Miriam (Schmulewitz) Hoffman (born 1936) is a Yiddish language playwright and lecturer. 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, cum laude, in 1981, and an M.A. from Columbia University, in 1983. 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 has been a columnist and feature writer for the Jewish Forward, where she has published over two thousand 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.