This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.

I grew up speaking Russian to my family — at home, on the streets in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and at the Italian grocery store in Tottenville, Staten Island. It was never an issue until the Russia-Ukraine conflict escalated in 2022. That’s when the language I knew as my mother tongue became political.

When I spoke Russian, some people threw judgmental looks and choice words my way, assuming my allegiance to Russia. They didn’t know my Ukrainian-Jewish background as the child of Odesan immigrants (while Odessa is the Russian spelling, Odesa is officially used in Ukraine). Slavic people judged my choice of Russian; others would assume I must be Russian.

My language became the marker of my identity; otherwise I was seen as a nondescript white person. This prompted me to seriously consider what my mixed ethno-cultural background meant to me. As someone one quarter Jewish, three-fourths Slavic, but fully shaped by Ukraine, who really was I, and how could I express all of it at once?

I think back to my parents describing Soviet antisemitism, particularly harsh in the 1980s, when they grew up in Soviet Ukraine. Though they learned both Russian and Ukrainian, able to partially connect to the region’s heritage, they lived under systemic discrimination that limited religious cultural expression. They celebrated with a secular “New Year’s” tree and exchanged gifts, prohibited from any further religious celebration by the government. My mother’s Jewish family could not light Hanukkah candles, and my father’s Eastern Orthodox relatives could not celebrate Christmas. Judaism was passed down through family recipes such as mini-matzah ball soup and latkes, mannerisms and stories told in kitchens thick with the smell of borscht.

Similarly, the Soviet Union suppressed Ukrainian identity, and Russia now does the same with Ukrainian speakers inside the territory it controls. Since 2019, Ukraine has emphasized reclaiming its culture, passing a language law mandating Ukrainian in the public sector. There is growing........

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