He was born in Korostyshiv, near Kyiv,[4] and received a traditional Jewish education; his application to the Kiev University was declined.
He was coeditor of the Moscow Yiddish monthly Shtrom, the last organ of free Jewish expression in the Soviet Union.
The poems in which he acclaimed the communist regime established him as one of the Kiev triumvirate of Yiddish poets, along with Leib Kvitko and Peretz Markish.
Hofshteyn's elegies for Jewish communities devastated by the White movement pogroms appeared in 1922, with illustrations by Marc Chagall.
After the death of Stalin, they were posthumously rehabilitated, and Hofshteyn's selected works reappeared in a Russian translation in 1958.