Rachel Gordan is the author of the new book Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American. She is Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at the University of Florida.
Q: What inspired you to write Postwar Stories?
A: I’ve long been interested in the American-Jewish mid-20th century experience. Part of the reason is that in 1950 my maternal grandparents arrived in the US, having survived the Holocaust.
They quickly found their footing, Jewishly, in the US, and this ability to fit in while retaining a strong Jewish religious life always intrigued me, and I wondered what had made that possible, especially for a decade (the 1950s) that is known for conformity and assimilation.
It helped that they lived in parts of the country (NY and then CT), where there were both other Holocaust survivors and an older established Jewish community. It also helped, I think, that Jews like my grandparents were able to see representations of Jews in American popular culture. In Postwar Stories, I explore two middlebrow genres of that popular culture.
Q: You begin the book with Laura Z. Hobson’s novel Gentleman’s Agreement--why did you choose to start there?
A: Because I think Agreement was one of the first really popular books that addressed American antisemitism.
It was the only one of the 1940s anti-antisemitism novels that became an Academy Award-winning film, so it had an unusually large influence, and provides a good example of how Jewish middlebrow culture could become a cultural phenomenon.
Q: The scholar Deborah Dash Moore said of the book, “Rachel Gordan reinterprets and reinvigorates two key narrative modes of anti-antisemitism and introduction to Judaism literature. Along the way, she interrogates convincingly their gendered dimensions and the reasons why so many Americans embraced them--and the Jews they described.” What do you think of that description?
A: I very much appreciate it! My goal was to show readers that this popular literature that we haven’t paid much attention to meant a lot to Americans at the time – and not even just to Jews.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book, especially given the current rise in antisemitism?
A: For better and worse, popular culture plays an important role in our interactions with Others in society. Especially in cases where we do not know individuals of a particular religious or ethnic background, it’s often movies, films, and books which feature characters of those backgrounds that influence what we think we know about these people.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a biography about Laura Z. Hobson, the author of Gentleman’s Agreement and several other popular novels. I was able to tell a sliver of her fascinating life in Postwar Stories, but there is so much more!
This is a woman who was born in 1900 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and graduated from Cornell (same class as E.B. White!). In her 20s, she lived in Greenwich Village and then worked in the burgeoning field of advertising on Madison Avenue, and then for Time magazine, where she became close friends with publisher Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce.
Hobson managed to adopt a child in the 1930s as a single woman, and then she gave birth to a second child, after an unplanned pregnancy, in her 40s.
And in the decades after she published Gentleman’s Agreement, Hobson led a very productive and active life in her 60s, 70s, and 80s, continuing to publish popular novels. One of her books, published when she was in her 70s, was considered a landmark gay novel.
Hobson’s an inspiring story of an American woman, who made her living as a writer.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I host a writing podcast, produced at the University of Florida, which you can find here. And you can find a couple of my more popular essays here and here.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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