But amid the competing volleys of anti-Semitism accusations, it’s easy to lose track of the truth: things are usually not quite what they seem in today’s Ukraine.

First, the popularity of far right parties in Ukraine is greatly overestimated. According to recent polls, candidates from Svoboda and Right Sector are projected to receive only 5-6 percent of the total vote in the parliamentary election. They are projected to fare even worse in the May 25 presidential election. And it bears repeating that both far-right groups owe their rise in part to none other than Viktor Yanukovych, who believed that by incubating ultra-nationalist parties he might steal nationalist votes from more mainstream parties and mobilize greater support from his traditional base in Eastern Ukraine.

Most importantly, the Ukrainian Jewish community is nowhere near as marginalized and oppressed as recent media coverage would suggest. Jewish public and political figures play important and varied roles in Ukrainian society, and the Jewish community has experienced a dramatic revival in recent years.

In Dnipropetrovsk, two Jewish billionaires financed a $70 million community center that houses a synagogue, businesses catering to observant Jews, the Israeli consulate, and a Holocaust museum. After the ouster of Yanukovych, one of those billionaires, Ihor Kolomoisky, was named the governor of Dnipropetrovsk oblast by the interim government. Even before the revolution, several figures of Jewish origin played prominent roles in Yanukovych’s Party of Regions—namely, Hennadiy Kernes, the mayor of Kharkiv, and Mikhailo Dobkin, the ex-governor of Kharkiv Province who is currently the Party of Regions candidate for president. Eduard Gurvits, also Jewish, served for years as mayor of Odessa, a city with close historical associations with the Jewish community, before being elected to parliament as a member of Vitali Klitschko’s opposition UDAR party in 2012. Another Jewish politician, Volodymyr Groisman, was appointed deputy prime minister for regional policy by the new government, after serving for eight years as the mayor of Vinnytsia. Ukrainian Jews were active participants in the Euromaidan protests, and one former IDF veteran turned Ukrainian businessman even teamed up with Svoboda fighters during the violent street battles that eventually brought down Yanukovych.

Unfortunately, the longer the Ukraine crisis drags on, the greater the risk of additional provocations and violence. The wave of kidnappings in Eastern Ukraine and attacks on journalists in recent days demonstrate just how dangerous and unpredictable the overall situation is. Ukraine’s Jews are, for now, not a central part of the political drama, but the repeated use of anti-Semitism as a tool in the country’s full-contact politics sends a worrying signal nonetheless.