Faculty
Miriam Hoffman
Lecturer of Yiddish
(Germanic Languages)
409 Hamilton Hall
(212) 854 8026
mh60@columbia.edu
Miriam Hoffman was born in Siberia and immigrated to the United States at the age of 13. She received her B.A. at The Jewish Theological Seminar and received a second B.A. from the University of Miami and her M.A. at Columbia University. She has been a Lecturer in Yiddish Studies at Columbia University since 1992.
From 1969 to 1979 while living in Israel Ms. Hoffman was script writer and production manager for the National Israeli Television creating the production of the first hour-long Yiddish special with the coming Yiddish star, Shimon Szigan. From 1988 to 1999 Ms. Hoffman created an hour-long weekly radio program for WEVD in New York called “For the Love of Yiddish.”
Ms. Hoffman is a journalist and feature writer for the Jewish Forward writing a weekly column on language and literature as well as editing a monthly literary supplement. She has also contributed literary pieces to the “Oxforder Yiddish Magazine,” the “Jerusalem Almanac,” “Di Goldene Keyt” a literary magazine in Tel Aviv, and “Yivo Bleter” in New York. Ms. Hoffman has also written over a dozen plays in Yiddish many of which have been staged by the New York Shakespeare Festival/Joseph Papp Public Theater, at the Astor Place theater, the John Housman Theater, The Folksbiene Yiddish Theater in New York as well as at theaters in Munich, Germany, Amsterdam, Holland, at the Akcent Theater in Vienna, at the Saidye Bronfman Theater in Montreal and the “Yiddishpiel” Theater in Tel Aviv for which she earned a Tony Award for translating the “Sunshine Boys by Neil Simon into Yiddish. Her latest play, in English, entitled “Noble Laureate (and not Nobel) is a play dealing with the last year of the Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis-Singer, with flashbacks to his family as they reappear among his literary heroes. The play was performed to great acclaim at the Queens Theatre in the Park in 2005.
Ms. Hoffman has taught at the Yiddish Summer Program at Oxford University; Vilnius University, Lithuania. In the summer of 2005 she spent the summer at the University of Vilnius training Yiddish teachers from all over the world in the art of pedagogy and a selected curriculum.
Her book Key to Yiddish will be published in 2007.