There is an oft-repeated joke about the 1947 anti-antisemitism novel-turned-film Gentleman's Agreement, written by Laura Z. Hobson. Reportedly, a stagehand told screenwriter Moss Hart that he truly enjoyed working on the film. Although the stagehand normally played gin rummy during the shooting of movie scenes, he explained to Hart that Gentleman's Agreement “has such a wonderful moral I didn't want to miss it.” Pleased, Hart asked the man, “What's the moral as you see it?” “Henceforth,” replied the stagehand, “I'm always going to be good to Jewish people because you never can tell when they will turn out to be Gentiles.”Footnote 1
The joke captured what critics saw as the main flaw in Hobson's story about American antisemitism: It featured the experiences of a gentile and not a Jew.Footnote 2 In Gentleman's Agreement, a non-Jewish reporter, Phil Green, is assigned to write an article about antisemitism for a liberal magazine. Searching for a fresh angle for his story, Phil decides to go undercover as a Jew. In effect, he does what no Jew in the 1940s was likely to do: Phil announces, at nearly every opportunity, that he is Jewish in order to encounter the discrimination typically directed at Jews. One of the problems with this premise, according to critics, was that the experiences of actual Jews were marginalized. It was the emotional responses of gentiles—Phil, his girlfriend, and his son—that were prioritized in Hobson's telling. As a writer for the Saturday Review put it, “The inner anxieties of persecuted races cannot be explored by tourists. They are known only to those who dwell as natives among such slights, apprehensions, and shameful humiliations.”Footnote 3 That discomfort with the plot of Gentleman's Agreement would continue. Fifty years after the novel and film appeared, film scholar George Custen reflected, “Having a lead character who is only pretending to be Jewish is not far from using blackface instead of black faces to mask white anxieties about the integration of American popular culture.”Footnote 4 The problematic quality of Hobson's story of passing had only become more apparent over time.
The Saturday Review critic, and those who shared his perspective about the shortcomings of Agreement, had a point. But there was at least one good reason for Hobson to use a non-Jewish protagonist: She was able to show that antisemitism was a problem for all Americans, not just Jews.Footnote 5 This idea that responsibility for the persecution suffered by the discriminated minority lay with the majority American population, and not with the persecuted, themselves, would become familiar to 1940s Americans.Footnote 6
In this essay, I examine the 1940s as the decade of American anti-antisemitism literature by focusing on several novels in this genre, which reinforced the shift in values that Hobson espoused, to varying degrees. Gentleman's Agreement, which went on to become an Academy Award–winning film starring Gregory Peck, was the most celebrated in this group of anti-antisemitism novels that included Saul Bellow's The Victim (1947), Gwethalyn Graham's Earth and High Heaven (1944), Margaret Halsey's Some of My Best Friends Are Soldiers (1944), Arthur Miller's Focus (1946), and Jo Sinclair's Wasteland (1946). Agreement's power arose from the multiple formats in which it was presented to the public (magazine serial, bestselling novel, and film), and from Hobson's narrative strategies. Although changes in attitudes toward Jews and antisemitism were becoming apparent in American society, fiction proved an ideal vehicle precisely because antisemitism was still very much a fact of real life throughout the 1940s. Only in imaginary worlds could skilled writers construct situations in which antisemitism was singled out, among all the problems that wartime Americans faced, as deserving criticism and resolution. Novels gave writers and readers space to explore how to make postwar America safer for difference, building on attitudinal changes toward Jews acquired during and in the aftermath of World War II. As literary scholar Miriam Udel observes, “We use stories to create small worlds, more pliant and perfect, more compassionate and consoling, than the big world we all inhabit together.”Footnote 7 Anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s served a similar purpose. Since at least the nineteenth century, sentimental literature has been deemed a gender-appropriate sphere through which American woman writers channeled their anger at social injustice. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes, “According to Aristotle, anger is a response to significant damage to something or someone one cares about, and damage that the angry person believes to have been wrongfully inflicted. Aristotle adds that although anger is painful, it also contains within itself a pleasant hope for payback or retribution.”Footnote 8 The two parts of anger are separable, Nussbaum explains, because “we can feel outrage at the wrongfulness of an act, without wanting payback. There is a species of anger that is free of retributive wish: its entire content is ‘How outrageous that is. Something must be done about that.’” Nussbaum calls this “Transition Anger,” because it “expresses a protest, but faces forward: it gets to work finding solutions rather than dwelling on the infliction of retrospective pain.” This is the anger of the woman social protest novelist. It is a less dangerous direction for female anger to take, in part because it is the anger of parents. As Nussbaum writes, “Parents often feel that children have acted wrongfully, and they are outraged. They want to protest the wrong, and somehow to hold the child accountable. But they usually avoid retributive payback. . . . They choose strategies that are firm enough to get the child's attention, and that express clearly that and how what the child did was wrong. And they give positive suggestions for the future, how to do things differently.” Anti-antisemitism literature similarly provided an outlet for anger at social injustice, as well as suggestions for how to resolve these conflicts, as characters worked through their prejudiced feelings.
The anti-antisemitism fiction of the 1940s thus guided public sentiment toward more progressive attitudes regarding Jews and antisemitism. These novels not only raised readers’ sensitivity to antisemitism, but, as fiction, they allowed writers to enter the thoughts and feelings of their characters, providing readers with access to the interior landscapes and personal stories surrounding antisemitism, with an emotional clarity that was difficult for nonfiction writers to achieve. Anti-antisemitism fiction thus furnished a kind of literary “confessional,” as main characters divulged their latent or former bigoted feelings—sometimes in conversation with another character, and sometimes within interior monologues—and then, through character development, overcame their former antisemitic attitudes to arrive at a position of anti-antisemitism. Through imaginative narrative strategies, skillful novelists showed readers that there were constructive ways of responding to bigotry, and to overcoming it within oneself.
As Hasia Diner, Leah Garrett, and Josh Lambert have shown, despite earlier scholarship arguing that it was not until later (the 1960s and 1970s, in particular) that popular culture featured the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, Americans did respond to the Holocaust in a range of cultural modes, including through the anti-antisemitism fiction of the 1940s.Footnote 9 This 1940s literary response to the Holocaust differed markedly from the kinds of literary treatments of the Holocaust that would characterize subsequent decades. Anti-antisemitism literature demonstrates that even before Americans fully confronted and dealt with the wartime experiences of European Jews, American participation in the war and their self-understanding as liberators of the concentration camps led to a reconsideration of Americans’ own problems with antisemitism. Anti-antisemitism novels thus constituted a muted literary response to the Holocaust. The novels’ brief mentions of the Holocaust served as a motivator and point of comparison for understanding and improving American antisemitism. In these allusions to Nazi antisemitism, readers were reminded of the extreme versions of antisemitism, and the comforting fact that the American situation was on a far less violent scale. In one scene in Gentleman's Agreement, for example, Phil reflects on the exclusion of Jews from certain American hotels: “In a world where only yesterday human bones powdered to ash in blazing furnaces, the barred register of a chic hotel could scarcely be called a disaster.”Footnote 10 The stark contrast between the image invoked of Nazi antisemitism and the upper-class antisemitism at the heart of Gentleman's Agreement is jarring to the twenty-first century reader, but was likely reassuring to both writer and reader in the 1940s. The discrimination described in these anti-antisemitism novels clearly did not rise to the horrific level of the Nazis.
