced interviews between the director and the Russian President with recreated scenes from the Maidan to the annexation of Crimea, as well as additional interviews with key supporters of the current Russian government. The
event was one in several large scale performances, including a 2014 Bike Rally and a reenactment of a Stalin-era opera, all of which help to create a grand narrative that connects the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian antagonism with historical incidents of fascism in
Western Europe. By fueling fears about the threat of nationalism to Ukraine's minorities, especially to its Jews, pro-Russian propaganda,
beginning in 2013, cautioned the West about the Maidan movement. In this presentation, I shall discuss these recent cultural products, and
the ways that their authors have rewritten the history of Ukrainian-Jewish relations to frame the current Ukraine-Russia crisis.

Author

• Amelia Mukamel Glaser, UCSD