Kaplan Brauer Lecture: Rachel Gordan

The Right Kind of Jew: Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement and the Bargain

of American Assimilation

Rachel Gordan, Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Florida, revisits Laura Z. Hobson’s landmark 1947 novel Gentleman’s Agreement. Through Hobson’s life and work, Gordan explores the promises—and costs—of assimilation and what it meant to become the “right kind” of Jew in twentieth-century America.