Hoffman was widely respected at Fordham for her interdisciplinary expertise and collaborative spirit. 

Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., a professor of English, said that despite their different fields of study, they grew to be fast friends.

“I always knew we spoke the same language. Decade after decade, our conversations about one another’s work were immensely gratifying,” she said.

Magda Teter, Ph.D., the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham, called Hoffman “a beloved member of Fordham’s Jewish Studies community” and said her work was marked by “great erudition and disciplinary depth.” 

“In her 1991 work on the Hebrew writer and Nobel Prize laureate S.Y. Agnon, she deployed a wide range of theoretical tools, ranging from psychoanalysis to feminist theory,” Teter said.

“She placed Agnon in conversation with other writers, such as James Joyce, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. … She was able to handle, with equal care and knowledge, traditional Jewish text and modern philosophy.

Hoffman was born on June 19, 1946, in New York City and grew up, along with her younger brother, David, in Brooklyn. She earned a bachelor’s in English and Comparative Literature from Cornell University and a master’s and Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She was a special member of Columbia’s Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine.

She joined Fordham in 1979 and taught courses in Israeli literature and film as part of Fordham’s Middle East Studies program. In 1992, she created the annual Nostra Aetate Dialogue series, which brought together Jewish and Christian scholars to address questions pertinent to Jewish-Catholic reconciliation. In 2002, she also helped found Fordham’s Jewish Texts Reading Group, which still meets today. 

Hoffman was an accomplished painter. In 2015, she opened up about her creative process in a lecture at the Walsh Library. Last November, her art was displayed at Fordham’s Butler Gallery. 

Hoffman was known at Fordham as a skilled instructor and generous mentor. Fordham professor of biology Jason Morris, Ph.D., said she taught him how to be a better teacher.

“I learned so much from teaching with Anne. She appreciated nuance: she had a deep mistrust of facile answers and sharply drawn lines,” he wrote in an email.

“Her integrity and her empathy (and despite what she said, her expertise) came across in everything she said and did.”

In 2003, she was honored with Fordham’s Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities Award, and in 2019, she was recognized for 40 years of service at Fordham. She retired in 2023 and was named professor emerita.

Nikolas Oktaba, a 2015 graduate, took a class with Hoffman, and like many students, he kept in touch with her after graduation. He called her a “fount of tranquil wisdom.” 

“Not only did she put her students first, but she did so in a way that allowed them to see the perseverance, resilience, and strength that they already held within them,” he said. 

At the time of her death, in addition to her painting, she was teaching writing skills at the Fortune Society, teaching Freud at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and conducting friendship-focused writing groups at the Asian University for Women (AUW) in Bangladesh via Zoom.

Leon Hoffman, M.D., Anne’s husband of 57 years, said that he would forever hold onto a memory of the two of them walking together when she was an undergraduate and he was attending medical school.

“We had one of those adolescent discussions of the time: would we marry someone who was not Jewish? I responded very quickly, ‘That is an academic discussion because I am going to marry you.’ She was shocked, but the rest is history,” he said.

“We were not tied at the hip, but we were tied with our brains and our love.”

In an interview last year, Hoffman recalled what her late father-in-law said when she received her first summer grant to travel to Israel to explore Agnon’s archive. 

“He observed that it truly is the ‘goldeneh medineh’ (a Yiddish term referring to the U.S. as the golden land) when a Catholic university gives a Jewish girl money to go to Israel to work on Agnon,” she said. 

“Even more than the material support, his remark captures something of the openness and generosity that have been my experience of this university, my academic home for over 40 years.” 

Hoffman is survived by her husband, Leon Hoffman, M.D.; her children, Miriam Hoffman, M.D. (Steven Kleiner, M.D.) and Liora Hoffman, Ph.D. (Rob Yalen); her brother, David Golomb; her niece, Danielle Golomb, M.D.; her nephew, Jesse Golomb; and her grandchildren Shoshana, Elisheva, and Hillel Hoffman Kleiner and Greta and Max Yalen.

A memorial service open to the University community will be announced at a later date.

For Christians, the week allows the faithful to commemorate the events of Jesus’ Passion, to mourn his death on Good Friday, and to celebrate his rising from the dead on Easter Sunday. Passover brings Jewish families together to share in the Seder, the ritual dinner that consists of storytelling, prayers, and symbolic food items.

But this year, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing people to stay apart, families will miss out on these traditions.

“Normally, I would enter the Week in the company of a great throng of other believers and be buoyed up, consoled, and strengthened by their faith,” Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham wrote in his April 5 pastoral message. “Normally, I would enter with holy dread holding a bit of the upper hand over eager longing. Normally I would pause before plunging into the Week to ask for the grace to walk with the Lord Jesus with unflinching courage. Normally. But this year and this Holy Week are anything but normal. We will not find ourselves in the company of large throngs. We will enter it and walk through it in a solitary way. We will all of us enter it with more longing than usual.”

This solitude is in contrast with the instinct people of faith have during times like these, said J. Patrick Hornbeck, II, Ph.D., chair and professor of theology.

“Think about the last major set of crises in New York City—9/11, the financial crisis of [2008 to 2009], people in these moments reported coming together,” he said. “Folks came together in their houses of worship, whether those be churches, synagogues, mosques, or whatever it might be, and that of course parallels trends throughout history. People, when faced with life and death catastrophes, very often turn to their religious leaders for solace or guidance or comfort. I think it’s been particularly painful for believers, and for clergy too.”

Feeling the Absence

For Anne Golomb Hoffman, a professor of English and comparative literature at Fordham, this means moving her family’s ritual into a “Zoom Seder.”

While this will still allow them, and many other families who decide to celebrate virtually, to gather and participate in some of the songs and storytelling that goes along with the evening, it will be shorter and will lack the physical connection they are used to.

“We’ll acknowledge the difference and at the same time acknowledge the bonds that tie us together,” she said.

Around Passover, there’s always extra room at the table for people who might not have somewhere to go, Hoffman said, so that piece will be missing this year.

“This is so deeply a time when people gather together, and within my own synagogue community, there’s always an awareness of who might need a place at the Seder table,” she said. “There’s always that opening to a larger bringing of people together so I think there’s a terrible awareness of social isolation, social distancing, and our efforts to connect and to affirm.”

For Christians, the days leading up to Easter Sunday often incorporate many physical traditions that the church community participates in.

“Think of the foot washing on Holy Thursday, remembering how Jesus knelt before his disciples, like a lowly servant, to wash their feet,” said Thomas J. Scirghi, S.J., associate professor of theology. “On Good Friday, we will miss the veneration of the cross, when we individually express our gratitude for Christ’s suffering and accept the truth, that through the cross we have been saved. On Saturday night, at the Easter Vigil, we will miss seeing the new fire symbolizing Christ as the light of the world, leading us out of the darkness of sin to the light of eternal life.”

A Deeper, Personal Connection

But despite the absence of being physically present, both Scirghi and Hoffman said that these holy days, with the readings that come with them, are well suited to help believers get through these uncertain and challenging times.

Scirghi said that even during normal times, many Christians around the world don’t often have access to a priest or local church. For those who usually do have a local congregation, this experience of self-prayer and isolation can allow them to connect to those who usually don’t, as well as make their own connections with Jesus.

“It is a way to identify with Christ even more,” he said. “Your own experience of feeling isolated may give you an idea of what Jesus experienced. And, as we believe, he accepted all of this out of obedience to his Father, and for love of humanity. “

He also said that the Lenten season in general often has a feeling that “something is missing,” whether it’s the Gloria or the Alleluia that are removed from the liturgy for the entire 40 days, or how the altar is stripped on Holy Thursday and crucifixes and statues are covered throughout the week.

“We are living in the “absence,” that is, the awareness that something is missing, and we need to wait for it to be filled again,” Scrighi said. “Catholics do not fear absence. The Lenten liturgy is “filled with” the absence … all this time we live in the absence. How countercultural. The popular culture would have us fill up whenever we feel empty. But now we wait, aware of what is missing, praying patiently for the day when the Lord will return in glory.”

Hoffman said for Passover, the story of how the Jewish people escaped bondage in Egypt also offers a chance to reflect on current events.

“An amazing facet of this retelling is the commandment that each person should experience this coming out of bondage, this liberation, as if it’s happening to you,” she said. “In the modern era, the Haggadah, this text that sort of guides your prayers and retelling, is open to contemporary (issues)—to the Holocaust, to the birth of the state of Israel, to the refugee crisis—it is a text that opens up to acknowledging a particular historical moment that people are in.”

For this moment, in the midst of a pandemic, Hoffman said people can look to the Passover story and see how a collective group can get through a struggle together.

