Impossible Homecomings: Women Ethnographers and the Places They Left Behind

In this year’s Rennert Forum on Women in Judaism, Ruth Behar, Jewish Cuban American anthropologist, writer, and noted feminist, will reflect on the recent literature being produced by diasporic women ethnographers, journalists, and writers, addressing their contradictory and often pained relationships to their home countries. Focusing on the work of Latin American and Caribbean women, she will also include an account of her own return to Cuba and her complicated search for home.

Ruth Behar is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Since 1991 her research and writing have largely focused on her native country, Cuba, which she left at the age of four. Her research on the dwindling yet vibrant Jewish community in Cuba is the focus of her film Adio Kerida (2002). Jewish Cuba is also the topic of her latest book, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (2007).