A future endowed chair at Fordham will honor the life of a beloved scholar and mentor.
Family and colleagues of Anne Golomb Hoffman, Ph.D.—a longtime pillar of Fordham’s English and Jewish Studies departments who died suddenly last year—came together on Oct. 27 for an inaugural annual lecture and the establishment of a new endowed fund, which will be used to support a chair in her name.
“Endowed professorships are among the most powerful investments we can make in a university’s future,” said Jessica Lang, Ph.D., Fordham’s dean of Arts and Sciences said at the event. “This extraordinary commitment honors the memory of Professor Anne Golomb Hoffman, a scholar whose intellectual curiosity and humanism shaped generations of students.”
Lang announced that a $1 million gift from the Hoffman family had provided seed funding for the chair, which will support the recruitment of outstanding faculty in Jewish studies and literature. She invited those who’d been inspired by Hoffman’s life to also contribute to the fund.
“The endowed chair will ensure that her legacy of rigorous thought, empathy, and interdisciplinary inquiry continues to inspire Fordham for decades to come,” said Lang.
Continuing Hoffman’s Work
Hoffman’s husband, Leon Hoffman, M.D., said that just before she died, Anne was looking forward to discussing the book Ruth: A Migrant’s Tale (Yale University Press, 2022) with its author, Ilana Pardes, Ph.D., and Fordham theology professor Karina Martin Hogan, Ph.D., in a lecture that was planned for about a week after her death.
So it was bittersweet, he said, to be at the rescheduled lecture that evening—now titled the Anne Golomb Hoffman Memorial Lecture—which focused on the same topic, only without Anne.
He noted that their family “is thankful for all that has been done to ensure that Anne’s spirit, love of teaching, and deep appreciation of learning and scholarship will continue.”
The evening was also tinged with sadness for Hogan, who considered Hoffman to be a mentor.
“Nevertheless, I think Anne would be happy that this lecture that she and I prepared for is happening now,” she said.
An Ancient Story of Immigration
In her remarks at the memorial lecture, Pardes, the Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, referenced Hoffman’s well-known book Between Exile and Return: S.Y. Agnon and the Drama of Writing (State University of New York Press, 1991).
She called it a groundbreaking publication because of the way Hoffman placed the late Hebrew writer and Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon in conversation with other writers such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann. Pardes said she would aim to do the same with Hoffman that evening.
“In my talk today on the book of Ruth and its reception, I will aim to continue my dialogue with Anne,” she said. “We shared so many passions, from feminism and psychoanalysis to questions of exile and migration,” Pardes said.
She said that the book of Ruth is remarkable for its capacity to provide “a vibrant portrait of one of the most intriguing characters in the Bible.”
“What makes Ruth’s migratory tale all the more exceptional is the fact that she’s a Moabite. So not only is she a woman, but she’s a foreign woman,” she said.
“Elsewhere in the Bible, in the great stories of migration in Genesis and in Exodus, male characters are the ones to prevail. Here, a woman is set on center stage, and the specificities of her life are spelled out with distinct verve.”
