Schmulewicz-Hoffman, Miriam
1936-July 29, 2026
Born Mirl Schmulewicz in Siberia in 1936, Hoffman spent her earliest years in the shadow of the Tobolsk Slave Labor Camp and the Russian border town of Saratov, before walking, at age nine, in a post-war refugee caravan from Poland to the Hindenburg-Kaserne Displaced Persons Camp in Ulm, Germany. That journey — from a stateless child behind barbed wire to one of the most influential voices in Yiddish language, academia and culture — became the foundation of a six-decade career devoted to the living, breathing Yiddish was not a relic, but a living, breathing culture and an act of resistance to forgetting, as well as a commitment to reviving the legacy of Ashkenazic Jewry.
Hoffman’s academic career began at the Sholem Aleichem Folkshul #21 on Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx and culminated in 25 years as professor of Yiddish language and Jewish culture at Columbia University, where she taught thousands of students. Her textbook, Key to Yiddish, Createspace, 2011, 664 pp. remains an important reference for Yiddish educators around the world.
An award-winning playwright, Hoffman collaborated internationally on her Yiddish translations of Mel Brook’s The Producers (Montreal) and Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple (Israel). Together with her longtime writing partner, Rena Berkowicz Borow, they were embraced by the late Broadway impresario Joseph Papp, co-writing the libretto for the 1989 Yiddish/English musical “Songs of Paradise,” staged by The Public Theater.
For more than 35 years, Hoffman was a weekly columnist for the Forverts (The Yiddish Forward), where her thousands of essays fused sharp social critique with the warmth of Jewish folklore. “Yiddish will never die,” she insisted, “because it contains too much life — too much argument, irony, and love — to vanish quietly.”
In her later years, Hoffman extended her life’s work beyond the classroom, co-founding the not for profit Yiddishkayt Initiative, Inc. with her son, actor, director, and producer Avi Hoffman.