Stranger Than Fiction: Ukraine’s New Jewish President

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all it the ultimate reality TV. Last week, a Jewish Ukrainian actor, who plays a fictional president in a popular television show, defeated the billionaire incumbent to win election as Ukraine’s new president. In the process, the country became the first outside Israel to simultaneously have a Jewish prime minister and president.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy took 73% of the vote in a landslide that ended the rule of chocolate tycoon Petro Poroshenko, who has governed Ukraine since the 2014 Maidan revolution and subsequent Russian seizure of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. The election of the 41-year-old Jewish leader in Ukraine raises the intriguing question of whether the country’s traditionally heavy strain of anti-Semitism is fading.

Zelenskiy’s unlikely rise to power as an outsider also raises questions over whether Ukraine is emerging from the grip of the oligarchs who have run the country in the post-Soviet period, as well as how the new chief of state will deal with the frozen conflict with Russian separatists in the country’s east.

So, who is Volodymyr Zelenskiy, reality star-turned-president? In a campaign short on traditional media and long on social media, one of the only people to have had had access to Zelenskiy on the campaign trail was Vladislav Davidzon, editor of the Odessa Review, an English language cultural magazine. He says that Ukraine’s new leader, who comes from a gritty, industrial part of the country, is charismatic and funny, and possesses a macho, working-class attitude. “He’s strong-willed, but also emotionally effusive; a short, tough Jewish guy.”