Author Lev Golinkin recently described an old-timey minstrel show at a Ukrainian Catholic church in Orlando, Florida, complete with hateful caricatures of a minority target, only now paraded before a modern audience and couched in Christmas celebration.
“The pageant isn’t short on spectacle,” Golinkin writes in the Washington Post. “The Holy Family, richly robed wise men, armored Roman soldiers and peasants dressed in bright Ukrainian embroidery all catch the eye. But even amid that explosion of color, the Jew is easy to spot. He appears on stage as a caricature of a Hasidic innkeep, including payot sidelocks. The character’s name is Moshko the zhyd — a slur for 'Jew' — and he is there to remind audience members of the evil in their midst.”
He parades about with promises to lend money and antics to distract revelry away from baby Jesus laying in his crib. And if he fails to catch your attention, he’ll call up a bunch of Roma (the slur name is “Gypsies”) to cavort and distract. He’ll even summon Satan himself to pull eyes away from the little marvel in a manger. Both pledge to keep the peasants ignorant of Jesus and wallowing in sin.
“This vestige of medieval antisemitism was just publicly live-streamed by St. Mary Protectress Ukrainian Catholic Church in Orlando, Florida, whose Facebook page invites viewers to ‘immerse yourselves in the magic of Christmas.’ But I don’t mean to single out this church; its pageant is not unusual,” said Golinkin. “Every winter, hundreds of Moshkos don the Jewish equivalent of blackface and scuffle onto stages in churches and community centers from New York to Chicago, Connecticut to Ohio, Dublin to Dubai. And many of the pageants, called verteps, are propagated by a branch of the Roman Catholic Church.”
The most jarring aspect of some of these spectacles, said Golinkin, is seeing children scream for the zhyd to ‘get out,’ or dress up as Moshko and his wife, “Sarah,” themselves, proclaiming their wickedness to the encouragement of parents, teachers and priests in the audience.
The scene is unnerving to Golinkin, who fled Russia with his family when the Russians similarly ordered them to “get out.”
“I’m certainly not the first immigrant to discover Old World darkness lurking in the U.S. But there was something obscenely mesmerizing about scrolling through social media and coming across little children — kids for whom Hasidic innkeeps might as well be Ottoman padishahs — being coaxed into shouting an antisemitic slur in churches and credit unions tucked amid strip malls,” said Golinkin. “Old hatreds have been lovingly packed and replanted. My nightmare was another’s nostalgia.”
At the end of the show, after King Herod is thwarted and Jesus manages to survives, Moshko comes out to collect donations from the audience.
“You could teach a course on antisemitism based on vertep tropes,” said Golinkin. And while Pope Leo XIV recently proclaimed in a speech that “The Church does not tolerate antisemitism,” the pontiff clearly has “his work cut out for him” with Antisemitic pageants legitimized at Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and splashed across Facebook pages.
“The reality is that right now bishops and priests across the globe, including in Pope Leo’s hometown of Chicago, are carrying out an annual tradition of teaching children to hate Jews and Roma,” Golinkin said.
The question with whether the church will continue to tolerate it.
Read Golinkin's Washington Post report at this link.