More than two decades ago, historian Deborah Dash Moore called for a reconsideration of World War II as an “American Jewish War.”Footnote 11 Moore invited investigation into how the war transformed American Jewish self-understanding.Footnote 12 In her own study of Jewish soldiers, Moore examined the implementation of the Judeo-Christian tradition during the 1940s and its transforming effect on American soldiers’ attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. World War II was also an American Jewish war on the cultural front. These novels, and Gentleman's Agreement in particular, reflected more progressive attitudes toward Jews, minorities, and antisemitism, even as they demonstrated the limits of such change. I examine the anti-antisemitism literature of the 1940s as a cultural arena for revising views about Jews, antisemitism, and good Americanism. To accomplish this, I look at the historical context of these novels, focusing on Gentleman's Agreement and its roots, and the connections between the 1940s anti-antisemitism literature and changes in American society.
Anti-Antisemitism Literature: Teaching Americans How to Respond to the Problem
Through its Midwestern, gentile protagonist, Gentleman's Agreement achieved several of Hobson's goals: It asserted the essential sameness of Jews and Christians—an idea well-suited to the Judeo-Christian era, yet offensive to those who valued the distinctions between Jews and Christians.Footnote 13 The novel enabled more readers to identify with and emulate Phil's heroic awakening, an awakening that was informed by a liberal Protestant ethos that grounded his secular worldview.Footnote 14 Hobson's knowledge of selling, acquired through her advertising background and as an employee at Time Inc., allowed her to aim her writing toward Main Street America.Footnote 15
Given his background, Phil Green's appreciation of New York's pluralistic society is especially meaningful.Footnote 16 Surveying the room at a party hosted by a Manhattan colleague, Phil thinks, “Here was a world where a man's name, the shape of his nose, the religion he believed in or the religion he did not believe in—where none of it counted.”Footnote 17 Phil perceives that his new milieu is not the kind where antisemitism is likely to drive a wedge between people. In his mind, Phil connects the cosmopolitan party scene before him—where “the faces in the room were various with many kinds of origin; the speech mingled the accents of Middle West, East, and West, of Europe and America”—with the best of American traditions: “Here was rugged individualism in its best sense, each man or woman a whole person, the sum of his worth and character left whole, no part subtracted by prejudice.”Footnote 18 Hobson's fictional portrayal suggests that small towns form good citizens like Phil, but cities, and especially New York, were the spaces in which religious pluralism—and secularism—thrived: “This, the fluid easy coming together of a dozen worlds, was the bonus life set aside for the luckier ones in the metropolises of the earth. The small city, the town and village, could not offer it. To Phil, grown in small cities and towns, it was as stimulating as the champagne.”Footnote 19 This secular, cosmopolitan Manhattan was Laura Z. Hobson's world. It was where she spent most of her life after graduating from Cornell in 1921 and, through her novel, it was a world offered up to American readers and moviegoers, in which religious pluralism, secularism, and anti-antisemitism flourished.Footnote 20
Ironically, antisemitism during the first half of the twentieth century, particularly the 1920s through the early 1940s, was so ongoing and pervasive as to be naturalized as part of the American milieu, neither worthy of discussion nor a topic fit for polite conversation. Today, we talk about antisemitic incidents. But for the typical American Jew during the 1920s and 1930s, antisemitism affected every aspect of life: housing, college, profession, recreational activities, social clubs, and friends.Footnote 21 Antisemitism shaped an individual's aspirations and dreams, often determining what a young Jew believed was possible in life. It was part of the air Jews breathed—taken for granted; not just accepted, but expected as a fact of life.Footnote 22 Historian Deborah Lipstadt recalls the way antisemitism permeated and organized her midcentury youth: “I had heard my friends’ older siblings say, that despite their outstanding grades and academic records, they would not get into a particular Ivy League school because its Jewish quota was filled. Already in the eighth grade we knew not to consider certain colleges because it was exceptionally difficult for a Jewish student . . . to gain admittance. Rather than being shocked by this, we accepted it, I am embarrassed to say, as a fact of life. This was how things were.”Footnote 23 That acceptance of antisemitism was also familiar to Arthur Miller, playwright and author of the 1946 anti-antisemitism novel Focus. In a 1947 speech, Miller explained that it had been difficult to write about antisemitism as a Jew, because it was so entangled with all of his experiences, and because the topic inevitably led to his own resentment and defensiveness.Footnote 24 Miller explained, “Instantly, therefore, and inevitably, when I confront the prospect of writing about Jewish life my mood is defensive, and combative. There is hardly a story or play I could write about which would not have to contain justification for behavior that in any other people need not be justified.”Footnote 25 In Agreement, Phil similarly discovers how challenging it is for a Jew to respond to antisemitism after watching his childhood friend Dave Goldman react to an antisemitic comment. Phil reflects on the burden that falls on the Jew in such a moment: “The anti-semite offered the effrontery—and then the world was ready with harsh yardsticks to measure the self-control and dignity with which you met it. You were sensitive or too sensitive; you were too timid or too bellicose; they gave you at once the wound and the burden of proper behavior toward it.”Footnote 26 It is a measure of Phil's empathy that he perceives this hidden, inner Jewish turmoil.
Agreement provided a model of non-Jewish understanding and sympathy for antisemitism through Phil. Thus, another justification for a gentile protagonist was that it allowed Hobson to showcase moral outrage as the proper American reaction to antisemitism. Phil is shocked and deeply disturbed by antisemitism, unlike most adult Jews in the 1940s, including Dave Goldman, whose “tough, muscular attitude” toward antisemitism had always impressed Phil.Footnote 27 “I'm in it up to my neck every way I can find,” Dave confides to Phil about his own experience with antisemitism.Footnote 28 Dave's outrage has been dulled over time. Having become inured to such discrimination and bigotry, the Jews in Gentleman's Agreement have largely lost their sense of moral outrage at the injustice of antisemitism. Meanwhile, it is part of Phil's white, male, Christian privilege, as it might be described today, that he has been shielded from the harsh realities of Dave's life for so long. The positive side of this privilege is that it allows Phil to evince, somewhat credibly, his moral indignation over the ubiquity of antisemitism, even in cosmopolitan New York.
The 1940s: A Cultural Moment for Anti-Antisemitism
Despite the complicated feelings that antisemitic bigotry aroused, for both Jews and non-Jews, anti-antisemitism had a cultural moment in 1940s America.Footnote 29 Antisemitism was certainly not a new phenomenon at this point, but its presence as a topic of polite conversation, and its prominence as a theme in books and popular culture, marked a change.Footnote 30 The late 1940s, therefore, witnessed not only a decline in American antisemitism, but also saw an increase in discussion of antisemitism in mainstream media and in popular culture.Footnote 31 “After decades of only episodic public discussion of anti-Jewish quotas” in colleges and graduate schools, for instance, “magazine and newspaper articles of 1945–1947 exposed in detail the practice of excluding Jews,” David Hollinger notes.Footnote 32 As early as the summer of 1941, the Atlantic Monthly published a three-part series on the problems of Jews and antisemitism in America. In “The Jewish Problem in America,” Alfred Jay Nock's June and July 1941 essays for the Atlantic Monthly, Nock categorized Jews as an Oriental people without hope of Occidentalization. Thus did Nock impose a race theory—“so warming to the heart of the Nazis,” according to James Marshall, the second author in the Atlantic series, who wrote in criticism of Nock's essays that “there is no pure Jewish race.”Footnote 33 Unlike Nock, Marshall recognized that racial categories were dangerous for American democracy, for “[o]nly a Caste society can result if our problems are distributed into airtight sections of Jewish, Negro, Catholic, Isolationist, employer, employee, and the like.”Footnote 34 While Nock believed that Occidentals and Orientals were destined to remain forever suspicious of each other, Marshall understood it as the American way for individuals to try to understand each other, in spite of their differences.
