Ruth Behar facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Ruth Behar
Born	Cuba
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Princeton University Wesleyan University
Scientific career
Fields	Cultural Anthropology
Institutions	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Ruth Behar is an amazing Cuban-American writer and anthropologist. An anthropologist is someone who studies human societies and cultures. Ruth Behar writes many different kinds of books, including academic studies, poems, memoirs (stories about her own life), and fiction. She believes that when researchers study people, they should be open about their own feelings and experiences. She has won the Belpré Medal for her work.

Ruth Behar's Life and Work

Ruth Behar was born in Havana, Cuba. Her family was Jewish, with roots from Turkey, Poland, and Russia. When she was four years old, her family moved to the United States. This happened after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959. Many Jewish families and others left Cuba around that time.

Ruth went to school in the U.S. She earned her first degree from Wesleyan University in 1977. Then, she studied cultural anthropology at Princeton University, where she earned her doctorate in 1983.

She often travels to Cuba and Mexico to learn about their cultures. She also explores her family's history in Cuba. Ruth Behar has focused on studying the lives of women in different societies.

Today, Ruth Behar is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her writing is also featured in the Michigan Writers Series at Michigan State University. She writes about women's issues and feminism in her books, essays, poems, and stories.

Lucky Broken Girl: A Story of Resilience

Lucky Broken Girl (2017) is a book for young adults. It's a coming-of-age story based on Ruth Behar's own childhood in the 1960s.

The main character, Ruthie Mizrahi, and her family have just moved to New York City from Cuba. Ruthie is starting to feel confident with her English and loves playing hopscotch. But then, a terrible car accident leaves her in a body cast. She has to stay in bed for a long time to recover.

Even though Ruthie's world becomes small because she can't move, she learns to observe more deeply. Her heart grows bigger, and she understands how precious life is. She also learns how important friends, neighbors, and art can be, even during tough times. People who have read the book say that Ruth Behar honors her own experiences while also understanding others. They also note that she uses her background as a Cuban American with diverse family roots to write stories that feel very real and true.

Traveling Heavy: A Family Journey

Traveling Heavy (2013) is a memoir about Ruth Behar's Cuban-American family. Her family has both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish roots in Cuba. The book also tells about the kind strangers who helped her along her life's journey. She explores her complicated family history and their move to America. This helps her understand more about identity and belonging. One review called her book "A heartfelt witness to the changing political and emotional landscape of the Cuban-American experience." Ruth Behar studies the Jewish community in Cuba as an anthropologist. But her personal journey back to the island she left as a child is at the heart of this book.

An Island Called Home: Exploring Jewish Cuba

Ruth Behar wrote An Island Called Home (2007) to better understand Jewish life in Cuba and her family's roots there. She realized that most stories about Jews in Cuba focused on them as a group. So, she traveled around the island, meeting many Jewish people. She became their trusted friend, which helped her with her research. By doing one-on-one interviews and taking black-and-white photos, she shows readers how Cuban Jews are connected to each other, even when spread out across the world.

The book starts with Jewish immigrants from the 1920s. These people fled problems in Turkey, Russia, and Poland. Later, Polish and German Jews came to Cuba in the 1930s and 1940s to escape persecution and the concentration camps of the Nazis. In Cuba, these immigrants opened small shops and gradually learned Spanish, while still speaking Yiddish. They settled into Latino life in Old Havana. Many Jewish immigrants worked in the Cuban clothing industry early in the century. Most of them left during and after the 1959 revolution. Since her family was among those who left Cuba, Ruth Behar shares her personal thoughts and feelings alongside her professional observations of Cuban society today.

The Vulnerable Observer: Feelings in Research

The Vulnerable Observer explains how Ruth Behar started including her own feelings in her anthropology studies. While she was in Spain studying funeral practices, her grandfather passed away. This experience made her realize that researchers can never be completely separate from what they study. She felt they needed to become "vulnerable observers." She argues that researchers should understand and work through their own emotions when studying a topic. She believes that the idea of a "scientific," detached way of presenting information is not complete. Other anthropologists also suggested that researchers should be more open about their role in the research process. Ruth Behar's six personal essays in The Vulnerable Observer show how she uses this personal approach.

Ruth Behar's grandparents moved to Cuba from Russia, Poland, and Turkey in the 1920s. In 1962, they left Cuba to escape communism. When Ruth was nine, she broke her leg in a car crash. She couldn't move for a year. This experience helped her realize that "the body is a homeland" where memories and pain are stored.

Translated Woman: A Story of Strength

In 1985, Ruth Behar was working in Mexico. She became friends with an Indigenous woman named Esperanza Hernandez, who sold things on the street. Esperanza was known as a healer. Ruth Behar's book Translated Woman tells Esperanza's story. Esperanza had faced many challenges in her life. Ruth Behar shows Esperanza as a strong woman who found her own way to overcome difficulties.

Ruth Behar also thinks about her own life in the book. She considers how trying to live the "American Dream" might have made her feel disconnected from her Cuban Jewish family's past. Esperanza's journey explores ideas of boundaries and separations. Translated Woman helps make the point that studying women in anthropology has been undervalued. This is because traditional academic views sometimes see studies focused on women as too personal.

Awards and Honors

• In 1988, Ruth Behar was the first Latina woman to receive a MacArthur fellowship. This is a special award given to talented people in many fields.
• In 2011, she gave a special lecture called the Turku Agora Lecture.
• In 2025, her book Across So Many Seas won a Newbery Honors Award.

See also

In Spanish: Ruth Behar para niños

• Cuban American literature
• List of Cuban-American writers