achievement of this goal is evident on every page." 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 Askenazi 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." Behar studies the revitalization of Cuban Jewish life as an anthropologist, but her personal journey back to the island she left as a little girl is the heart of this "memoir I snuck in, between journeys."<ref>[https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2013/05/07/book-review-traveling-heavy-ruth-behar/63bQLREGr3TWK6bOtobcSN/story.html Review: Ruth Behar, Traveling Heavy'"], Boston Globe, 7 May 2013</ref> 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". Traveling the island, Behar becomes the confidante to a host of Jewish strangers, building connections for further anthropological research. Conducting one-on-one interviews, combined with black-and-white photography, she builds readers an image of the diasporic thread connecting Cuban Jews to one another. Beginning with Jewish immigrants of the 1920s, who fled unrest in Turkey, Russia and Poland, she moves on to stories of later immigrants, Polish and German Jews who fled to Cuba in the 1930s and 1940s in order to escape persecution and the concentration camps of the Nazis. In Cuba immigrants opened mom-and-pop shops, peddled, and gradually adopted Spanish while still speaking Yiddish, settling into Latino life in La Habana Vieja. In the early part of the century, many Jewish immigrants worked in the Cuban garment industry. More than 94% left during and after the 1959 revolution. 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. The Vulnerable Observer The Vulnerable Observer recounts Behar's passage to integrating subjective aspects into her anthropological studies. Suffering her grandfather's death while on a field trip to Spain to