The issue of antisemitism was thus already being aired at the start of the decade. A couple of months after the Atlantic series, the aviator and national hero Charles Lindbergh's infamous Des Moines speech at an America First rally had singled out Jews as among the three groups attempting to push America into the European war—a charge that was roundly censured by politicians and newspaper editors around the country for its “race prejudice.” A pamphlet issued in the wake of the speech, “Is Lindbergh a Nazi?,” reflected the question that sparked a turn in public opinion against the national hero. The speech and the backlash it provoked—“Stay Out of Texas, House Roars Out to Lindbergh”Footnote 35 ran a typical headline—caused an early, albeit limited, public reckoning with prewar antisemitism in America. Even the America First committee felt it necessary to issue a statement declaring that they “deplore the injection of the race issue into the discussion of war or peace.”Footnote 36 This led the New York Times to editorialize, in passing, on the subject of Jews and race, a topic the Times likely would have avoided were it not for the need to criticize Lindbergh: “Passing over the question whether a religious group whose members come from almost every civilized country and speak almost every Western language can be called a ‘race,’ let us examine what Mr. Lindbergh actually said.”Footnote 37 Not unlike the declarations coming from other newspapers, the Times firmly stated that “We do not believe that anti-Semitism will ever gain ground in this country so long as the masses of our people are true to the great tradition on which this Republic was founded and for which such a multitude of known and unknown heroes have labored, sacrificed and given their lives.”Footnote 38 In suggesting that real Americans did not engage in anything resembling Nazi behavior, such statements made clear that Hitler had introduced a new standard for what counted as serious antisemitism.Footnote 39
It was becoming clear, by the early 1940s, that the European situation had caused Americans to be more attentive to their own problems. Publication of important nonfiction books about antisemitism written by non-Jews, such as the American edition of Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew in 1948 and, in that same year, Carey McWilliams's A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America, reflected the public's interest in the issue.Footnote 40 As the New Republic editor Bruce Bliven observed in 1948, in relation to recent anti-antisemitism books and movies, “Discrimination against minorities has suddenly become high priority news.”Footnote 41
Not everyone would agree that minorities had become a high priority, but Bliven's conflation of Jews and minorities was telling. At times, during the 1940s, talking about Jews and antisemitism became a stand-in for Americans’ concern for all minorities.Footnote 42 In retrospect, it appears that talking about Jews was a harbinger of future change for other minority groups.Footnote 43 In the 1940s, Jews were the minority group du jour, attracting attention and consideration because of World War II and what would become known as the Holocaust, and as a result of the efforts of American Jewish defense organizations.Footnote 44 Confronting antisemitism through books and popular culture during the 1940s likely eased the conscience of many Americans, even as race relations in the United States continued to fester.Footnote 45 Gentleman's Agreement and Crossfire, another movie about American antisemitism, received multiple nominations during the 1948 Academy Awards, with Agreement winning the award for Best Picture.Footnote 46 Its prominence as a theme at the 1948 Oscars was just one of several indications that anti-antisemitism had become central to the country's postwar liberal creed and part of America's global moral leadership.Footnote 47 This change in ideals is not to be confused with the disappearance of antisemitism; discrimination toward Jews in the form of university quotas, housing covenants, restricted country clubs, and hiring discrimination continued well past the 1940s.Footnote 48 As usual, everyday behavior, and especially that which occurred on the other side of closed doors, lagged behind national ideals.Footnote 49 But shifting national ideals were significant. They pointed to progressive aspirations and curtailed public bad behavior.
Transforming the Story of American Antisemitism
Prior to the 1947 anti-antisemitism films, the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s demonstrated that at least a segment of American writers, readers, publishers, and editors were willing to explore attitudes toward Jews. Indeed, the success of anti-antisemitism fiction helped convince Hollywood to take on the issue of antisemitism. Despite the prominence of Jews in the film industry, executives had previously avoided the issue of antisemitism. As Saul Austerlitz observes, “In the years leading up to the American entry into World War II, American films had chosen not to talk about the tenuous status of European Jewry—even in films ostensibly about the Nazi menace. (The world ‘Jew,’ famously, never made an appearance in the 1940 anti-Nazi drama The Mortal Storm.)”Footnote 50 It would become part of the lore of Gentleman's Agreement that it had taken the courage of Darryl Zanuck, the only major non-Jewish studio head, to display the courage to produce the film. The novel's scenes about acceptable and unacceptable Jews, however, as well as the novel's several discussions about race, did not make it into the movie, suggesting that the novel was a popular culture arena of greater daring than film when it came to the relatively controversial topics of antisemitism and racism. The novels literally changed the story of antisemitism in America, transforming, as noted previously, what had been a problem for Jews into one requiring an American solution.Footnote 51 In Gentleman's Agreement, Phil Green's development as a character hinges on his awakening to this truth: “It was a nonsectarian problem. And because of the simple thing of majority, it was mostly a Christian problem. He'd always known that. But now he was a different sort of Christian. Now he was one of the Christians able and ready to act. On whatever front the thing showed itself.”Footnote 52 Readers picked up on this message and felt its urgency. A lawyer from New York wrote a typical response to Hobson:
I have just finished “Gentleman's Agreement” in one reading. I could not put it down, anymore than I now can refrain from writing you. I must tell you that I consider your novel a major achievement of our time. I have never seen the facets of anti-semitism so knowingly and nakedly revealed in any other writing. It is a study which is at once incisive and subtle, sweeping and precise, and terrifyingly urgent. In a word, it has “guts.” But, above all this, it brings home the fact that anti-semitism is an American problem—and a world problem—which threatens to infect our social system beyond repair. I believe the message of your story and its manner of presentation should be read by every adult in America today. For myself, I intend to shout the plaudits of “Gentleman's Agreement” to everyone I meet.Footnote 53
Although, as noted earlier, some Jewish reviewers criticized Hobson for focusing on the feelings and reactions of non-Jews in her novel, Hobson's approach allowed more Americans to identify themselves with both the problem and solution of antisemitism.
