Life Is with People: The Jewish Little-Town of Eastern Europe

Born in Uman, Ukraine, Mark Zborowski studied anthropology at the University of Grenoble in France and immigrated to the United States in 1941. During the prior two decades, Zborowski had worked as a spy for the Soviet secret police (NKVD). In America, Zborowski worked for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research before joining anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead on their Research in Contemporary Cultures project at Columbia University. Zborowski’s historical and ethnological expertise became central to the project’s goal of anthologizing Jewish life in Eastern Europe. His work alongside Elizabeth Herzog culminated in Life Is with People, which for decades after its publication remained among the most popular portraits of East European Jewry.

Elizabeth Herzog was born in Chicago to a long-established family of German heritage. In 1952, she cowrote the widely praised book Life Is with People with ethnologist Mark Zborowski, an evocative recreation of the shtetl, constructed through interviews with former residents. In the 1960s, while working as the chief of child life research in the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Herzog published several influential studies challenging prevailing stereotypes about poverty, race, and family life.