Veteran American-Israeli journalist Stuart Schoffman, a founding editor of The Jerusalem Report, died on Sunday in Jerusalem.
A screenwriter, lecturer, and translator, the Brooklyn, New York, native spent 17 years as an editor and columnist for the Report, where he combined Jewish scholarship with reportage and analysis of politics, religion and culture.
Most recently, he was a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and the editor of Havruta: A Journal of Jewish Conversation.
Before moving to Israel in 1988, he worked as a reporter for Fortune magazine, a staff writer at Time, an editor at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and a screenwriter for many Hollywood studios and producers.
A graduate of Harvard and Yale, Schoffman taught history at the University of Texas at Austin, screen-writing at the University of Southern California film school, and film at the Claremont Colleges in California, Tel Aviv University, and the Sam Spiegel School of Film and Television in Jerusalem. In 2002, he was named the Koppelman Scholar in Residence of the Anti-Defamation League. His translations of Israeli literature include books by David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua.
“Stuart had an awesome command of both high & low culture, Jewish & general knowledge, all of which he put to brilliant use in his sparkling columns for The Jerusalem Report,” wrote Calev Ben David, a former Report colleague of Schoffman and now an anchor at i24News.
“Off the page, he was one of the greatest storytellers I ever met, at once one of the funniest and most profound. He became the go-to translator for such giants of Hebrew literature as A.B. Yehoshua & Meir Shalev; I interviewed Yehoshua earlier this year and he couldn’t stop singing Stuart’s praises, and Stuart’s translation of Shalev’s Two She-Bears, a novel that relies greatly on nuances of the Hebrew tongue, was a masterwork of translation.”
Friends said Schoffman was 74.