By the late 1940s, the proper American response to antisemitism was laden with wartime symbolism. Photos of Nazi atrocities, newsreels, and reporters’ written and radio accounts of the Allied forces’ liberation of Nazi concentration camps all likely led many Americans to feel that changes in their attitudes toward antisemitism were necessary.Footnote 54 Hearing trusted American authorities, such as Generals Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, describe what they found at the camps was a shock to the collective American conscience in the spring and summer of 1945.Footnote 55 Reports of Nazi barbarity had trickled into the United States during the war, despite efforts by the U.S. State Department and the Office of War Information to suppress reports of Germany's extermination camps, but Americans had been unsure of what to believe.Footnote 56 And when news of Hitler's atrocities came from Jews, the alleged brutalities were all too easy to dismiss as “special pleading.”Footnote 57 For the American public, the 1945 liberation of the camps was an encounter with the darkest parts of humanity.Footnote 58 For the American soldiers liberating the camps, the experience of witnessing the evidence was life altering.Footnote 59 CBS reporter Edward Murrow, the first reporter to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp, described the horrific scene of dead bodies that greeted him. Murrow implored his audience, “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words. If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry.”Footnote 60 Murrow was hardly alone among reporters and Americans, shocked and disturbed by the sights and smells.Footnote 61 Through magazines, newspapers, movie theaters, radio, and photos taken by soldiers, many postwar Americans came face-to-face with an evil unlike anything they had ever seen.Footnote 62 To varying degrees, the encounter forced a self-reckoning.Footnote 63
Did Americans suddenly become empathetic to Jews upon hearing and reading such reports? It seems unlikely.Footnote 64 It is not even clear that Americans in the immediate postwar years felt much guilt about not having done more to save Hitler's victims.Footnote 65 But Americans did come to understand the war after witnessing the extent of Nazi evil. In simplistic terms, it became clear that the war on the European front had been about American good triumphing over Nazi evil.Footnote 66 Anti-antisemitism fiction provided an arena for that battle against Nazi evil to continue on the home front even after the war, and for Americans to continue to draw meaning and a sense of national identify from the European war. Among the many readers who wrote to Hobson to thank her for writing a novel that illuminated the fight against Nazi evil, one put Hobson's contributions this way: “May I commend you on the superb job you have done, and tell you how glad I am to hear another ‘voice crying in the wilderness’ of intolerance and prejudice. The battle against the Nazi spirit is the battle of our century, and unless we can win it, it makes little difference what solution they find to the atom bomb problem.”Footnote 67 That “Nazi spirit,” the reader explained, could be found in the United States in “those unwarranted feelings of superiority among friends, and relatives” that were so disheartening to discover among other Americans. “Then someone like you, or Margaret Halsey speaks up—and it is good to discover another articulate intelligence on the side of decency.”Footnote 68 Hobson replied that she had “read your letter to Margaret Halsey who happens to be a close friend of mine so you cheered two authors instead of just one.”Footnote 69 Anti-antisemitism novels provided a forum for writers and readers to continue the fight against Hitlerism on the home front. They allowed readers, despite seeing parallels between Nazism and American bigotry, to believe, nevertheless, in America's more civilized behavior toward Jews, and provided guidance for how Americans might further improve.
Full appreciation of Nazi evil forced a reassessment of America's treatment of its own Jews. The realization that they had been fighting extreme evil during World War II destabilized American identity. Consider the change: In the early, eugenic-imbued decades of the twentieth century, the country's mission was aptly encapsulated by President Calvin Coolidge's slogan to “Keep America American,” by preserving its old white, colonial stock, as some described the preferred ancestry of American citizens.Footnote 70 Even in 1939, when news of the Nazis’ persecution of Jews—if not its full scope—had reached the United States, a poll revealed that Americans persisted in their xenophobia. In that poll, two months after Kristallnacht, when asked if the United States should accept ten thousand Jewish children from Europe, 60 percent of Americans answered no.Footnote 71 It did not seem to matter to the vast majority of Americans that the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, by Jewish poet Emma Lazarus, expressed values contrary to their own: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. These words may have been affixed to the statue's pedestal in 1903, but they were not in line with the ideas of much of the country's social and governing elite during the four decades prior to World War II. After the war and the revelations about the Nazis, Americans increasingly sought to change earlier racist, discriminatory policies and ideas—or at least those that applied to Jews.Footnote 72
Defining Acceptable Difference in Postwar America
Recognizing that homogenous Aryan racial purity, a cornerstone of Nazi ideology, was responsible for the worst evil of the twentieth century, many postwar Americans began a cultural project of attempting to distance the United States from such belief.Footnote 73 American democracy would be about keeping the United States safe for difference. Or, certain kinds of difference. Expanding the categories of once-marginalized groups that could be integrated into the American mainstream was a slow process. Jews were the first notable group in this series of marginalized groups to be integrated. And not all kinds of Jews were initially acceptable in the 1940s, as some authors of anti-antisemitism literature made clear. “Americans without Distinction” was the title of Diana Trilling's critical review of Gentleman's Agreement, because of what Trilling saw as Hobson's inability to allow significant differences into her liberal worldview. “If Gentleman's Agreement regards Jew and Gentile as but two profiles of the same face,” Trilling observed, “it is because Mrs. Hobson recognizes no valid differences between them.”Footnote 74 Where were the religious Jews in this novel? Trilling asked in her review. For that matter, Trilling also asked, where were the religious Christians? In Hobson's fictional world, no religious, noisy, poor, or angry Jews need apply, Trilling explained.
Here was the lacuna in the supposed commitment of postwar America to protecting minorities: only certain kinds of minorities and certain kinds of difference were offered protection. In proclaiming the interchangeability of gentile and Jew, Phil expresses what David Hollinger has called the “extravagant universalism” of the mid-twentieth century, a time when Hobson and other writers emphasized the potential for unity in American society.Footnote 75 The House I Live In, an Academy Award–winning short film from 1945, exemplified this thinking. In the film, Frank Sinatra confronts a group of young boys bullying a Jewish boy. Sinatra teaches them not to hate others simply because of a difference of religion. “Religion made no difference except maybe to a Nazi or somebody as stupid,” Sinatra tells the boys.Footnote 76 Americans don't hate based on religion, Sinatra explains. Although he was rewriting centuries of American religious history in this statement, Sinatra's sentiment was true to the postwar, anti-antisemitic vision for the country. In Gentleman's Agreement, when Phil decides that he and his Jewish childhood friend, Dave Goldman, are essentially the same kind of person, he articulates a version of Sinatra's lesson and communicates his resistance to recognizing significant differences in someone he finds acceptable.
Dave was like him in every essential, had the same boyhood patterns, the same freedom from either extreme of poverty or wealth, the same freedom from any creed-bound faith. They had both grown up in a generation when religion did not work itself very deep into life. Whatever Dave felt now—indifference? Outrage? Fear? Or contempt?—would be the feeling of Dave as a man, and not Dave as a Jew. Dave as citizen, as American, and not Dave as a religious being. That, Phil was sure of. And that was good.Footnote 77
Phil's musings suggest that deep religiousness might even pose a threat to good American citizenship. Dave is as fully an American as Phil precisely because neither was the type to let “religion work itself very deep” into their lives. This desideratum of shallow religiosity is commonly associated with President Eisenhower's 1950s suburban America and with sociologist Robert Bellah's 1960s idea of an American civil religion.Footnote 78 Hobson's novel suggests that a superficial Judeo-Christianity or a “faith in faith” phenomenon might already have been at play in late 1940s settings that prioritized religious pluralism and anti-antisemitism. Thinking about his childhood friend Dave allows Phil to contemplate what constitutes acceptable difference in the United States. Phil realizes, “It was more valid to think of someone like Dave, the kind of man he himself would be if he were a Jew. He could not ‘think into’ a deeply religious old Jew in a prayer shawl, or into the poor, ignorant Jewish peddler behind a pushcart on the East Side, or into the wealthy tycoon in business.” Here, Hobson defines an acceptable Jew according to standards that resemble the good–bad religion polarities defined by religion scholars Robert Orsi and Tracy Fessenden.Footnote 79 In Gentleman's Agreement, as Phil makes clear, only religious identities that do not disturb enlightened democratic societies deserve tolerance. Phil realizes: “The deeply pious, the truly ignorant, the greatly powerful of any creed or religion were beyond his quick understanding.”Footnote 80 Hobson could not have made it much clearer that Phil—a stand-in for 1940s liberals—was not the type with an interest in delving deeply into religious, socioeconomic, and cultural differences. For critics such as Trilling, this refusal of the “liberal ideal” to recognize true difference was its own kind of totalitarianism. The silver lining to this regimentation of the nation's psychic life, Trilling hoped, was that it might motivate some “to underscore rather than eliminate minority differences.”Footnote 81 In the coming years and decades, Trilling's hope would be realized among Jewish writers striving to show what distinguished Jews and Judaism from other religions in a genre of “introduction to Judaism” books that flourished in the postwar years.
