Return to Jewish Cuba with Ruth Behar

Recorded on May 13, 2021

Links shared during the program:

You can learn more about Ruth and her work here: https://www.ruthbehar.com/

You can learn more about An Island Called Home here: https://www.theivybookshop.com/book/9780813541891

You can register for the film screening of On the Banks of the Tigris here: https://jewishmuseummd.org/events/on-the-banks-of-the-tigris/

You can purchase your copy of Letters from Cuba online through Esther’s Place here.

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Explore Jewish life in Cuba with author, scholar, and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar. Behar will trace her family’s transnational journey and her Cuban roots as well as the stories of the Jewish community that remains on the island. Drawing upon her book An Island Called Home and her most recent novel, Letters from Cuba, which is inspired by her grandmother’s story of escaping Poland to make a brand-new life in Cuba, Behar will touch upon themes of immigration, belonging, identity, and preservation that make up Cuba’s Jewish story.

Closed captioning will be available for this program.

About the Author:

As a cultural anthropologist, poet and writer, teacher, and public speaker, Ruth Behar is known for the compassion she brings to her quest to understand the depth of the human experience. She was born in Havana and grew up in New York and has lived in Spain and Mexico. She returns often to Cuba to build bridges around culture, literature, art, and Jewish life, and is the editor of the classic anthology, Bridges to Cuba.

Behar’s books about her travels, Translated Woman, The Vulnerable Observer, An Island Called Home, and Traveling Heavy, are acclaimed for their unique mix of personal and scholarly writing. She is the author of a bilingual book of poetry, Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé. Behar made her fiction debut with her novel for young people, Lucky Broken Girl, which won the Pura Belpré Medal. She was the first Latina to win a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.

She has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation. Behar is the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.