Shneiderman (15 June 1906 – 8 October 1996) was a prominent Polish-American Jewish writer, journalist, translator and poet, who wrote in Yiddish and English.

Shneiderman was born as Szmuel Lejb Sznajderman (Yiddish: Shemu’el-Leyb Shnayderman) in Kazimierz Dolny, Congress Poland in the Russian Empire.

There, he wrote poems about poverty, unemployment, industrial expansion, the rejection of militarism, and an idealized, pastoral Polish village life.

Some of these poems were reproduced and appeared in the leading Yiddish weekly in Warsaw at the time, Literarische Bletter (Literary Pages), edited by Nachman Mayzel.

[7] In his first article, “Film has Deep Meaning,” Shneiderman argued that movie making was an important form of cultural mass entertainment and emphasized the social significance of the cinema.

His second essay, published under the pseudonym “Emil”, “Behind the Scenes of In the Polish Woods”, narrated the production of the eponymous movie based on the novel by Yosef Opatoshu.

[9][10] Eileen devoted herself to preserving and promoting CHIM's work after his death in 1956, including organizing a 1996 exhibit at the International Center of Photography, where she became an honorary trustee.

He published his first volume of reportages, Zvishn Nalewkes un Eifel-Turm (English: Between Nalewsky and the Eiffel Tower) in 1935, with a foreword by Kisch, and in Polish Od Nalewek do Wieży Eiffla in 1936.

[13] After World War II, Shneiderman promoted the publication of Holocaust survivors’ memoirs and testimonies, thereby contributing to making them available to a wider audience.

Written from the perspective of a teenage girl, Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary was published in English in 1945, and subsequently translated into Hebrew, Italian, and French.

[14] Shneiderman also edited and published the diary of Gemma LaGuardia Gluck, after encountering evidence on her arrest and incarceration as a political hostage while covering the 1961 Eichmann trial.

Throughout his life, he continued to write about postwar Poland, reviewing the 1956 Polish uprising in The Warsaw Heresy, published in 1959.

[20] That same year, he gave then-Vice President Richard Nixon a tour of the Warsaw Ghetto on his official visit to Poland.

[25] In 1968, he published a Yiddish biography of Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967), a Jewish Russian-language poet, novelist, and journalist whom he had met in interwar Paris and in Spain.

and Eileen Shneiderman maintained close connections with Polish-Jewish artists, writing a critical essay about Marc Chagall’s use of Christ imagery and work in cathedrals in France, celebrating the work of Chaim Goldberg, and publishing a 1980 book on the illustrator, miniaturist, and political cartoonist Arthur Szyk.

[29] Shneiderman was a prolific writer and journalist, authoring hundreds of articles in the Yiddish and Anglophone Jewish press throughout his seventy-year career.

[31] He tackled diverse topics, ranging from Polish intellectuals and writers under Communist rule, to Yiddish in the USSR, and the portrait of Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs.

Shneiderman's death on October 8, 1996, Eileen donated their collection of 395 Yiddish books signed by their authors to the University of Maryland’s McKeldin Library.