Zhydovka (Russian: жидовка, Ukrainian: жидівка, Polish: żydówka, Czech: židovka) is a term used for a Jewish woman. The term is used to refer to women who are of Jewish heritage. In Russia, it is considered pejorative and the word is used as an "anti-Semitic pejorative" by Russian-speaking people across the old Soviet Union. In other Slavic languages, such as Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Slovene and Croatian the terms zhyd (Jewish man) and zhydovka (Jewish woman) are not pejorative. The word zhyd was banned illegal to use by the Soviet authorities in the 1930s, also in the languages of the Soviet Union in which it had no negative connotations.
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Use in Soviet times
Nikita Khrushchev commented on this in his memoirs: "I remember that once we invited Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles...to a meeting at the Lvov [Lviv] opera house. It struck me as very strange to hear the Jewish speakers at the meeting refer to themselves as "yids." "We yids hereby declare ourselves in favour of such-and-such." Out in the lobby after the meeting I stopped some of these men and demanded, "How dare you use the word "yid?" Don't you know it's a very offensive term, an insult to the Jewish nation?" "Here in the Western Ukraine it's just the opposite," they explained. "We call ourselves yids...Apparently what they said was true. If you go back to Ukrainian literature...you'll see that "yid" isn't used derisively or insultingly."
Current use
In December 2012, Ukrainian politician Ihor Miroshnychenko of the Svoboda party wrote on Facebook that Hollywood actress Mila Kunis is "not a Ukrainian but a zhydivka (Ukrainian spelling of zhidovka)". Ukrainian Jews protested the use of term. Svoboda officials and Ukrainian philologist Alexander Ponomarev argued that in the Ukrainian language the word does not always have the anti-semitic connotations that it does in the Russian language, though Ponomarev warned that the term would be considered offensive by Jewish people. The Ukrainian Ministry of Justice declared that Miroshnichenko's use of the word was legal because it is an archaic term for Jew, and not necessarily a slur. In a letter of protest directed to (then) Prime Minister of Ukraine Mykola Azarov the term Zhydovka was described by Rabbi Marvin Hier of the U.S.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center 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," while himself referring to the country as the archaic "the Ukraine."