In fact, there are no examples of very religious Jewish protagonists in the anti-antisemitism literature of the 1940s. And, given her secular worldview, it is likely that Laura Z. Hobson—like many secular Manhattan liberals of her day—did not mean to include Jews who wore kippot or other religious garb in public. Garish and uneducated Jews also presented a problem. Toward the end of Agreement, Phil's girlfriend, Kathy, encounters two young women on the slopes during a ski vacation. Kathy sees their “glittering costume jewelry . . . the frozen beads of mascara at their eyes, the gleam of eye shadow, the thick lipstick, congealed and cracked,” and hears their coarse language. The reader understands that they are Jewish, as Kathy thinks to herself, “Why do they do it? She thought miserably. Why do they make themselves so noticeable? It's awful. It's just awful.”Footnote 82 Kathy is an attractive, liberal Manhattanite; indeed, it was Kathy who had suggested the idea of an article about antisemitism to her uncle, Phil's editor. Kathy also undergoes the greatest character development in the novel as she comes to recognize her own latent antisemitism. But Kathy cannot abide the kind of garish Jews she meets in this scene. Miss Wales, Phil's Jewish secretary who passes as a gentile in order to find employment, also expresses repugnance for loud, pushy Jews whom she calls “kikey” Jews, reminding readers that both gentiles and Jews are capable of antisemitic attitudes.Footnote 83
While the ski scene illuminates Kathy's moral limitations at this stage of the novel, it also raises the specter of intolerance from those who, like Kathy, consider themselves “good liberals.” Having spent her adult life among educated, liberal Manhattanites, most of whom were gentiles, Hobson's experience allowed her to send a message to her Jewish readers: Even the good Americans, like Kathy, might harbor negative feelings toward Jews. Even someone who wanted to be anti-antisemitic, like Kathy, whose desire to feel right about Jews is connected with her desire for Phil, faced challenges when confronted with Jews who did not conform to societal norms. Kathy risks losing Phil if she does not change her attitudes toward Jews and antisemitism. But Jews, Hobson's novel subtly teaches, risk losing the Kathys of the world if they do not change their offensive behavior. In Gentleman's Agreement, Hobson offered lessons for both Jews and non-Jews about right behavior and attitudes for postwar Americans. As much as the anti-antisemitism literature exposed the issue of antisemitism to Americans—making it a topic of discussion and consideration—it also provided a guide for how the normalization of Jews and Judaism might occur, and exactly which kinds of Jews were eligible for it.
In one of the most famous scenes from the novel and film, Phil models the normalization of Jews in postwar America by explaining that Jews are to be conceptualized as members of a religion. When Phil's young son, Tommy, asks him, “What are Jews anyhow?” Phil's reply anticipates Will Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955) argument, in which Herberg explained that there were now three ways to be American. Phil says, “You can be an American and a Catholic, or an American and a Protestant, or an American and a Jew.”Footnote 84 So there's no confusion, Phil adds, “Or you could be French or German or Spanish or any nationality at the same time you're Catholic or a Protestant or a Jew.”Footnote 85 Phil tells Tommy that one thing is your country,
But the other thing is religion if you have any, or you grandfather's religion, like Jewish or Catholic or Protestant religion. That hasn't anything to do with the country or the language. . . . Get it? . . . Don't ever get mixed up on that. Some people are mixed up.Footnote 86
Religion, as Phil teaches his son, is something one might or might not have or inherit, and there appear to be but three choices: Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism. None of these religions should ever be equated with nationality, Phil explains.Footnote 87 When Tommy asks his father why some people are mixed up, Phil replies: “Oh, they talk about the Jewish race, but never about the Catholic race or the Protestant race.”Footnote 88 When it comes to whether Jewishness is a matter of religion or nationality or race, there are still a lot of confused Americans, Phil informs Tommy, suggesting that it is a sign of enlightened and progressive American values to understand that Jewishness is now, post-Hitler, considered a matter of religion. This may be another “gentleman's agreement” in the novel (in addition to the term's meaning in relation to restrictive housing covenants): Good, postwar progressives accept Jews as members of an American religion, marking a dramatic shift from much of the first four decades of the twentieth century, when Jews were viewed as members of an inferior race.Footnote 89 In return for integration as members of one of the big three American religions, Jews were expected to fit themselves neatly into the religion category.Footnote 90 This postwar religionizing of American Jews marked a transition from earlier fictional portrayals of Jews. By the late 1940s and 1950s, the ragingly ambitious and abrasive protagonist Harry Bogen in Jerome Weidman's popular 1937 novel I Can Get It for You Wholesale and the unsavory Sammy Glick in Budd Schulberg's 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run? were no longer well-suited to American Jewry's new position as middle-class Americans. A sign of these shifting norms in the portrayal of Jews is evident when Weidman's novel was made into a film in 1950. The movie avoided depicting unattractive Jewish stereotypes by turning Harry Bogen into Harriet Bogen, a gentile woman “who apparently carries an adding machine where her heart should be,” one reviewer noted of the dress designer who still shared some of Harry's crudity. Yet something had been lost in the de-Judaized remake, for a reviewer explained, “With less white-wash and more honesty, ‘I Can Get It for You Wholesale’ could have been an exciting, instead of just an average good, entertainment.” The satisfying, if offensive, qualities from the old portrayals of urban Jewishness had diminished in the shift to just “average, good entertainment.” It was in just this way that postwar popular culture mediated the transition of Jews, in the eyes of Americans, from persecuted race, to mainstream, middle-class religion. This postwar, middlebrow culture accommodated a certain amount of distinctiveness, especially those parts relating to religion, family life, and democratic values, so long as those aspects of Jewishness that might seem offensive or radical were shorn. On the other hand, this postwar era could not yet make room for the old negative stereotypes that, so soon after the Holocaust, had become newly charged and potent, threatening the recent mainstream acceptance of Jews as members of an American religion.Footnote 91 It was a mid-twentieth century American Jewish experience of religionization that echoed the much earlier emancipation process of French Jews.Footnote 92 Like that earlier European experience, the process of making themselves acceptable to mainstream, postwar American society did not completely erase the racial or nationalistic conception of Jews.
