In this series we are featuring profiles of leading secular and
humanist Jews from various countries and eras. These profiles are
written by Bennett Muraskin, a regular contributor to Outlook,
Humanistic Judaism and Jewish Currents. Many of these profiles appear
in Bennett's book Let Justice Well Up Like Water: Progressive Jews
from Hillel to Helen Suzman, published by the Congress of Secular
Jewish Organizations (CSJO) and the Centre for Cultural Judaism. (For
ordering information contact CSJO at csjo@csjo.org.)

In 1947, the novel Gentlemen's Agreement appeared. It was the story
of a Gentile journalist who poses as a Jew to expose the genteel
anti-Semitism among the upper crust, an "agreement" that excluded
Jews from certain hotels, neighborhoods, colleges, private clubs and
occupations. An instant bestseller, the book sold over 1.6 million
copies and was translated into 13 languages. Hollywood made it into a
movie starring Gregory Peck, and it won an Academy Award for best
film. When the Jewish Book Council wished to honour the author,
however, she refused to accept its award. She did not want
Gentlemen's Agreement to be considered a "Jewish book."
Laura Z. Hobson was born Laura Zametkin, the daughter of Jewish
immigrant radicals. Her father Michael was tortured in a Czarist
prison for his revolutionary politics. After fleeing to the U.S., he
became the first editor and a longtime writer for the New York City
Yiddish-language daily, the Forward. Laura's mother Adella wrote a
women's column for another Yiddish daily, Der Tog (The Day). Both
parents were life-long socialist activists among the Yiddish-speaking
working class. Yet they made a conscious decision to bring up their
children as "total Americans," speaking only English. Laura absorbed
their secular faith in justice and equality, but not their knowledge
of Jewish culture. On occasion, however, certain incidents in her
life awakened a dormant Jewish consciousness.
In 1930, Hobson married Francis Thayer Hobson, a non-Jewish
publishing executive. Although they divorced after five years, she
kept his name, adding the initial "Z" for her maiden name. She made
it a point to inform anyone who asked that it signified her Jewish
origins.
Hobson's early career was in journalism and publishing. She became
the first woman hired by Time magazine outside typically female
niches. She did promotional writing and soon became the promotions
director, supervising a large staff. Later, she helped launch Life
magazine.
Hobson was always a strong, independent woman. Upon her divorce in
1935, she refused to accept alimony on principle and remained
self-supporting for the rest of her life. In 1937 she took the
unprecedented step of adopting a baby as a single mother. In keeping
with her universalist principles, she insisted that it be the child
of intermarried (Jewish/Christian) parents. In 1941, she became
pregnant after a casual affair. Fearing the social stigma and
concerned that her adopted son might feel inferior to her natural
child, she devised an elaborate ruse. She concealed her pregnancy,
gave birth under an assumed name and then legally adopted her new
son. In 1970 she published a novel, The Tenth Month, regarding the
trauma of single motherhood. She raised both boys on her own. When
the younger son turned out to be a homosexual and "came out," she
overcame her prejudices and eventually accepted his sexual
orientation. Years later, she wrote a novel, Consenting Adult (1975),
based on this experience. Both books were made into TV movies.
Hobson was an outspoken liberal and anti-fascist. During the 1930s,
she supported the New Deal and campaigned for humanitarian aid to the
Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. She forcefully condemned
Nazism and did publicity for organizations urging U.S. preparedness
for World War II. She openly denounced "isolationists" such as
Charles Lindbergh who accused the Jews of dragging the U.S. into an
unnecessary war. In the late 1930s, she personally sponsored families
attempting to emigrate to the U.S. to escape from Nazi-occupied
Austria. Only after great difficulty was she able to secure their
visas. She knew that others were not so fortunate. Her first novel,
The Trespassers (1943), deals with the plight of Jewish refugees from
Hitler denied admission to the U.S. She did publicity work for the
War Department during World War II, encouraging women to volunteer,
and in 1945, she herself volunteered as a driver transporting
officers and soldiers within the U.S.
Hobson continued her fiction writing after Gentlemen's Agreement,
although she never achieving the same level of success. For many
years, she wrote a human interest column for the International News
Service. She was involved politically in opposition to McCarthyism,
nuclear proliferation, and the Vietnam War, and in support of the
civil rights movement and the Equal Rights Amendment. She served on
the board of the New York branch of the ACLU. Throughout her life,
she consistently opposed Soviet communism.
Although Hobson originally favoured the establishment of Israel as a
place of refuge for Holocaust survivors, she opposed Zionism as a
form of "religious nationalism." Her attitude changed during the
1970s in response to the spate of Palestinian terrorist attacks
(including the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics
and the 1976 skyjacking at Entebbe, Uganda), and the 1975 UN
resolution equating Zionism with racism. As reflected in her novel,
Over and Above (1979), she viewed Arab hostility to Israel as a form
of anti-Semitism, equating Yasir Arafat with Hitler. Her profound
emotional reaction to PLO terror tactics may have made her feel more
"Jewish," but it obscured the underlying issues of Israel's
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and its oppression of the
Palestinians.
Hobson was a self-proclaimed agnostic who lacked any cultural
attachments to Judaism; her Jewish identification was very much a
defensive reaction to perceived anti-Semitism. Toward the end of her
life, however, she expressed remorse over refusing the Jewish Book
Council's award in 1947. She came full circle by granting an
interview to the Forward (in its English-language supplement), the
newspaper her father helped found in 1897. She still maintained,
however, that she was not a "Jewish woman writer" but "a writer, a
woman and a Jew."
After writing nine novels and dozens of short stories, Hobson capped
off her career at age 83, with an autobiography, Laura Z.: A Life
(1983). Following her death due to cancer, a second volume appeared,
Laura Z.: A Life - Years of Fulfillment (1986).
Few twentieth-century American women have led as full and exciting a
life as Hobson. Through her novels, she popularized issues of
anti-Semitism, unwed motherhood and gay rights. She succeeded as a
single mother and as a professional. It is not surprising that the
Jewish feminist journal Lilith printed a moving obituary. Laura Z.
Hobson took to heart her mother's words, who once inscribed a volume
of her Yiddish writings to her daughter: "Dedicated to those women
who are never too old to learn."