A Ukrainian politician has sparked controversy for using an anti-Semitic slur toward Mila Kunis, who was born in the Ukraine and is Jewish, in a Facebook rant.
Igor Miroshnichenko says the actress is not a true Ukrainian because she is a “zhydovka,” which is a word that has been used as a slur against Jewish people since the Holocaust.
After protests by Ukrainian Jews, the Ukrainian government announced the word was OK to use because it appears in the Ukrainian dictionary as a term for a Jew that isn’t necessarily a slur.
According to Los Angeles’ Simon Wiesenthal Center, the term translates to “dirty Jewess,” and in a letter to the Ukrainian prime minister, a rabbi from the Center describes the term as “a slur invoked by the Nazis and their collaborators as they rounded up the Jews to murder them at Babi Yar and in the death camps.”
The org. has called on the Prime Minister to “publically condemn this attack and to take measures to defeat the xenophobic forces that threaten your democracy.”
Kunis has not yet commented.
