Marina Sapritsky-Nahum’s work focuses on post-Soviet Jewish communities, religion, migration, philanthropy, and urban culture. Her research brings together anthropology, history, and Jewish studies, and concentrates geographically on Ukraine and its diaspora communities abroad. She is particularly interested in the process of religious revival and community-building in the aftermath of state socialism, and how these changes affect social relations and city life. She has written about concepts of home and diaspora; morality and return migration; cosmopolitanism; religious adherence; philanthropy; and heritage travel. 

Marina’s initial research was based in Ukraine’s southern port city of Odesa, a historically “cosmopolitan” city affected by nationalism, globalisation, mass migration, and international development. There she studied the transformation of Jewish practices and the everyday lives of remaining and returning Jewish residents. She has published several articles and chapters based on this research and is currently completing a manuscript provisionally entitled Negotiating Traditions: Jewish Life in Contemporary Odesa.   

She has also conducted research on Russian-speaking Jewry and global Judaism in London, UK.  Her project “New Directions in Transnational Jewish Identity: Russian-Speaking Jewry in London” was sponsored by the Brandeis-Genesis Institute for Russian Jewry and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Her new research looks at Ukrainian Jewish heritage as part of a larger project: “Knowledge Architectures: Mapping Structures of Jewish Heritagization Processes on Communal, Organizational and Academic Levels in Post-1945 Europe.”This work is funded by the German Academic Research Council.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Marina has been writing about the effects of war on the everyday lives of Ukrainian Jews who remain in the country, and of those who have fled to Europe and the UK, as well as the fragmentation and remaking of historical narratives. 

Marina has also applied anthropological methods to her work as a volunteer consultant for international and local Jewish outreach programmes in Ukraine and the UK. Keen to engage with the wider public, she contributes regularly to the LSE blog and others and writes for international newspapers and magazines.