Ruth Behar

Ruth Behar is a Cuban-American anthropologist and writer. Her work includes academic studies, as well as poetry, memoir, and literary fiction. As an anthropologist, she has argued for the open adoption and acknowledgement of the subjective nature of research and participant-observers. She is a recipient of the Belpré Medal.

Life and work Ruth Behar was born in 1956 in Havana, Cuba to a Jewish-Cuban family. Her father, Isaac Behar Mizrahi, was from a Sephardic Jewish family. Her father's parents had immigrated from Turkey to Cuba in the early twentieth century as part of a wave of Sephardic Jewish immigrants fleeing the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, the Balkan Wars, and the prospect of their sons’ conscription into the Ottoman army. Her father's side of the family spoke a combination of Judaeo-Spanish and Cuban Spanish. Her mother's side, by contrast, was Ashkenazi Jewish, with her maternal grandparents coming from Poland and Russia. When her Ashkenazi and Sephardic parents married in Havana in 1956, their unusual union was called an "intermarriage." Behar has written about this dual heritage extensively, including in her documentary Adio Kerida and in essays describing her grandparents' Havana wedding photo, the Ladino-speaking household, and the family's connection to Cuba's old Sephardic synagogue, Chevet Ahim (Shevet Akhim).

Ruth was four when her family immigrated to the U.S. following Fidel Castro's gaining power in the revolution of 1959. More than 94% of Cuban Jews left the country at that time, together with many others of the middle and upper classes. Behar attended local schools and studied as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, receiving her B.A. in 1977. She studied cultural anthropology at Princeton University, earning her doctorate in 1983.

In 1988, Behar was the first Latina woman to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

She travels regularly to Cuba and Mexico to study aspects of culture, as well as to investigate her family's roots in Cuba. She has specialized in studying the lives of women in developing societies.

Behar is a professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. A writer of anthropology, essays, poetry and fiction, Behar focuses on issues related to women and feminism. Professor Jonda C. McNair also highlights the importance of Ruth Behar using her personal experience as a Cuban American of Sephardic Turkish, Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry to write stories that are culturally authentic. Traveling Heavy Traveling Heavy (2013) is a memoir about her Cuban-American family, descended from both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews in Cuba, as well as the strangers who ease her journey in life. Her probings about her complicated Jewish Cuban ancestry and family's immigration to America explore issues about identity and belonging. Kirkus Reviews described her book as "A heartfelt witness to the changing political and emotional landscape of the Cuban-American experience."

An Island Called Home An Island Called Home (2007) was written in Behar's quest for a better understanding of Jewish Cuba and particularly her family's roots. She noted, "I knew the stories of the Jews in Cuba, but it was all about looking at them as a community". As her family was among those who left Cuba, Behar intertwines her personal thoughts and feelings with her professional, analytical observations of the current society. She argues that the ethnographic fieldworker should identify and work though, his or her own emotional involvement with the subject under study. She suggested that the ideal of a "scientific," distanced, impersonal mode of presenting materials was incomplete. Townspeople said the witch, Esperanza Hernandez, had used black magic to blind her ex-husband after he regularly beat her and then left her for his mistress. Esperanza's odyssey examines physical borders, margins and separations.

Awards and honours MacArthur Fellowship (1988)

Selected bibliography

Books The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village: Santa María del Monte (1986) Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (1993; second edition, Beacon Press, 2003 ) Bridges to Cuba / Puentes a Cuba, editor, University of Michigan Press, 1995, Women Writing Culture Editors Ruth Behar, Deborah A. Gordon, University of California Press, 1995, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart, Beacon Press, 1996, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, Rutgers University Press, 2007, The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World, Editors Ruth Behar, Lucía M. Suárez, Macmillan, 2008, Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in Between Journeys, Duke University Press, 2013, Lucky Broken Girl, Nancy Paulsen Books, 2017, Letters from Cuba, Nancy Paulsen Books, 2020, Tia Fortuna's New Home: A Jewish Cuban Journey, Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2022, Across So Many Seas, Nancy Paulsen Books, 2024,

Film Adio Kerida (Goodbye Dear Love): A Cuban-American Woman's Search for Sephardic Memories (2002)