Dustin Hoffman Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with Columbia University, when he was 21. "It was a great experience for me," he said. "All my life I had wanted to get inside a prison or a mental hospital. . . . I wanted to get inside where behavior, human behavior, was so exposed. All the things the rest of us were feeling and stopping up were coming out of these people." He used that experience to help him develop the character of Raymond Babbitt, a high-functioning autistic savant, yet a person who critic David Denby described as "a strangely shuttered genius." Hoffman created certain
Dustin Hoffman interview, he said that all of his children from his second marriage had bar or bat mitzvahs and that he is a more observant Jew now than when he was younger; he has also lamented that he is not fluent in Hebrew. A political liberal, Hoffman has long supported the Democratic Party and Ralph Nader. In 1997 he was one of a number of Hollywood stars and executives to sign an open letter to then–German chancellor Helmut Kohl protesting the treatment of Scientologists in Germany, which was published as a newspaper advertisement in the "International Herald Tribune". In 2009 he