Sponsored by the departments of Spanish, English and Women's and Gender Studies and the Corliss Lamont Lectureship for a Peaceful World, Behar shared her experiences as a writer, editor, ethnographer and documentary filmmaker. Behar received her B.A. in Letters from Wesleyan University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Princeton University. She is also affiliated with programs in women's studies, Latina/Latino studies, and Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Michigan.
Ruth Behar's search for her self began in her early childhood. When she was just four-and-a-half years old, she, along with her family, was torn away from what most would consider a tropical paradise. Having settled in Cuba with plans of financial prosperity, Behar and her family were uprooted in the early 1960s by the Cuban Revolution. Unexpectedly, Fidel Castro, and the Communist regime he stood for, came into power.
One group in particular was greatly affected by the repercussions of the Cuban Revolution. Comprising a large percentage of the population of the capital city of Havana, the lives of Cuban Jews were disproportionately disrupted by the regime change.
Only one in 2000 Jews chose to remain in Cuba when Castro came into power. Most chose to emigrate from Cuba-among them were a family of Jewish capitalists from Europe: Ruth and her relatives. Ruth and her family immigrated to the United States and eventually settled in New York in 1962.
Recalling her past, Behar said that she "would stare at the photographs her parents salvaged from their time there [in Cuba], so I could remember something of my lost childhood and of my relatives' lives." Although her parents kept Cuban traditions alive through "family stories and salsa dancing", Behar never felt satisfied. She was convinced she had to be in Cuba, to see Cuba to feel truly connected to her past.
Behar had so many questions: "Who were the Jews that stayed in Cuba?" and more interestingly, "Why did they stay there?" This curiosity to know the past of her Jewish family in Cuba and of other Jews has led her to the country multiple times.
Behar made her first trip back in 1979, and in 1991 she made a series of visits to gather research for her many award-winning books and documentaries on "finding ways to reveal the conjunction between Cubaness and Jewishness in the 1950s."
Her parents' old photographs in Cuba filled her mind with thoughts of what her childhood was like there and if those places in the pictures were still in existence.
One place in particular is El Patronato, the most prominent synagogue in Cuba. During the height of the revolution and the Castro regime, religion was outlawed. The synagogues, including El Patronato, existed with no purpose and were ultimately destroyed.
Finally, in 1991, the Communists allowed people to have a religion, which meant Cuba was no longer atheist but secular instead, and El Patronato became active again. Through funding from American Jewish organizations, El Patronato was restored and renovated. Behar explained, "The Jewish revival of the 1990s was the responsibility of the Cuban Jews to keep their legacy from disappearing."
Now, only a thousand Jews remain in Cuba, out of a total population of 11 million, making Behar's research even more difficult to conduct; however, this low number is not due to any current discrimination against them.
Before the revolution, for Behar, like many other Cuban Jews, Cuba felt like a place that was never tainted with the poison of anti-Semitism. "Cubanos have a way of mixing and matching cultures. There is an interesting protection of the Jews in Cuba," Behar said. From Behar's travels and research, she has finally been able to understand the Jewish culture in Cuba, including her own. Now, she no longer has to rely solely on photographs to feel connected to her past, she can experience it for herself.
As a Cuban woman of the diaspora, Behar is committed to seeking reconciliation and a common culture and memory with Cubans on the island. In that spirit, she edited "Bridges to Cuba (Puentes a Cuba)." The anthology paved the way for more interchanges and became a highly praised forum for the voices and visions of Cubans on the island and in the diaspora.
She also recently wrote the foreword to the anthology "Cubana: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women." Additionally, she is the author of many published books, novels, poems and essays and is an emerging filmmaker as well.
She is currently writing "Nightgowns from Cuba," a work that combines fiction, autobiography and anthropological and historical research to tell the story of her Jewish-Cuban family's journey from Europe to Cuba and then to the United States as seen through the eyes of the Afro-Cuban woman, still living on the island, who was her caretaker as a child.