U OF M CENTER FOR JEWISH STUDIES LECTURE SERIESRachel 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.