Elizabeth Herzog

Anthropology students influenced by Ruth Benedict began a project to study the Jews from Eastern Europe, expecting to find Poles, Ukrainias, Czeks, who were Jews. What they found was the existence of a "whole" which they had not expected.

This scholarly work reflects a "new kind of anthropology", with members from different discipline depending not just on interviews and observations, but analysis of literature, history and films, as well as the dialectics of numerous seminars.[18]

This is not show more a portrait of a village. It does reflect the images a people had of themselves who were living in different societies different from their own. Particular care is taken with the image of self and other, finding delight in the culture of the shtetl under the protection and pogroms of the "others".

In the Foreword, Margaret Mead helpfully walks through the development of the project and how it was conducted, and explains that this monograph is intended as a primary source on the extinct Eastern European Jewish culture. Its brilliant light was extinguished by the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. The values survive, and have implications for all people who must learn to live together. show less

Excellent sociological/anthropological study of Jewish life in 19th century eastern Europe. There are many editions of this book. The most recent was published in 2007.

This book is an attempt to bring our anthropological discipline to the task of preserving something of the form and the content, the texture and the beauty, of the small-town life of Eatern Europena Jews as it was lived before World War I (from the Foreword).