Joyce Eisenberg

An enthusiastic traveler and author, Joyce has trekked through the poppy fields of northern Thailand (B.C. – before children) and the lava fields of Iceland (W.C. – with children). She’s planned two round-the-world trips – 33 years apart – for herself and her husband, Ted. The first was in 1982, before GoogleMaps and TripAdvisor, when TWA was the best airline and belly packs were crammed with American Express Traveler’s checks.

The second trip was in 2015, when she depended on modern technology and the expertise of her son and travel guru Ben on a trip that took her from Turkey and Myanmar to Kuala Lumpur and Seoul.

Whether she did trip research at the library or on her iPad, whether she converted Thai baht to dollars with a pencil or an app, she paid close attention to details. Some might call her compulsive about details. After all, she’s also written a dictionary. But details are important when you’re planning a trip.

Joyce loves a good buffet breakfast and a luxurious hotel, but she knows that fun doesn't always mean fancy. She equally enjoys taking a backyard Burmese cooking class or eating a bowl of beef pho for $1.25 at a local Hanoi place where she has to point to order.  

Joyce not only loves to travel but also loves to share her discoveries. She’s spent much of her career writing about her native Philadelphia for Fodor’s Travel Guides. In fact, she wrote the first Fodor’s guide to the city on an Osbourne computer with 64K of memory! The year was 1985, and she was pregnant with Ben. The travel gene was clearly passed along to him.

Her other travel writing projects include:

  • Chapters of Fodor’s Escape to Nature Without Roughing It, Fodor’s Road Guide USA, Thirteen Colonies, Great American Vacations, and more.
  • Editing Fodor’s Guides to Austria, Great Britain, France and Spain, Hawaii, Nova Scotia and Colorado.
  • Feature articles which have appeared in national magazines including Travel-Holiday, Walking, Military Lifestyles, GlobeHopper, Woman’s World and Hadassah.

Joyce also has an interest in Jewish heritage travel, inspired by her work as an editor at the Jewish Exponent, a Philadelphia weekly newspaper, and her experience editing Holocaust memoirs. She visited Myanmar's last remaining synagogue, Musmeah Yeshua, which once boasted 126 Torah scrolls brought by Jews who worked in Burma's teakwood trade during the British colonial era. She celebrated the Jewish New Year at a dinner in Phnom Penh, where the mandlen floated in pumpkin soup, not chicken soup. She's been to  the Jewish Ghetto of Rome, the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. 

With Ellen Scolnic, she co-authored the Dictionary of Jewish Words and The Whole Spiel, a collection of 34 funny essays about digital nudniks, seder selfies and chicken soup memories. As The Word Mavens, Joyce and Ellen frequently speak to synagogue and community groups and write essays that appear in newspapers and magazines nationwide. 

Photos from top left, clockwise: On a sunset "cruise" on the Irrawaddy River, Myanmar. A cooking lesson - Burmese chicken curry - in a backyard kitchen in Bagan. Afternoon tea in Belfast; it started with turnip soup. By the lagoon pool with the swim up bar in Bali.