Editorial note: Spoilers ahead for season five, episode nine of “Hacks.”
Robby Hoffman has long deserved an Emmy for her work as Schaefer & LuSaque’s resident queer, ex-Hasidic assistant Randi in “Hacks.” And now, in our humble opinion, her mom does too!
In the latest episode “The Garden,” Randi has a line in Yiddish which Robby credits her mother with writing.
In the episode, Ava (Hannah Einbinder), Jimmy (Paul W. Downs), Kayla (Meg Stalter), Randi and Damien (Mark Indelicato) scramble to organize a new show for Deborah (Jean Smart) after her nemesis Bob Lipka (Tony Goldwyn) ruins her sold-out stint at Madison Square Garden. Randi, fliers in hand, becomes a more-than-committed street barker. “Kumen tsu ze Deborah Vance, Central Park, a kamedye, s’iz bkhnim.” she says, accosting some Hasidic Jewish men. Or, in English, “Come see Deborah Vance in Central Park. A comedy, it’s free.”
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“She wears a wig, too!” Randi goes on, in English, to two married Hasidic women. “She wears a sheitel!”
Robby Hoffman told Hey Alma that though she initially was ad-libbing the line, she called her mother Connie to run the Yiddish by her. (In a 2024 episode of Marc Maron’s podcast, Robby shared that Connie, mother of 10, writes plays in Yiddish.)
“I was using ‘frei’ to mean free but my mother corrected it to ‘b’chinem,’ which is free in the sense of cost. ‘Frei’ meant more free in the sense of philosophically,” she explained. “So ultimately have to [give] full credit [to] my mother whose Yiddish still comes in handy apparently.”
Indeed it does. And with the “Hacks” series finale airing tonight, Connie Hoffman’s Yiddish expertise could be even more helpful with a Randi-Kayla-Jimmy spin-off show… HBO take notes.
