Professor Miriam Hoffman.
Professor Miriam Hoffman, a Columbia University professor, acclaimed Yiddish scholar, playwright and longtime columnist whose decades-long career helped preserve and promote Yiddish language and culture around the world, has died. She was 90.
Born Mirl Schmulewicz in Siberia in 1936, Hoffman spent her earliest years near the Tobolsk slave labor camp and in the Russian border city of Saratov. At age 9, she joined a post-World War II refugee caravan that traveled from Poland to the Hindenburg-Kaserne Displaced Persons Camp in Ulm, Germany.
Those early experiences shaped a lifetime devoted to preserving Yiddish as a living language and safeguarding the cultural legacy of Ashkenazi Jews.
Hoffman’s academic career began at the Sholem Aleichem Folkshul No. 21 in the Bronx before she spent 25 years teaching Yiddish language and Jewish culture at Columbia University. During her tenure, she introduced thousands of students to the language, and her 700-page textbook, Key to Yiddish, became a widely used resource for educators.
An award-winning playwright, Hoffman translated Mel Brooks’ The Producers into Yiddish for a production in Montreal and Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple for a production in Israel. She also collaborated with longtime writing partner Rena Berkowicz Borow on the libretto for the bilingual musical Songs of Paradise, produced by the Public Theater in 1989 under the leadership of Joseph Papp. The production is credited with helping spark a modern revival of Yiddish theater.
For more than 35 years, Hoffman wrote a weekly column for the Forverts (The Yiddish Forward), publishing thousands of essays that blended cultural commentary, humor and Jewish folklore. She often expressed confidence in the future of the language, writing that, “Yiddish will never die because it contains too much life — too much argument, irony, and love — to vanish quietly.”
In recent years, Hoffman co-founded the nonprofit Yiddishkayt Initiative and its online platform, YILoveJewish.org, alongside her son, actor, director and producer Avi Hoffman, to expand access to Yiddish education and culture.
“My mother didn’t just teach Yiddish — she made the whole world fall in love with it,” Avi Hoffman said in a statement. “She survived the worst of the 20th century and spent the rest of her life making sure the language and the people who spoke it would never be erased and forgotten. Every joke, every lecture, every column was her way of saying, ‘We are still here.'”
Hoffman is survived by her sons, Avi and Benjamin; four grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and generations of students, readers, theater audiences and advocates who continue her work of preserving Yiddish language and culture.
Shiva will be held at Country Club Towers, 10777 W. Sample Road, Apartment 1105, in Coral Springs on Friday from 6 to 9 p.m., Saturday from 2 to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 6 to 10 p.m.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that tax-deductible donations be made to the Yiddishkayt Initiative to support Hoffman’s legacy of Yiddish education and cultural preservation.
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