07/31/2026
National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene mourns the passing of Miriam (Schmulewitz) Hoffman z’l (1936 – 2026).
NYTF has produced plays and musicals written by Miriam Hoffman including The Maiden of Ludmir, Songs of Paradise, Reflections of a Lost Poet and a reading of her Yiddish translation of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys starring Theodor Bikel and Fyvush Finkel.
Miriam Hoffman was born in Łódź, Poland to a Yiddish-speaking family. While she was a child, her father was sent to a forced labor camp in Siberia, accompanied by Hoffman and her mother. After a difficult passage through several other countries, the family arrived in the United States in 1949. In 1957 Hoffman finished the Jewish Teacher's Seminary with a B.A. in pedagogy. In the 1970s she taught Yiddish at the University of Tel-Aviv, Israel. She received a B.A. from the University of Miami, cm laude and an M.A. from Columbia University. From 1991 to 1994 she taught Yiddish and Yiddish Dramatic Arts in the Oxford University Summer Program. From 1992 until her retirement in 2017, she was a professor of Yiddish language and culture at Columbia University.
Since the late 1990s Hoffman had been a columnist and feature writer for the Jewish Forward, where she has published over 2,000 articles. She also edited a monthly literary supplement for the Forward. In 1992 she won the Israeli equivalent of a Tony Award for her English-to-Yiddish translation of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys.
Miriam Hoffman wrote ten Yiddish plays that were performed both at the N.Y. Shakespeare Festival and the Joseph Papp Theater, off-Broadway at the Astor Theater, the John Houseman Theater, the 92nd St. Y, with productions in major American and European cities, among them: Amsterdam, Zurich, Munich, Dresden, and Warsaw, Poland. Original plays of her's have been staged at The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, the Jewish Repertory Theater-Playhouse 91, Center for Jewish History, the Sadye Bronfman Theater in Montreal, Canada, Akzent Theater in Vienna, Austria and the Yiddishpiel Theater in Tel-Aviv, Israel.
May her memory be for a blessing.
