Is the Ukrainian Jewish president a 'modern Maccabee' for our time?

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Congressman retires to lead American Jewish Committee, Biden's Supreme Court pick on religious liberty, frat suspended for swastikas, and the president pays a shiva call.

THE WAR IN UKRAINE

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is drawing praise from Jews who see him as a hero. (Getty)

Russian forces hit Ukraine harder on Monday, causing hundreds of casualties and about half a million civilians to try to flee. At the center of the crisis sits Ukraine’s Jewish president, a 44-year-old former comedian and actor who finds himself in perhaps his greatest role yet.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy reminds us what a Jewish hero looks like: The persistence of Soviet refuseniks against totalitarian rule during the 1980s, along with the hundreds of thousands of Jews who supported them around the world, showed the leaders of the Soviet Union that the human spirit of liberty cannot be stifled. Today, Ukrainian civilians — particularly the courage demonstrated by President Zelenskyy — remind one rabbi of the bravery he witnessed in Russia decades ago. “As the prophet Zechariah taught us 2,500 years ago,” he writes, “it is not by might, not by power, but by spirit.” Read the essay ➤

How a career in performance prepared Zelenskyy for this moment in Ukraine:The Ukrainian president’s television background brought to mind another actor-turned-politician for our culture columnist. While it was said that former President Ronald Reagan was not always “able to distinguish real life from reel life,” Robert Zaretsky writes, Zelenskyy “is acutely alive to this distinction. He is using reel life — the knowledge he has won as a screenwriter as well as an actor — to underscore the existential stakes of real life not just for Ukrainians, but for us as well.” Read the essay ➤

For many Jews watching Ukraine’s war, Zelenskyy is a ‘modern Maccabee’: One popular meme circulating on social media shares that Zelenskyy had family die in the Holocaust, and then adds: “He is standing up to a dictator. Because he is brave. Because he knows what happens if you don’t.” A Jewish human rights group produced a T-shirt inspired by Zelenskyy that reads, “Resisting tyrants since Pharaoh.” But there is a more complicated subtext. Read the story ➤

But wait, there’s more…

To follow all our Ukraine coverage, bookmark this page.

ALSO FROM THE FORWARD

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has a long career on the bench. (Getty)

What does President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee have to say about Jewish issues? In 2017, a postal service employee complained of discrimination when he was reprimanded for listening to gospel music at work. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who President Biden nominated last week for the Supreme Court, allowed the case to move forward. She “has a relatively standard and progressive commitment to the legal protections afforded faith and its role in public life,” writes Michael A. Helfand, a law professor and fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. “Her engagement with questions of law and religion, for now, seem the kind of balls-and-strikes decisions you would expect from a federal judge.” Read the story ➤

Rep. Ted Deutch retires from Congress to ‘fight for the Jewish people’: The congressman, a prominent Democrat from South Florida, announced on Monday that he would not seek a seventh term, instead becoming chief executive of the American Jewish Committee. Deutch, who would have had to face off against another incumbent Democrat because of redistricting, becomes the 31st member of his party to step aside ahead of the midterms. He told our Jacob Kornbluh he’d been preparing for his new role his whole life, crediting his formative years at Camp Ramah with teaching him to stand up for Jewish issues, and his time as a Hillel leader in college fighting for Soviet Jews. “If I think about what I did as a kid and the experiences that I had as a young adult, it probably would have been easier to anticipate a position like the one I’m going to more than the one that I’ve been in,” Deutch said. Read our interview ➤

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

🏫 The University of South Florida has suspended a fraternity after underage students were caught drinking and drawing swastikas on each other as part of a hazing ritual at an off-campus party. A hearing between the university and the fraternity, Pi Kappa Phi, is scheduled for later today to determine the length of the suspension. (USF Oracle)

🇮🇱 Two armed Palestinian men were killed during a clash with Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank overnight Monday. The Israeli border police said officers came under fire while arresting a person suspected of terrorism in the Jenin refugee camp. Earlier Monday, dozens of Palestinians were injured when Israeli police tried to disperse stone-throwers at Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate. (Jerusalem Post, AP)