Interestingly, Hobson does not clear up all confusion surrounding the appropriate classification of Jews in Gentleman's Agreement.Footnote 93 Jewishness retains its racial aspect in parts of the novel, even as characters argue against this outmoded conception.Footnote 94 As Matthew Jacobson observes of Agreement, “[T]he text is at war with itself in a way that wonderfully demonstrates the character of racial categorization itself as ideology deeply entrenched.”Footnote 95 Gentleman's Agreement made the case for Judaism as an American religion, while allowing readers to hold on to what likely felt like a more emotionally satisfying way of thinking of Jews—as not quite, or not just, a religion.Footnote 96 Other anti-antisemitism literature similarly revealed both the persistence of race discourse, at the same time that the novels explicitly presented Jewishness as a matter of religion.Footnote 97 In one scene in Agreement, Hobson delivers a somewhat heavy-handed teachable moment about the proper categorization of Jews when Kathy demonstrates both common mistakes and lessons learned about discourse surrounding Jews:
That time after he'd gone to see Professor Lieberman and she'd said something perfectly casual about “the Jewish race.” Phil had explained once or twice that the phrase was based on old misconceptions which were completely disproved by modern anthropologists. But she'd said it—it was just habit. She wasn't fighting the scientists when they said there was no such thing. She knew perfectly well that the three great divisions of mankind were the Caucasian Race, the Mongoloid, the Negroid. She remembered his finger pointing out a phrase in a pamphlet written by leading anthropologists “There is no Jewish ‘Race.’”
That pamphlet—which is found among Hobson's papers at the Columbia University archives—was The Races of Mankind, written by two female anthropologists, Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish.Footnote 98 Published in 1943 by the nonprofit educational organization Public Affairs Committee, the pamphlet attacked Nazi racism.Footnote 99 The Races of Mankind explained how the war against the Nazis could be fought on the home front, as facts provided by science could be used to combat the dangerous untruths about race supplied by Hitler. “Aryans, Jews, Italians are not races,” wrote Benedict and Weltfish.Footnote 100 They were speaking Hobson's language. The pamphlet further explained that “Jews are people who acknowledge the Jewish religion. They are of all races, even Negro and Mongolian.”
Hobson's inclusion of the anthropologists’ pamphlet in her anti-antisemitism novel was one of the ways in which she enlisted science as a bulwark against antisemitism and Nazism.Footnote 101 The character of Professor Lieberman, the rational, secular Jewish scientist with whom Phil finds intellectual fellowship was another. In Gentleman's Agreement, scientists are portrayed as prophets of truth in a secular milieu. In The Races of Mankind, Benedict and Weltfish see their 1940s moment for the challenge it presents: “With America's great tradition of democracy, the United States should clean its own house and get ready for a better twenty-first century. Then it could stand unashamed before the Nazis and condemn, without confusion, their doctrines of a Master Race.”Footnote 102 According to the scientists—and Hobson and Phil—accepting Jews as members of a religion is part of America's cleaning up of its own house as a result of its involvement in World War II. However, it is a rushed cleaning job: There is little grappling with the fact that Jewishness does not fit neatly within the religion category. That lack of examination of the relationship between Jewishness and religion makes sense when one remembers (1) the 1940s Judeo-Christian context mentioned earlier that prioritized commonalities between Jews and Christians, and (2) the genre and goals of these novels.
Anti-Antisemitism Novels as Social Protest Literature
As fiction designed to fight injustice, the 1940s anti-antisemitism novels followed a tradition of social protest literature in America—a genre in which Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1859) is the paragon and Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) is a successor. Like earlier examples that exposed and protested social ills of the day, anti-antisemitism novels called out the bigotry endemic in American society. In imagining possible alternative attitudes toward Jews that better fit American ideals of equality and religious freedom, these 1940s anti-antisemitism novels presented a “reordering of the world” that is characteristic of nineteenth-century sentimental protest literature.Footnote 103 As nineteenth-century women authors sought to convince readers of the morality of their new visions of society, the authors of 1940s anti-antisemitism novels promoted a vision of a more tolerant American society.Footnote 104 The nonviolent antisemitism showcased in these novels included slurs, hiring and admission discrimination, friction over interfaith romances, and restricted neighborhoods and country clubs. While these injustices paled beside the horrors experienced by European Jews, they nevertheless were common and uncomfortable reminders of America's failures to realize its ideals.
As a result of Agreement and other anti-antisemitism novels, the everyday, low-grade antisemitism that had been accepted as part of American culture was increasingly judged un-American. Middlebrow or popular fiction, reviewers opined, was an especially effective genre for communicating these shifting attitudes to a wider readership. A reviewer of Margaret Halsey's anti-antisemitism and antiracism book, Some of My Best Friends Are Soldiers (1944), expressed hope that books like Halsey's indicated:
[t]hat spokesmen for decency in human relations are learning to be as clever in liberal indoctrination as reactionaries and Fascists have always been in selling their own line of thinking to the public—a word dropped here and there, without blowing of trumpets and waving of banners, but naturally and as part of a general theme. Too often in the past liberal education has been so obviously propagandized that the average citizen has rejected it.Footnote 105
But not everybody minded the clear signs of propagandic literature. Reviewers of Gentleman's Agreement applauded Hobson's writerly methods of teaching her readers: “It is propaganda of the most artful kind,” one reviewer observed.Footnote 106 “Women who wouldn't touch The Nation or The New Republic (or Survey Graphic) with a ten foot pole are going to read ‘Gentleman's Agreement’ as they sit under the dryer, and they're going to urge their husbands to read it.” This midcentury gender logic suggested that sentimental literature was the kind of emotionally manipulative reading that appealed to women, who in turn would try to influence their husbands. Fan mail showed that there was truth to the idea that women shared news of good fiction. In March of 1947, Hobson told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune about news of her novel traveling between female friends and acquaintances. Hobson had heard from a reader from Evanston, Illinois, who had been in a room of people “classed as liberals,” when “someone said something about ‘the chosen people.’ One of the women there—it was she who wrote the letter—looked at another who also had just finished reading Mrs. Hobson's serial. ‘Gentleman's Agreement,’ she said cryptically. ‘What do you mean?’ the other wanted to know. Then the talk began about the theme of the book.” Hobson was delighted if it turned out that she “[h]ad created a handy phrase that will be used significantly as ‘Lost Week End’ has been used,” referring to her friend Charles Jackson's recent novel. One San Francisco woman wrote Hobson that the only reason she had heard about Agreement, in its magazine serial form, was that a friend who subscribed to Cosmopolitan had sent her the issue with the first installment. “Frankly, I was really amazed to find a story on antisemitism in a Hearst magazine and particularly the way you handled it.” She assured Hobson, “I and many others I have talked to about your story think the writing and content are excellent. We are writing the editor of the magazine.” A woman who had just moved from Islip, Long Island, wrote to Hobson that if she had the money, “I would buy copies of your book and mail them to my acquaintances out there. They need to read it.” Similarly, a Mrs. Liebeskind of Brooklyn wrote, “I have just finished my copy of your book and have already passed it on to my eager friends.”Footnote 107 Whether it was a matter of “virtue signaling,” as twenty-first-century observers might label it, or a sincere desire to share good fiction with friends, or some combination of the two, readers enjoyed telling their friends about a readable novel that attacked antisemitism. It seemed that it wasn't just that postwar Americans liked Gentleman's Agreement—they liked the fact that they liked Gentleman's Agreement. Being a fan of the novel said something about a reader's liberalism and values.
