The Soviet Jews Who Turned a Beloved Cartoon Character into a Metaphor for Their Plight

The hero of the Soviet Union’s most popular animated series was an adorable but mysterious “beast of unknown origin” named Cheburashka. To Maya Balakirsky Katz, Cheburashka’s rootlessness, his inability to fit into bureaucratic classification systems—in an early episode he is rejected by the zoo since its staff doesn’t know which cage to put him in—and even the fact that he resembles but most definitely is not a bear (the symbol of Russia), all suggest that he is a symbolic Jew. Such an interpretation becomes more persuasive given the men behind the cartoon:

[T]he series’ creative team was made up almost entirely of Yiddish-speaking Jews who had lost their families and homes in the [Holocaust]. The director, Roman Kachanov, . . . was born in a poor Jewish neighborhood in the city of Smolensk and pursued boxing in the cultural atmosphere of Smolensk’s Labor Zionist movement before his father and sister were murdered point-blank at a nearby execution site. Cheburashka’s puppet designer, Lev Shvartsman, raised in the Zionist youth culture of Minsk, changed his name to “Israel” after the 1967 war despite official hostility toward the Jewish state.

Kachanov recruited Teodor Bunimovich, a [Jewish] photojournalist who recorded many frontline documentaries of Nazi atrocities in Belarus, as his cameraman. The series’ operator Iosif Golomb not only spoke fluent Yiddish but his father was an avid collector of ḥasidic music. . . . [I]t stands to reason that the myriad rejections that Cheburashka endures as a consequence of his “unknown origins” resonated [with the creators] on a personal level. . . .

Cheburashka’s mysterious origins provide one of the central intrigues of the series. . . . The first episode opens with a fruit vendor opening up a crate of oranges and finding an adorable cross between a brown bear and an imported orange. . . . Not coincidently, Israel was the main source of orange imports to the Soviet Union. More to the point, Jaffa oranges were the signature export of the Jewish state. Indeed, Jaffa oranges were the only product that the Soviet Union imported from Israel and were the source of both national pride, representing productive Jewish labor in a country of their own, and, for Soviet Jews, anxiety as the ultimate symbol of Zionism.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Arts & Culture, Soviet Jewry, Soviet Union, Television, Zionism

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF