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.

“The fact that we each have a different background and story is precisely what makes us such a strong community,” he said in a statement to the Soros Fellowship program. “It means that we are often in the front lines of the struggle for justice, seeking to improve and uplift the many communities of which we are part. Being a New American means to celebrate the richness of the American experience while also working to enhance and improve it for everyone.”

Oktaba is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, where he is studying comparative literature with a focus on narratives of trauma, paranoia, and genocide.

As the son of a single mother who came to the United States seeking both opportunity and safety after helping to overthrow the Communist regime in her native Poland, the issue of trauma is personally compelling to him, he said. He was born in New York City and grew up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where his greatest solace was his neighborhood’s small public library; he’d carry a stack of borrowed books along when he helped his mother in her job as a cleaning woman, reading in whatever moments of respite he could find.

At Fordham, Oktaba studied classics, exploring the ways in which they continue to inform discussions of identity and selfhood. With the help of Fordham’s Office of Prestigious Fellowships, he earned a Beinecke Scholarship and a Gates Cambridge Scholarship during his senior year. The latter scholarship took him to the University of Cambridge, where he earned a Master of Philosophy degree.

In 2018, he was named a Luce Scholar, which enabled him to travel to Asia and continue studying trauma. Focusing on Himalayan Buddhism, he explored storytelling and other forms of witnessing in post-traumatic survival, as well as historical medical approaches toward trauma treatment.

Anne Golomb Hoffman, Ph.D., professor of English at Fordham, taught Oktaba when he was an undergraduate and has continued to support him through each fellowship application process, most recently penning a letter of support for his Soros application.

“It’s been my great pleasure to have been in conversation with Nikolas over recent years and to see the development of his interests over time, in ways that derive from work he did as an undergraduate,” she said. “In fact, knowing the importance of libraries and reading to Nikolas’ development, I’d say those interests have been there, developing since childhood: Nikolas is someone who takes what life hands him and makes it the occasion for productive inquiry.”

Now, as a doctoral candidate at Yale, he’s seeking to combine scholarly research and writing with activism, identifying possible ways to address trauma, holistically and empathetically, beyond the academy.

“My sense now is that Nikolas has fully merged his interests in his program of graduate studies at Yale,” Hoffman said. “Through his experiences in England and his Luce year as well, Nikolas now understands trauma and narrative in broader historical contexts, including genocide. That’s become the larger focus of his work and it will be truly exciting to see where it takes him.”

Founded by Hungarian immigrants Daisy M. Soros and her husband, Paul Soros, the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans program honors the contributions of continuing generations of immigrants in the United States.

He will depart in June, and although his placement is not yet finalized, he hopes to study manuscripts and documents about suffering and trauma, and how these stories are told and retold.

Oktaba has had previous experience analyzing texts in the service of advancing discussions of trauma and human suffering. For his Gates Cambridge study, he read the Dionysiaca—at 20,426 lines, the longest surviving Greek poem from antiquity. His research integrates literature and the humanities as a whole into discussion of identity, sexuality, and trauma. It has touched on topics ranging from Dionysiac cult practices to the nightlife of Weimar Berlin, and he has presented his findings in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

In the past two years, Oktaba has taught courses in military history at Oxford and at Cambridge University, where he earned a Master of Philosophy degree. He is translating ancient Greek magic scrolls for a book about pharmaco-religious beliefs of Late Antiquity and their continuing contemporary resonance.

In Asia, he hopes to deepen his understanding of trauma from a global perspective, using storytelling to investigate various forms of witnessing in post-traumatic survival, and exploring new ways to bridge academic and public discussions on trauma and its symptoms.

“Trauma is not a unidirectional narrative. It’s not simply a javelin that’s hurled from Point A to Point B. It is affective, and it is contagious,” he said.

Launched in 1974 by the Henry Luce Foundation, the Luce Scholars program identifies potential future U.S. leaders in order to promote cross-cultural understanding between the two regions.

Upon graduation in May, Oktaba, a classical civilizations and classical languages major, will enroll at Cambridge University to continue studies about how ancient peoples’ sometimes painful questions of identity have had an impact on present-day social and religious life.

“It feels absolutely amazing,” said Oktaba.

“I’m thrilled but also deeply humbled, given that this is one of the most prestigious fellowships in the world.”

The Gates Cambridge scholarship is one of the world’s most competitive, where only 1 in 10 applicants are invited to the interview stage.

Oktaba credited Fordham faculty members Andrew Clark, Ph.D., associate professor of French and comparative literature, Anne Golumb Hoffman Ph.D., professor of English, and the staff of Fordham’s Campion Institute for Prestigious Scholarships for helping him through the application process.

John Ryle Kezel, Ph.D., director of the Campion Institute, called Oktaba’s scholarship win a tribute to both his personal academic excellence and to the University as a whole. Since his sophomore year, Oktaba has worked closely with Mary Shelley, Campion’s assistant director for the Lincoln Center campus, and has taken part in Campion-organized mock interview sessions with faculty drawn from Fordham’s three undergraduate colleges.

In terms of competitiveness, Kezel said the Gates Cambridge is on a par with the Rhodes Scholarship and even involves a further step because students first need to apply directly to their department of choice at Cambridge, and interview there for the scholarship.

Kezel recalls Oktaba as a “remarkable scholar.” During his mock interviews, Kezel said that when someone asked him ‘What’s your favorite Greek poem?’ Oktaba quoted the poem in Greek.

“I’m particularly grateful to Mary Shelley and my staff who worked with Nikolas, and for the continuing support from [Provost] Stephen Freedman and President Joseph McShane, S.J. It really takes a whole University to win such awards.”

Oktaba noted that the classics have historically been at the vanguard of opening contemporary inquiries into questions of sex, gender, and sexuality.  He said it is a subject he’s been interested in since childhood, when his mother would take him to the library in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. When he was just 7, he discovered books about classical antiquity next to the books about chivalry, knights, and courtly romances that interested him at the time. One of those, The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, made a lasting impression on him.

At Fordham, he studied groups such as the Ascetics, who that believed the goal of a man was to become an angel and the goal of a woman was to become a man.

“Because of the temporal distance between 2015 and antiquity, I think it might be easier for many to look at these painful questions as they were asked 2,000 years ago than thinking about them from the 1960s or today,” he said.

“Not only have the classics informed over 2,000 years of talking about identity in the western world and beyond, as recently as 2003, in the Supreme Court case about sodomy, both the plaintiff and defendant were using editions of Plato to support their own arguments.”

The Gates Cambridge Scholarship was established by Bill and Melinda Gates in 2000 and is awarded to applicants from countries outside the United Kingdom to pursue a full-time postgraduate degree at the University of Cambridge. It aims to build a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others. Past Fordham winners have included Rose L. Spear FCRH ’06, Joseph Clair GSAS ’08, Jeremiah Schwarz, FCRH ’03 (who won his in 2008), and Jeffrey Lockhart  FCRH ’13,GSAS ’14.