Picture a multicultural fair. Like the ones you went to in elementary school. I’m sure you see booths lined up with traditional food, music, and outfits from all over the world. And each of these booths probably holds a flag paired with a static image of land drawn on a map. In the era of nation-states, we think of cultures as inextricably tied to countries with rigid borders, distributed uniformly across the globe. Furthermore, people in one place see themselves as entirely separate from other cultures, and can only be neighbors within a structure of separated states. Growing up, the world told me that the Jewish people were bound to (and only to) the Southern Levant between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, what is now a state called “Israel”. According to this logic, Israel was my homeland, excluding any other place in the world from being my true home. I believed wholeheartedly that the Israeli state and culture were part of my “heritage”.
Until I learned that Israel is not my homeland. The more I read about the state’s history, the more I realized the country was not an “ancient homeland found again” but a settler-colonial enterprise built off the ongoing displacement of Palestinian people from their land. As I dove deeper, I only became more astonished by the depth of the state’s depravity.
Then one day, I woke up and realized I was not Israeli. The food, music, and dress that I associated myself with were not mine at all. This loss made me feel culturally “naked”, like I had nothing.
What I did know is that my family escaped from antisemitic pogroms in Ukraine during the early 20th century. As I came to understand that my true ancestry lies in Ukraine, I asked myself “Why don’t I feel connected to this culture?”.
And that’s when I realized that the Ashkenazi Jewish culture of my ancestors was murdered.
At the turn of the century Eastern Europe was getting cut into nation-states defined by singular bloodlines. Ashkenazi Jews were forced into a perilous choice: submit to the dominant group and face oppression, or leave. Antisemitism exploded in all facets of life, with state and civilian violence against Jews becoming a daily reality. This all came to a head with the Nazi Shoah, murdering 6 million Jews, with around a quarter of the murdered population coming from Ukraine alone.1 Ukraine was subsequently reoccupied by the Soviet Union, an entity that suppressed Jewish culture through bans on the teaching of Yiddish and Hebrew, murder of Jewish scholars, and destruction of artistic property. The combined influence of the United States’ assimilationist policies and Israel’s goal of building a new “Hebrew” culture (in direct opposition to older diasporic Jewish traditions) only ensured that Ukrainian Jewish culture was not to be passed on outside of Eastern Europe. Yiddish, the language of my ancestors, has gone from 13 million speakers before WWII2 to less than a million today.3 The Southeastern Dialect, commonly referred to as “Ukrainisch”, once the vehicle of Yiddish theater, is nearly extinct today.
Instead of lamenting what was lost, I take inspiration from Diasporist ideology and have set out to rebuild my Ukrainian Jewish culture. I’ve learned to play Klezmer clarinet. I practice every day and have played Klezmer songs from my ancestral home city, Odesa, in front of a live audience of dozens of people. Symbols are an essential part of any culture. I’ve been curating new symbols to represent what it means to be a Ukrainian Jew. The Holocaust memorial at Babi Yar in Kyiv, with its powerful menorah commemorating the over 30,000 Jewish people who were murdered during a two-day massacre, stands for me as a symbol of the resilience of the Ukrainian Jewish people in the face of extreme adversity. Along with the Ukrainian flag, I’ve adopted the flag of the Jewish Labor Bund, a leftist, Diasporist, anti-authoritarian, anti-Zionist group that was once the largest Jewish political organization in Eastern Europe. I’m coming to see the Tryzub, the golden Ukrainian trident, as a pan-Ukrainian symbol I can call my own.
Flag of the Jewish Labor Bund 5
Ukrainian Tryzub 6
I don’t assume I can call myself “Ukrainian” without doing something to help the country’s people in their struggle. I’ve participated in pro-Ukraine protests since the launch of the unjustified, genocidal full-scale Russian invasion. Ukrainian-born voices are often sidelined when speaking about their country’s struggle in mainstream Western media, so I’ve been uplifting the work of Leftist Ukrainian thinkers such as Romeo Kokriatski and Tara Bilous to inform my friends about the reality of the country’s situation. With the advent of the new Trump/Musk/Vance regime’s traitorous collaboration with Putin, I’ve spent Friday lunches with other Ukrainian activists calling on congresspeople to support Ukraine. Perhaps most strikingly, I’ve integrated my graduate education with opportunities related to Ukraine and dedicated my thesis to writing an infrastructure feasibility study for a new refugee-focused neighborhood in the municipality of Tetiiv to give back to the current generation of Ukrainian refugees. Helping to rebuild Ukraine is an essential part of regrounding myself and rebuild the Ukrainian Jewish culture.
Despite this work, it still feels strange occupying Ukrainian spaces. The stereotypical image of a Ukrainian person is someone with blonde hair and blue eyes, unlike my brown hair and brown eyes. Often, people inquire if my family spoke Ukrainian, and I have to inform them that my ancestors actually spoke Yiddish before coming to the U.S. When people ask me “Do you still have family in Ukraine?” I have to explain that we lost all connection after two world wars, a genocide, and an iron curtain. My family has been gone for so long that if I were to return, I would be the first in my lineage to set foot on Ukrainian soil in over one hundred and ten years.
Even with this, one of the most powerful benefits of seeing the world through a Diasporist lens is understanding that the multitude of identities can be embraced simultaneously. We can inhabit multiple spaces at once and resist the othering of ethnonationalism. I am not less Ukrainian for being Jewish and I am not less Jewish for being Ukrainian. Jews and their Ukrainian neighbors have exchanged music, recipes, loanwords, and art, a continuous exchange that leaves our cultures and identities interconnected.
Perhaps the most potent lesson of this quest to rebuild Ukrainian Jewish culture is how it
relates to other diasporic and genocided peoples. I see parallels in the movement to revitalize the Yiddish language and customs with Indigenous people rebuilding their heritage from mass state-sponsored destruction. The Black Diaspora’s struggle to create community autonomy inspires many young Jewish activists to pursue a similar commitment. Palestinians and Ukrainians fighting steadfastly to ensure their homeland is not pulverized by genocidal nation-states (Israel and Russia, respectively) show what resistance to domination can look like.
Cultures should be bridges, not walls. My endeavor to revitalize my Ukrainian Jewish roots has taught me what it means to think of myself and others outside of the nation-state framework. I hope to pass on my learnings to other Ukrainian Jews and displaced communities to create a more holistic understanding of human relations. May we all work to heal the world in solidarity together.
Slava Ukraini (Ukrainian - Glory to Ukraine) and Mir veln zey iberlebn (Yiddish – We will outlive them)!
1. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (2025). Ukraine. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/ukraine
2. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. (2012). Yiddish. Retrieved March 13, 2025, from https://web.archive.org/web/20120322162722/http://yivo.org/downloads/Yiddish.pdf
3. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. (2014). Basic facts about Yiddish. Retrieved from https://www.yivo.org/cimages/basic_facts_about_yiddish_2014.pdf
4. Image Credit: https://eurasiademocracy.org/2016/09/29/babi-yar-75-will-changing-ukraine-remember-infamous-nazi-atrocity/
5. Image Credit: deviantart.com/politicalflags/art/Jewish-Bund-flag-1018637271
6. https://www.cleanpng.com/png-flag-of-ukraine-national-symbols-of-ukraine-coat-o-6887537/