For nearly twenty years, Marina Sapritsky-Nahum has been documenting how Jewish life is lived, remade, and imagined in Ukraine and its diaspora. As a Visiting Fellow in Anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London (UCL), she brings together ethnographic fieldwork, historical sensitivity, and a commitment to making scholarship matter beyond the academy.
Marina’s relationship with Odesa—the Black Sea port city that has been the heart of her research—began long before the world’s attention turned to Ukraine. Her book Jewish Odesa: Negotiating Identities and Traditions in Contemporary Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2024) tells the story of a community navigating the complex legacies of Soviet rule, mass emigration, religious revival, and the fraught politics of language and nationality. It’s a story of resilience and reinvention, of how people build lives and communities amid uncertainty and change.
Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, that uncertainty has become existential. Marina has watched the communities she has known for decades face impossible choices: to stay or to flee, to hold onto the past or imagine new futures.
For nearly twenty years, Marina Sapritsky-Nahum has been documenting how Jewish life is lived, remade, and imagined in Ukraine and its diaspora. As a Visiting Fellow in Anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London (UCL), she brings together ethnographic fieldwork, historical sensitivity, and a commitment to making scholarship matter beyond the academy.
Marina’s relationship with Odesa—the Black Sea port city that has been the heart of her research—began long before the world’s attention turned to Ukraine. Her book Jewish Odesa: Negotiating Identities and Traditions in Contemporary Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2024) tells the story of a community navigating the complex legacies of Soviet rule, mass emigration, religious revival, and the fraught politics of language and nationality. It’s a story of resilience and reinvention, of how people build lives and communities amid uncertainty and change.
Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, that uncertainty has become existential. Marina has watched the communities she has known for decades face impossible choices: to stay or to flee, to hold onto the past or imagine new futures. Her recent writing traces how war reshapes not just individual lives but collective memory and heritage itself. She documents the everyday—how people continue rituals, care for one another, and maintain connection across vast distances—because it is in these ordinary acts that survival and meaning are made.
Marina’s current research, supported by the German Academic Research Council, examines how Ukrainian Jewish heritage is being constructed and contested in real time, as part of the larger project “Knowledge Architectures” on post-1945 European Jewish heritage processes. She also continues work she began years ago on Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking Jews in London, exploring how migration, language, and religious practice create new forms of Jewish identity across borders.
Throughout her career, Marina has worked at the intersection of research and practice. She has served as a consultant for Jewish organisations in Ukraine and the U.K., translating anthropological insight into community action. She writes regularly for the London School of Economics Religion and Global Society blog, Jewish Renaissance, Haaretz, and Tablet—outlets that allow her to reach beyond academic audiences and engage with urgent questions about identity, displacement, and what it means to belong.
Expertise: Ukraine, Jewish identity, religion, migration, philanthropy, heritage, urban culture, post-Soviet studies
Her recent writing traces how war reshapes not just individual lives but collective memory and heritage itself. She documents the everyday—how people continue rituals, care for one another, and maintain connection across vast distances—because it is in these ordinary acts that survival and meaning are made.
Marina’s current research, supported by the German Academic Research Council, examines how Ukrainian Jewish heritage is being constructed and contested in real time, as part of the larger project “Knowledge Architectures” on post-1945 European Jewish heritage processes. She also continues work she began years ago on Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking Jews in London, exploring how migration, language, and religious practice create new forms of Jewish identity across borders.
Throughout her career, Marina has worked at the intersection of research and practice. She has served as a consultant for Jewish organisations in Ukraine and the U.K., translating anthropological insight into community action. She writes regularly for the London School of Economics Religion and Global Society blog, Jewish Renaissance, Haaretz, and Tablet—outlets that allow her to reach beyond academic audiences and engage with urgent questions about identity, displacement, and what it means to belong.
Expertise: Ukraine, Jewish identity, religion, migration, philanthropy, heritage, urban culture, post-Soviet studies