It’s one hell of a reflection on Europe that the country which now arguably has the continent’s toughest laws against antisemitism—and the greatest will to fight this resurgent evil—is Ukraine.
Yes, Ukraine. The country that has been beating off a brutal Russian invasion for more than four years. The country for whom a typical day will bring hundreds of drones and barrages of missiles raining down on its cities and towns. The country that has been traumatized by the cruel abduction of nearly 20,000 of its children by the Russians in an outrage that brings to mind the Nazi “Germanization” campaign targeting Polish children during World War II.
Yes, that Ukraine.
On April 15, a day when Ukraine was struck by more than 300 Russian drones, the country’s Jewish President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed new legislation combating antisemitism, passed by an overwhelming majority of the country’s parliament. The law introduces harsh penalties for offenders, with crimes involving violence carrying sentences of between five and eight years.
It should be emphasized that the new law didn’t appear out of nowhere, nor was it an act of political opportunism. Rather, it builds upon and strengthens existing legislation, including Ukraine’s 2021 bill to combat antisemitism. That statute includes Holocaust denial, incitement and attempts to delegitimize Jewish identity—the latter phenomenon now so widespread in Western Europe that it has become unremarkable as punishable offenses.
There is much to say about this, and none of it reflects well on Ukraine’s neighbors to the west. Were any Western European country to have at this moment a Jewish president or prime minister, it’s highly unlikely that she or he would take the political and reputational risk of pushing through legislation to fight antisemitic agitation. But in Ukraine, there is no tension between Zelenskyy openly identifying as a Jew and approving legislation to protect the Jewish community, and his status as an elected, accountable president for all Ukrainians, many of whom are devout Christians.
This does not mean, of course, that antisemitism is non-existent in Ukraine—if it were, then this legislation wouldn’t be necessary. Nor does it mean that Jew-hatred can be simply written off in its long history there. Over the centuries, when Ukraine was a component of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union, its Jewish communities were subjected to vicious pogroms and expulsions. That culminated in the slaughter of 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews during the years of World War II and the Holocaust, mainly by the invading Germans but with plenty of local collaborators as well.
That history is still a point of contention, as demonstrated by the fact that Ukraine has yet to overturn the 1954 Soviet decision renaming the provincial city of Proskuriv as Khmelnytskyi in honor of the 17th-century Cossack leader Bogdan Chmielnicki, whose name, prior to Adolf Hitler, was a synonym for murderous violence against Jews. Indeed, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s regime has weaponized this history, which also includes such figures as the wartime nationalist leader and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, to defame Zelenskyy’s democratic government as “neo-Nazi.”
Yet the past should not blunt the significance of the present moment. By stigmatizing antisemitism—and by doing so on a day when Israelis and Jews marked Yom Hashoah—Ukraine was standing up for the finest values of liberal democracy. Because the ideological garbage that this age-old scourge represents is anathema to societies based on tolerance and intellectual openness, and which cherish the importance of a well-rounded education. One of the saddest aspects of Western Europe these days is the retreat of these values at just the time that the vultures of communism, Islamism and neo-fascism are all circling with intent.
The grotesque nature of this situation was graphically unveiled in Tel Aviv University’s annual report on antisemitism, whose 2025 findings were published last week.
The statistics are grim. In 2025, 20 people were killed in four separate antisemitic attacks. In countries where Jewish communities are a tinier fraction of the overall population than in the United States and where they make up at most 2.4 percent of all Americans, the number of recorded antisemitic incidents was simply dizzying. Nearly 2,000 in Australia. Nearly 4,000 in the United Kingdom. Nearly 6,000 in Germany. Nearly 7,000 in Canada. In many countries, like France, where there was a slight decrease in incidents compared with 2024, there was a corresponding rise in physical assaults targeting Jews.
Most disturbing of all is the lack of prosecutions of offenders. The final section of the report contains profiles of individuals in the United States, Canada, France and the United Kingdom who were convicted for antisemitic crimes. However, the study’s author, professor Carl Yonker, noted that his “research team located slightly fewer than 100 indictments. This number is strikingly small in comparison to the number of antisemitic incidents reported in the four countries studied over the past five years. It highlights one of the main problems of the fight against antisemitism … the vast majority of offenders go unpunished.”
In surveying the offender profiles, certain patterns emerge. The overwhelming number are males. Arabs and Muslims are disproportionately represented, but several other demographics—white, black and Asian among them—find their way onto the list. Many of the offenders of all ages are unemployed. Many have been unable to find a romantic partner or bring children into the world. Many still live with their parents. Many have been diagnosed with mental illnesses or claim to suffer from them, although as the report observed somewhat wryly, “It is not clear why their situation led them to attack Jews while sparing other groups.”
Quite a few of the offenders are possessed by a rage against Jews that they are happy to share with the rest of the world. Here is a selection of what they have to say: “Jews don’t deserve to live. Jews don’t deserve to be on this earth. I’m going to kill the Jews. I’m coming to the Temple to kill all the Jews and the children.” “I’m gonna blow you to bits you f**king ki*e bit*h.” “Get the f**k out of Palestine, you bleeding ass heinie heebe ki*e, or I’ll blow your other kid up, ki*e.”
Spitting and screaming, on and on they go.
Such gutter discourse has not emerged in a vacuum. Those who have enabled it are those whose offenses against Jews do not pass the threshold of criminality, but whose hatred is no less tangible.
They include the millions of keffiyeh-clad demonstrators who have marched in solidarity with Hamas at protests and rallies where antisemitic barbs like “zio” and “Epstein class” are commonplace. They include that amorphous class of grifters known as “influencers”—ghouls like Hasan Piker on the left, and Tucker Carlson and Meghan Kelly on the right—whose revenue streams now depend on the continued popularity of Jew-baiting. They include the pundits, politicians, musicians, actors and artists who have falsely accused Israel of “genocide”; denied the fact that multiple rapes and other forms of sexual abuse were committed during the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the kidnapping of 251 others into the tunnels of Gaza; and given credence to the long-discredited slander that Western governments are in thrall to a cabal of powerful Jews.
Every single one of these people is directly complicit in the storm of antisemitic hatred Jews face today. Most of them are proud of having done so.
This is the atmosphere in which Ukraine has bravely declared, “no more.”
Jews have never had the luxury of ignoring their enemies, but they cannot forget their friends either—most of all, those who stood by them in the darkest times.
