responses in this survey should have been noted by 60 Minutes, as should the improvement in
attitudes from 1990 to 1992. Instead of applauding the reality of favorable Ukrainian attitudes
toward Jews, and the reality that they are getting even better, 60 Minutes seemed bent on
encouraging their deterioration.
And, if 60 Minutes had wanted personal testimony concerning Ukrainian attitudes toward Jews to
bolster the dry facts coming from the opinion poll, then it could have consulted any number of
Ukrainian Jews who would have been happy to correct 60 Minutes' biases. The above-mentioned
Iosep Zissels, for example, would have offered observations such as that "There was a time when
the leaders of Pamiat [or "Pamyat" - the Russian anti-Semitic organization] would travel from
Russia to recruit supporters in Ukraine. They didn't find any. We are well aware of this fact"
(Ukrainian Weekly, January 26, 1992, p. 4)
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Is there any? Of course there is. Jewish Ukrainophobia is universal. Ukraine has some, just
as does the United States or Canada or Israel. But is there more Jewish Ukrainophobia in
Ukraine than elsewhere? Don't ask 60 Minutes - to ask such a question is to violate rules of
political correctness.
One thing missing from the above discussion of Ukrainian anti-Semitism, then, is any mention of
the reciprocal attitude of Jewish Ukrainophobia (or more generally of Jewish phobic responses
toward Gentiles or peoples of any other creed). But perhaps we would be able to evaluate
statistics on the rate of Ukrainian anti-Semitism more intelligently if we were able to put them
side by side with statistics on Jewish Ukrainophobia. If Ukrainian anti-Semitism shows a
declining trend over some interval, would this fact not be enriched by a comparison with the
trend of Jewish Ukrainophobia over the same interval? In a discussion of Ukrainian-Jewish
relations, how is it conceivable that the attitudes of Ukrainians toward Jews is deemed relevant
and susceptible to quantification, but the attitudes of Jews toward Ukrainians is not? Here, as
in several other instances above, we see a curious paralysis of the comparative function, a
puzzling Ukrainian passivity in allowing the Jewish side to set the agenda for discussion and to
limit its parameters. Ukrainian motes are put under the microscope and measured and analyzed,
but Jewish beams are not.
CONTENTS: