Rachel Gordan Presents: The Jew Who Passed: Laura Z. Hobson and the American Bargain of Belonging

Before Gentleman’s Agreement became the Academy Award–winning postwar film starring Gregory Peck, it was the bestselling novel of Laura Z. Hobson, a Jewish American woman whose life was shaped by the very questions of antisemitism, assimilation, and conditional belonging that made her novel-turned-film famous. Born Laura Zametkin, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrant radicals, Hobson transformed herself into Laura Z. Hobson: Cornell graduate, Madison Avenue copywriter, Time Inc. editor, Upper East Side wife, divorced single mother, celebrity novelist, and one of the most widely read interpreters of American antisemitism. This talk tells the story of Hobson’s life as a biography of passing—not as simple denial, but as a practice of social translation through names, manners, marriage, work, motherhood, and literary ambition. Her life reveals the “other Jew” as the one who seems to have crossed the boundary into belonging—until antisemitism exposes how conditional that belonging remains.

Rachel Gordan is the Samuel Shorstein Professor of American Jewish Culture & Society at the University of Florida. Her book, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American (Oxford, 2024), was a finalist for the 2025 Jordan Schnitzer Award in Modern Jewish History & Culture. In addition to her scholarly publications, Gordan’s writing has appeared in LitHub, Slate, Tablet, Moment Magazine, and the New York Times website.

Cosponsors: Department of Anthropology, Department of Communication Studies, Department of English, Department of History, Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication