In Ukraine’s recent election, Volodomyr Zelensky—a Jewish actor and comedian who made his name playing a hapless everyman unexpectedly elected to the presidency—was elected to the presidency by a landslide. Vladislav Davidzon, one of the few journalists granted extended access to Zelensky, describes the factors that contributed to his success, and considers what it might mean for the country’s Jews:

As has been widely and gleefully repeated by Ukrainian patriots, Zelensky’s election paves the way for Ukraine to be the only state other than Israel to have a Jewish president and a Jewish prime minister (Volodymyr Groysman) serving concurrently. If nothing else, Sunday’s electoral results should finally shatter the five-year-long Kremlin narrative of Kiev having been captured by a neo-Nazi fascist junta, [a charge Russia has used to smear efforts to fight back against its invasion of Ukraine]. Still, in private, multiple leaders of the Ukrainian Jewish community expressed worry to me about that situation not being an appealing one for the Jewish community in the long term if Zelensky fails as a political leader.

[For his part], Zelensky forcefully defended the history and contributions of Ukrainian Jews to the country [in a conversation on the day] before the first round of voting. . . .

Ukraine’s new president is the son of a Jewish intelligentsia family from Krivyi Rih, a gritty industrial city in the country’s Russian-speaking south. The symbolic location of his birthplace has served to reassure some voters that he would respect a truce between mutually hostile Russian-leaning and Ukrainian-nationalist visions of the country’s cultural future.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.