In the 1940s, reviewers seemed to recalibrate standards for these female-authored social message novels, suggesting that literary greatness was not the expectation so much as was effective pedagogy. In 1944, the Saturday Review assessment of Gwethalyn Graham's anti-antisemitism novel, Earth and High Heaven, opened,
One of the hardest tasks to do successfully is the thesis-novel. At some point the thesis is apt to get out of hand and then the novel ceases to be a novel and becomes a tract. It all turns into a message and trips the reader up as obviously as the word Moral tacked on at the end of a nineteenth century story. It is to Miss Graham's credit that she has accomplished this difficult task expertly.Footnote 108
The desire to write a novel and not a tract was widely shared among social message authors such as Halsey and Hobson. As Hobson began writing what would become Gentleman's Agreement, she worried over how to avoid writing that sounded like propaganda. As she confessed in a September 1944 letter to her publisher, “one of the major issues in my mind now is a purely literary one—can I get enough story-line, emotional interest etc into it to save it from being a lecture or a tract?”Footnote 109 As Hobson explained to her publisher, Richard Simon, she would have to write a few chapters to see if it were possible. In time, readers’ letters affirmed that Hobson had been successful. The national director of the organization Friends of Democracy Inc. wrote to Hobson of his hope that Agreement might awaken more readers to its cause: “I wish it might be possible to require every Christian in the country to read ‘Gentleman's Agreement.’ It might jolt some of our benighted Christian brethren out of their complacency.”Footnote 110 He explained that it “would do them good to read ‘Gentleman's Agreement,’ and besides, they would be interested and enlightened.”Footnote 111 His further assessment, that “‘Gentleman's Agreement’ has that rare combination of being both a good novel and an enlightening document” is just one testament to Hobson's achievement of her literary goals.Footnote 112
Readers agreed with Hobson's ideas about creating a culture of activism, even if they did not use that term. One male reader wrote to Hobson, explaining how exposing the problem of antisemitism in the armed services had led to surprisingly beneficial results:
Being in Special Services I had the chance to “M.C.” an army show and found this chap in the audience. I introduced him to about 5,000 GIs as a Nazi and an anti-semite disguised as an American soldier. A group of militant Jews on our Post followed through and his life was miserable for the rest of his army career. The reason I mention this case is because, fresh air does clean dirty linen. This chap is now among my better and closer friends. He was made to think and thinking cleared his mind. This is an isolated case and is just a “chink” in the wall of hate—but your book attacks men of his ilk on a nation-wide scale—and I for one know that daylight treatment of this horrible problem does produce results—so may I see again.Footnote 113
Hobson replied, “I guess you know from my book that I heartily agree with you that daylight treatment is the only way to meet the dark and secret poisons of prejudice. The fact that some nine million people will be exposed to ‘Gentleman's Agreement’ as a movie makes me hope that ‘the treatment’ may even get going on a national scale.”Footnote 114
Even those critical of Agreement as a novel conceded its usefulness in drawing attention to the issue. When the Reform rabbi and bestselling author Joshua Loth Liebman devoted one of his 1948 radio broadcasts to Gentleman's Agreement, he paid homage to the novel and film, “which have aroused so much national interest,” praising its potential to change American understanding of antisemitism and broaden possibilities for societal change.Footnote 115 In spite of the “inevitable shortcomings” of Mrs. Hobson's novel, Liebman told his listeners, Gentleman's Agreement holds value
[i]n that it can open the eyes of millions of Americans as to the difference between the true and the bogus American tradition; it can make many understand that it is certainly no act of a “gentleman” to warp and twist the emotions of a child, to make a Jewish war hero feel himself an outcast, or to make a creative segment of the American population feel itself unwanted and rejected.Footnote 116
Maybe, Rabbi Liebman hoped, a novel like Gentleman's Agreement could show readers that antisemitism was contrary to American values.
Hobson's favorite fan letters may have been those from readers who had thought of themselves as “true liberals”—exactly the readers whom Hobson had hoped to reach. One such letter came from Faye Emerson Roosevelt, an actress and then-wife of President Franklin Roosevelt's son, who wrote to praise “such an important book” that “points out the flabby morality with which most of us cushion our thinking. I was emotionally and mentally, deeply stirred by it.”Footnote 117 Hobson replied with appreciation, for
surely this is the real reward for writing something one believes in—to get letters like yours which tell me that you were deeply stirred by my book. My belief is that if people are emotionally stirred, things happen, juices generate, polite barriers crumble—and they find themselves lots more free to talk, argue, fight than when they have been appealed to on a purely intellectual level.Footnote 118
Encouraged by another reader, she wrote back, “It is really so damn wonderful to see the way ‘Gentleman's Agreement’ is going—it implies, I think, that thousands of people are hungry for something that may help them fight prejudice. It sure makes my optimism mount for the future when all of us in our different ways keep finding signs of decent people's hate of bigotry.”Footnote 119
This was the power of middlebrow anti-antisemitism fiction: readers from all walks of life were emotionally moved by it, and they, in turn, talked to their friends and neighbors about the novels, the problems they portrayed, and solutions they proposed. Hobson had first discovered this consciousness-raising aspect of anti-antisemitism literature while she was in the early stages of writing Gentleman's Agreement. Hearing about other women authors of anti-antisemitism literature, back in the fall of 1944 when she was beginning to write Gentleman's Agreement, encouraged Hobson, allowing her to feel part of a movement that would eventually extend to her readers.
