14 DAY TRIAL // Mila Kunis, who won over audiences worldwide and critics with her stunning performance in the Oscar-winning “Black Swan” (most recently), is at the center of a media controversy after an Ukrainian politician referred to her on his Facebook page by what is considered an Anti-Semitic slur.
Igor Miroshnichenko picked on Mila because she happens to be born in Ukraine. However, as the politician sees it, she is not a true Ukrainian because she’s a “zhydovka,” a word, which, according to TMZ, has been in use as a slur ever since the Holocaust.
The remark immediately drew the ire of Ukrainian Jews, but also of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in LA.
The official stance of the Ukrainian government is that Miroshnichenko was right in using the offensive word because it also appears in the dictionary with the meaning of “Jew” and, as such, it’s not necessarily a slur.
“Now, the famous Simon Wiesenthal Center in L.A. is getting involved – firing off a letter to the Prime Minister of the Ukraine to ‘express our outrage and indignation against the slanders of the Svoboda Party directed against the Jewish community in the Ukraine’,” TMZ reports.
“In the letter, Rabbi Marvin Hier explains, the term ‘zhydovka’ translates to ‘dirty Jewess’... and was used as an ‘insidious 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 celebrity publication further notes.
Moreover, the organization is asking for concrete measures to be taken in this particular instance, to “publically condemn this attack and to take measures to defeat the xenophobic forces that threaten your democracy.”
The Ukrainian government is yet to respond to the open letter. Equally silent has been Mila Kunis herself, whose publicist was not immediately available for comment as word of the slur directed at her broke online.