The Corona virus has transformed globetrotting elders into armchair travelers practicing stay vacations instead of heading for the airports of the world. The illusive microbe revealed how vacation and holiday travel are such integral parts of the modern retired senior citizen’s culture. Today’s elders are Marco Polo wannabees, retired rambling backpackers and frequent flyer nomads. They’re Airbnb aficionados, proud Million Mile Club members. Most have checked off the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu, or Taj Mahal. Who hasn’t tasted French Escargot, Vietnamese Pho, or the Dutch version of Nasi Goreng?Rick Steves’ market of 75 million American baby boomer globetrotters is locked down. The 157 billion spent on touring, sightseeing, and bucket list browsing has dried up. Now his retired rambling royals are self-isolating and binge watching his travel videos. He was the pied piper of travel creating a tsunami wave of senior citizen nomads. Now Rick, like the rest of the world, wears a protective mask waiting for a vaccine to allow the relaunching of the legions of feisty grey heads into the four corners of the world. The Paris Expert reminds the reader of those mask-free days when you only worried about the occasional terrorist bombing, not social distancing or remembering to douse your hands with hand sanitizers. Yes, those were the days, such sweet innocent Paris memories.The Paris Expert is an American flaneur’s memoire, an American polyglot's version of Hemingway's Moveable Feast. Fifty years of visiting Paris beginning in 1968 and returning yearly, attending school in Paris, becoming an English language tutor for Russian, Polish and Arabic students, avoiding terrorist attacks, becoming an accidental au pair, falling in love, falling out of love, and finally while in Paris, watching America elect Donald Trump its 45th president. Are you Jewish? A question the author has been used to answering all his life. His ethnic nose seemed to trigger that question, so he had a ready answer, or rather, two ready answers. One, short, simple and direct, with no necessary elaborations; the other, long and involved, with detailed embellishments, testing the inquisitor’s attention span. Yes, he spoke some Yiddish, the language of Eastern European Jews. But no, he wasn’t Jewish, but his mother spoke Yiddish fluently, coming from Poland, near the Russian border, a region heavily populated by Jews. Was his nose a legacy of his family’s geographic and DNA history? Who knows, who cares? If the inquisitor persists and asks, still aren’t you afraid of visiting Paris? He quotes statistics. 20 million visitors walk the streets of Paris each year. Then, he displays his Paris expert credentials. he knows his Paris arrondissements, the ones to avoid and the ones safe to visit. Who has time to worry about terrorist’s grudges with so many museums and restaurants to visit in ten days? Now, it’s his turn to ask questions. Aren’t you afraid of visiting an American mall? Or more tragically, after Pittsburg, how safe are Jewish people in their own Synagogues? The Paris Expert addresses all these questions, but provides no easy answers, just reminds the reader of the persistence of fear, hatred and survival. Since they were driven out of their homeland centuries ago, Jews have suffered pogroms, religious persecution and finally the holocaust and have survived and even thrived. Now, in the Age of Trump, the Corona virus, and the George Floyd murder and street protests and riots, the plague of anti-Semitism has many sinister fellow travelers. Sure, Black Lives Matter as well as Jewish Lives Matter, as well as All Lives Matter but why doesn’t the world listen to these wise and noble words? In the age of Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Casher, can a Jewish looking American tourist still safely explore the poetry and magic of the streets of Paris? Scientists have yet to discover a vaccine for Anti-Semitism.