In Memory & Complicity, we feel skirts of summer dust as Eve Hoffman rides on dirt roads barefoot on a bike or clings to a runaway horse. We walk with her though an exhibit of one hundred and fifty postcards of lynchings. We see a girl in a yellow dress at the synagogue her great-grandparents founded—the synagogue bombed four hours later by white racists. We see black-faced jockeys in front yards. We listen to lullabies written in the Nazi concentration camps played on her mother’s piano—and the realization her mother was pregnant with her as they were being written. We taste sweet-potato pies and feel the wooden pews of churches turning their backs as gay men die. We watch giggling children dive from the top of the refrigerator into their father’s arms. We accompany a widow rebuilding her life, catching fireflies with her grandchildren, dancing with them in the rain.

Memory & Complicity available here


Eve Hoffman’s book of memories arrives at a conflicted time in American life and culture, and provides much needed insight into the paths that led us here and possibilities for going forward.

Robert Franklin, PhD, President Emeritus Morehouse College


In the end, Eve Hoffman’s work stands as a testimonial to a love that lives both in the ordinariness and in the trials, losses, struggles of our lives—if we but look.  

Jamil Zainaldin, President Emeritus, Georgia Humanities Council

Eve Hoffman confronts our moral sensibilities. Being a white, Jewish girl (and then woman) of privilege in the South over the last half century was fraught with contradictions and challenge.

Paul Root Wolpe, Director, Emory University Center for Ethics 

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