Reply to Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Is she actually a Russian that was born in Ukraine? Or Ukrainian that like so many speaks Russian in her family? I think I heard her say in interviews that she is Russian.[/quote]
She is neither. She is Jewish and that’s why her family was able to get an immigrant visa to the US.[/quote]
That makes no sense. Plus there are plenty of Russian and Ukrainian Jewish people. She can identify as both, like so many here identify as both. I am sure Jews in the U.S. would take offense to your telling them they are not American.[/quote]

It was very different in the Soviet Union.  Your passport listed your ethnicity.  Jewish was listed as a separate ethnicity, as were Russian and Ukrainian.  There were basically no practicing Jews in the Soviet Union (or very few, since religion had been banned for decades), so Judaism was mainly an ethnicity, not a religion.  Most of the Soviet provinces were heavily settled by Russians, including Jews of Russian extraction, as part of the Soviet attempt to integrate the provinces into the larger Soviet community.  After the breakup of the Soviet Union, many of these Russian families were very unwelcome in many of the provinces (regardless of whether they were born there), and the Jews even more so.  Many emigrated.  Anyway, within 20th century Russia, most Jews would consider themselves as having a dual ethnic identity as Russian and as Jewish, but its not as simple as an American Jew just saying that they are "America" but "Russia" wasn't even a country from 1917 to 1991 -- it was a republic and ethnicity within the country of the Soviet Union.   But a Russian Jew living in Moldova, for instance, would not consider themselves Moldovan, nor would the people in Moldova consider them Moldovan.

While it's a separate historical point, I don't think there were a ton of Ukrainian Jews that survived the Holocaust.  My husband's family was from a Jewish town in the Ukraine and  literally the entire town was killed.[/quote]

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