The Beating Heart

Home is not a place. Home is a feeling. A Jewish home is first and foremost an emotional sensation of togetherness and belonging to an extended family. This is not a travel guide, nor a book about Jewish history, Jewish community institutions, Jewish sites, or kosher restaurants. The Beating Heart is a groundbreaking anthology that will take you on a cultural journey to Jewish destinations and communities around the world, as a family member peering into your own childhood home. Following in the footsteps of its companion anthology, Heartbeats, whose journey and story take place in the Jewish homeland of Israel, The Beating Heart will not only whet your appetite to explore Jewish communities around the globe, it will invite you – whether you are in the United States, Canada, England, or anywhere else in the world – to connect to the Jewish home inside your heart.

The Beating Heart is the culmination of an inspired project by Ya’acov Fried, a pioneer and leader in the world of educational travel, and Yishay Shavit, a leading Jewish tour educator. In this stunning anthology, leading tour educators take you on a fascinating and eye-opening journey from Western and Central Europe to the former Soviet Union and on to China, India, and Africa, where they delve deeply into Jewish communities with which they are intimately familiar. Their fresh, unconventional attitudes are the product of thousands of tours around the world exploring the Jewish angle in each destination. In each chapter, a local personality was chosen to shed light on unexplored terrains. The Beating Heart will allow you to experience, feel, learn, and enjoy the layers beneath each destination. Our hope is that this book will inspire you to travel to these destinations yourselves and to search for the Jewish angle in each place. We hope that such visits will pique your curiosity and cause you to ref lect on – and even challenge – your own Jewish identity.