“There’s a collective affirmation of ‘we come through this together’ and it’s really open toward the larger human community—I think that’s really a facet of the Seder in the modern era,” she said. “It’s very Jewish and very historically Jewish and at the same time, it incorporates a recognition that the narratives of liberation, of bondage, are something shared with the larger human community.”

Connecting Virtually

The COVID-19 pandemic has required many faith leaders to get creative with how they can provide virtual offerings to their communities, Hornbeck said.

“The starter version of this for religious communities seems to be live streaming services that they previously did not livestream,” he said. “There’s obviously advantages to that—people who are looking for something like “normal” in their lives, they can pull up a video and they can see something like their ordinary service. The downside though, is a unidirectional experience—you watch passively while someone somewhere else does something.”

Some communities, such as the Church of Heavenly Rest, an Episcopal church in New York City, have taken to adding new offerings to connect people during this time, such as a daily prayer group with an active live chat, Hornbeck said.

“The chat function there has proven to be really valuable because folks can write out their prayers and everyone can see them,” he said. “You can have the official service going on and then also individual reflections going on.”

Scirghi said that he believes there’s something for the clergy and participants to learn from this period of virtual worship.

“Perhaps this new experience will provide a new perspective on our regular worship, so that we may come to see and hear in a new way,” he said. “We may notice our prayers and rituals anew. If nothing else, the virtual worship may leave us longing for ‘the real thing,’ that is, to get back inside the church alongside the people of God.”

WFUV 90.7 FM and wfuv.org will air Fordham’s Good Friday service at 8 p.m. on April 10 and Easter Sunday Mass at 11 a.m. on April 12. Easter Sunday’s Mass will also be live streamed.

For more information, visit fordham.edu/info/20094/campus_ministry.

Hans Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors, has been analyzed for its symbolism and visual narrative. It’s also been said that Henry James may have been influenced by the painting’s presence in London at the time he wrote his novel The Ambassadors. The connection may be tenuous, but some critics have made that argument—including Anne G. Hoffman, PhD, Professor of English and Comparative Literature.

That Hoffman could make an argument for James’s awareness of the painting should surprise no one. The James siblings have been the focus of her recent work: Henry the novelist, Alice the diarist, and William the philosopher/psychologist. Last winter The Psychoanalytic Review published her article, “Writing Siblings: Alice James and Her Brothers.”

What may surprise some is that Hoffman is an accomplished painter who also recently completed her own watercolor tribute to Holbein’s piece. The literary argument and the watercolor speak to just a few of her intellectual passions: painting, drawing, and literature.

Nowadays, Hoffman fuses those passions in a seemingly effortless manner. But she says it wasn’t always that way. Looking back from the present, she notes that at times of difficulty in writing, she would find herself turning to drawing. Only recently did she come to recognize that during times when the writing had stopped, the visual arts continued.

“Looking back, you can come to understand what’s happened in the past,” she said. “In fact, past difficulties can become the source of new insights and creative pathways.”

Hoffman has been drawing and painting her entire life, but she said she’s always made the more intellectual choices when it came to where to focus a career. More recently, she’s begun to think about the mingling of literary critic and painter, and opened yet another door in her intellectual life.

Today, in addition to her full time duties as professor at Fordham, she also holds a research faculty appointment at the DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. At Cornell, she chairs the Richardson Research Seminar in the History of Psychiatry and also participates in a working group on psychoanalysis and the arts.

To separate Hoffman’s various spheres of interest would be an exercise in futility. In talking about her visual work, the disparate worlds appear to intersect and mesh. And on Wednesday, Sept. 30 at 4 p.m. in Walsh Library. she will present the comingling of those worlds in a talk titled “Words and Pictures, Bodies and Books.”

Hoffman’s art isn’t always representational, she says. Despite her overall interest in the human body—both in writing and in painting—her art is equally at home with the static still life. Sometimes, as in the case with the Holbein homage, the figures are obvious, at other times she veers toward abstraction.

But to look for a clear literary narrative or theory in any of Hoffman’s images would be beside the point, particularly when it comes to the human figure. Beneath it all, she said, is an interest in psychoanalysis and a belief that subjectivity begins to take shape in the earliest stages of life. Such subject matter can’t be represented in any literal manner, she said, and is not done so in her art, where her use of texture, color, and movement dominate.

“As an artist, I recognize that the infantile body—an intense domain of sensation, perception, and fantasy—is a reservoir and a resource for creative life,” she said. “Outside of conscious awareness, our early years provide the grounding for later experiences.”