✍️ Two Iowa farm girls, Betty and Juanita Wagner, were pen pals with Anne and Margot Frank. Their letters are now part of an exhibit at a tiny museum in Danville, Iowa, the last one dated April 27, 1940. Two weeks later, Germany invaded the Netherlands, and the American sisters didn’t hear from the Frank family again until after the war. “I got a letter back from their father, handwritten, five pages, telling about what had happened to them during the war,” Betty recalled. “How they had hidden in the attic and how hard it was on Anne. I cried. We all cried.” (JTA)

🏀 The governor of Alabama is questioning a decision not to honor the request of a Seventh-Day Adventist high school to reschedule a Saturday basketball game until after sundown because of Sabbath observance. The idea that a team “could be denied a chance to compete based on its faith – without even the most modest of accommodations – is deeply concerning,” Gov. Kay Ivey said. (CNN)

📖 CYCO books isn’t quite like the other Yiddish bookstores in New York: The store, which is in Queens, was long financed primarily by a philanthropic foundation. When that organization recently cut off support, it seemed like a death knell for one of the last outposts of secular Yiddish literary culture in the city – until a crowdfunding operation stepped in. (New York Review of Books)

Shiva call ➤ Joan Olivere, the mother-in-law of Beau Biden, died at 76, and the president attended the Zoom shiva. A former flight attendant, Olivere did volunteer work, played Mah-Jong – and was Joe Biden’s childhood crush. “I was the Catholic kid, she was the Jewish girl,” he has joked. “I still tried. I didn’t get anywhere.” (Delaware Online)

Another shiva call ➤ Richard Blum, the husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, died at 86. Blum was a businessman and philanthropist who donated tens of millions of dollars to educational causes, and he also sat on the boards of organizations including the American Cancer Society and the Daniel Pearl Foundation. (New York Times)

What else we’re reading ➤ Jennifer Esteen, a Black Jewish lesbian Assembly candidate in California, is ready to break more barriers … Woody Allen is publishing a collection of humor essays, his first book since his controversial 2020 memoir … Maroon 5, the pop rock band, will perform in Israel for the first time as part of its 2022 world tour.

ON THE CALENDAR

Bob Dylan and Dinah Shore circa 1982 in New York City. (Getty)

Welcome to Women’s History Month: Dinah Shore, singer and TV star, was born on March 1, 1917. A native of Tennessee, Shore’s career spanned decades and genres: as a recording artist in the Big Band era and later as the host of her own variety show, for which she won 10 Emmy Awards. Gallup, the polling agency, crowned her one of the most admired women in the world – on four separate occasions. But perhaps her greatest claim to fame is Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah song, in which he manages to rhyme her name with “menorah” (“Dinah Shore-ah”).

Also on this day, in 1867, Nebraska was admitted as the 37th U.S. state. Check out our roundup of 10 Jewish facts about the Cornhusker State.

In honor of National Dadgum That’s Good Day (yes, it’s a thing), check out our recipe for sweet challah rolls with apple currant filling.

Last year on this day, we were reporting on all the Jewish (and Jewish-adjacent) winners at the Golden Globe Awards.

Happy birthday to Frida Simon, a Holocaust survivor who turns 100 today.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Adam Neumann, an entrepreneur, was inspired by the kibbutz he grew up on when he launched WeWork, which provided communal spaces for freelancers. But, by all accounts, he took the ethos of Israel’s Startup Nation a tad too far. Neumann’s rapid rise, and even quicker downfall – his chaotic leadership led to billions of dollars in losses – is now the subject of a new miniseries on Apple TV+ featuring Jared Leto as Neumann and Anne Hathaway as his wife, Rebekah. “WeCrashed” premieres on March 18; watch the trailer above.

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Play today’s Vertl puzzle (aka the Yiddish Wordle)

Thanks to Laura E. Adkins, Jacob Kornbluh and Taya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at [email protected].

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