The first annual New York Sephardic Jewish Book Fair will take place on Sunday July 25, 2010 with book readings, author signings, book sales and tours at the Center for Jewish History. Hosted by the American Sephardi Federation (ASF), the book fair will bring together authors and book lovers that write about and enjoy books relating to the culture, history, philosophy, religion, languages and experiences of the Sephardic Jews, past and present.

See here for details. (hat tip)

One comment on this important rabbinic figure. In Alexander Marx’s chapter on R. Hoffman in his Essays in Jewish Biography (pp. 190-191), Marx writes the following about Hoffman.

In teaching Codes he would go back to first sources; but he realized that the time at the disposal of the Seminary was not sufficient to cover the entire ground even for the sections that he taught. He therefore prepared an abstract of all the codifiers, to the latest important collections of responsa, and dictated this to the students, always adding the injunction that they were never to make decisions on the basis of this dictation without first looking up the original sources. This compilation on various parts of the Shulhan Aruk was arranged with the clarity, the excellent organization of the material and the emphasis on the essential so characteristic of Hoffman. It was superior to all modern works of the kind, so far as it went, and it is unfortunate that this abstract has remained unpublished.

Is anybody familiar with any other testimony to the existence of such an unpublished work? I think that Alexander Marx, his son-in-law, was in possession of some of his papers, and hopefully it wasn’t destroyed in the JTS fire.

I am a big fan of the Artscroll book, The Rishonim, and I just saw in an ad of their’s that the companion volume, The Early Achronim, is back in print. Any quibbles with some of the biographical or bibliographical information found in these books, is off-set IMHO by the quick reference which they allow.