“Things like these pave the way for other books”: Creating a Genre of Anti-Antisemitism Novels
In early September 1944, Hobson wrote to her publisher, Richard Simon, of her excitement at seeing novelist Gwethalyn Graham's anti-antisemitism novel, Earth and High Heaven, serialized in Collier's magazine. There was even talk of a possible Hollywood movie adaptation of Graham's novel. “Have you read Earth and High Heaven in Collier's? Have you heard that Nunnally Johnson wants to make a picture of it? It's all so new a departure—both for magazines and for film, that it fascinates me. Did it do good or harm in Collier's—I don't imagine anyone can tell yet.”Footnote 120 Hobson was not alone in her surprise that anti-antisemitism had become a viable theme for fiction and film. Arthur Miller would look back on the 1940s, when he was working on his own anti-antisemitism novel, Focus, and reflect, “As far as I knew at the time, anti-Semitism in America was a closed if not forbidden topic for fiction—certainly no novel had taken it as a main theme.”Footnote 121 Shame among Jews over antisemitism had largely precluded its literary treatment until American attitudes began to shift in the mid-1940s.Footnote 122
Hobson's uncertainty about the effect of popular culture that exposed viewers to American antisemitism was also typical for the era.Footnote 123 The question of whether fiction or films about antisemitism might unintentionally incite bigots was widespread. When Agreement became a movie, RKO's Crossfire, a film noir, had already premiered in the summer of 1947. Reviewers of Crossfire, including Elliot Cohen of Commentary, worried that the film might unintentionally catalyze bigots and “maladjusted veterans” to antisemitic acts.Footnote 124 Even the FBI expressed concern that Crossfire might aid Communist enemies by exposing American antisemitism.Footnote 125 But Hobson was not easily deterred. Discovering that Richard Simon and others hoped to dissuade her from writing a novel about antisemitism made Hobson all the more determined to find signs that her plan for what would become Gentleman's Agreement was viable. In one of her letters to Simon, in the fall of 1944, Hobson referred to her friend, Margaret Halsey, another anti-antisemitism author: “I'm eagerly waiting for Peg Halsey's book—no book store has it yet. I didn't know it dealt with this subject at all.” Margaret, or “Peg,” Halsey was the ex-wife of Richard Simon's brother, Henry, and had been a former entry-level employee at Simon and Schuster, before marrying into the Simon family and becoming a writer. A winner of an early National Book Award for “Most Original Book of 1938,” for her humorous bestseller With Malice Toward Some (1938), Halsey's writing continued to garner high praise. Her 1997 New York Times obituary recalled Halsey as “a witty writer with an acute social concern,” and compared her with Dorothy Parker and H. L. Mencken.Footnote 126
The Halsey book that Hobson anticipated reading—Some of My Best Friends Are Soldiers, published in 1944—focused on both black–white race relations and antisemitism. Halsey would continue these themes in Color Blind: A White Woman Looks at the Negro (1946). Drawing on her experiences as a volunteer at New York's Stage Door Canteen, Halsey wrote Some of My Best Friends as an epistolary novel between Gretchen, a volunteer at a servicemen's canteen, and her brother, Jeff, a soldier.Footnote 127 A reviewer for Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life commented that it was not the racist episodes in the novel that made Some of My Best Friends exceptional, “for they are, unfortunately, commonplace.”Footnote 128 It was Halsey's humor and wit that made her race lessons so easily absorbed. In the meantime, Hobson informed Simon, “I got and read Peg Halsey's book. Though I think it is too slight and at many points artificial (as ‘letters’ to a brother) I'm very much for it. I think it will do some good even, only a jot of good maybe, but a starter.”Footnote 129 As she noted in that same letter, Hobson had also recently read Gwethalyn Graham's Earth and High Heaven, which was serialized in Collier's magazine, and was making its way to Hollywood.Footnote 130 “I felt that about the Collier's serial—and the fact that it is bought for movies by Sam Goldwyn for 100 grand knocks me over and makes me feel that maybe the conspiracy of silence is ending. Which I approve of. And selfishly perhaps, I feel that things like these pave the way for other books which will perhaps be deeper and truer in some ways at least.”Footnote 131 Not every anti-antisemitism novel had to be stellar, Hobson maintained. Some of these novels would enable others—hers, for instance—that might go “deeper and truer” on the subject.
Going deeper and truer was a difficult goal, not least because the lessons that these novelists sought to impart were often countercultural. In Halsey's Some of My Best Friends, the main character, Gretchen, hears an antisemitic remark from a wealthy patron of the canteen that deeply offends Gretchen's Jewish friend. The incident was based on one that Halsey had witnessed at the Stage Door Canteen that caused Halsey to reflect that “‘Jewboy’ was Standard English for many of the soldiers who came to the Canteen,” despite the fact that these American soldiers were at war, defending democracy.Footnote 132 Halsey later reflected in her autobiography, “There seemed to be room for a restatement of what in those days we called ‘tolerance’ for minorities and if such a restatement could be sugar-coated with humor, it might persuade people who would never dream of reading a tract.” In the novel, after the antisemitic episode, Gretchen thinks to herself, “‘Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ Only names do hurt people.”Footnote 133 Names do hurt people was one of the main lessons that came from the anti-antisemitism novels. The old children's rhyme, which had been accepted wisdom and central to American childrearing for well over a century, was overturned in the anti-antisemitism literature of the 1940s. Hurtful and discriminatory words mattered more than previous generations of Americans had recognized.
The Great Jewish Book Corresponding to Strange Fruit
Margaret Halsey was one of several divorced or unmarried women who, along with Laura Z. Hobson, Gwethalyn Graham, and Jo Sinclair, wrote commercially successful social message novels in the 1940s. Lillian Smith, the white, southern, single, female author of the bestselling interracial romance Strange Fruit (1944), was another. The New York Times Book Review called Smith's novel “one of the most rewarding first novels to come out of the South in years,” adding, “America's peculiar dilemma has waited a long time for understanding—and for a two-sided fictional treatment.”Footnote 134 Despite being banned in Boston for obscenity, Strange Fruit sold a million hardcover copies, topping the bestseller list, and surprising the several publishers who had rejected it.Footnote 135 In the mind of Hobson's publisher, Strange Fruit provided a model for what an anti-antisemitism novel might become.Footnote 136
What to make of the connection between divorced or unmarried women authors and popular social protest literature? Although Harriet Beecher Stowe, the nineteenth-century literary ancestor to this group of authors, was married, future generations of women social protest novelists would include a significant number of divorced and unmarried women authors, including Hobson; Gwethalyn Graham; Jo Sinclair; Margaret Halsey; and Harper Lee, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel-turned-film To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), which also starred Gregory Peck. Living outside societal expectations that a woman would be preoccupied with her wifely duties, and within American associations between women and morality, these authors demonstrated unusual freedom in criticizing society.Footnote 137 As noted earlier, social protest literature marked a socially acceptable and beneficial outlet for female anger that often led to literary activism among writers and readers. Robin Bernstein's analysis of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a “repertoire” that shaped readers’ subjectivities is helpful here.Footnote 138 Social protest literature also gave women writers unusual potential to shape readers’ attitudes and behavior. Literary historian David Reynolds writes of Stowe's influence, “No book in American history molded public opinion more powerfully than Uncle Tom's Cabin.”Footnote 139 The same cannot be said for Gentleman's Agreement—in part because antisemitism, unlike nineteenth-century slavery, was not the kind of problem that threatened to divide the country, and, in part, because when Gentleman's Agreement was published it competed with many more novels and forms of entertainment. Still, the comparison between Hobson and Stowe is fitting, particularly because readers noticed it, too.
“It may not be an ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin’ in the popular conception of propaganda literature but, to me and to those of my friends who have already read it, it seems about the most honest and perceptive as well as the most entertaining and interesting piece of a social-political nature in current literature,” wrote Dorothy Fletcher of Ridgewood, New Jersey, to Laura Z. Hobson, in the spring of 1947.Footnote 140 One of hundreds of readers who penned admiring letters to Hobson, Fletcher explicitly linked Hobson's efforts to a U.S. tradition of social protest literature. And although Hobson's publisher, Richard Simon, did not, at first, approve of Hobson's plan to write a novel about antisemitism, he, too, looked to this literary tradition for hope that Hobson's novel might succeed. When Simon wrote to Hobson in late September of 1944, he expressed his view that novels about bigotry were not effective in combating antisemitism, but added: “By all this I do not mean that we're against publishing books about refugees or jews [sic] or Negroes or any of the other problems which so many people would rather not face or think about or hear about. But we do know that in order for those books to do any good they have to be extraordinarily well done and plausible.”Footnote 141 Referring to Hobson's first book, Simon wrote: “‘The Trespassers’ did not achieve the hundred thousand or more which we had hoped for because not enough people found that—for whatever reason—it rang a bell in their hearts.” Still, Simon looked to another social ill—racism—to see what an anti-antisemitism novel might achieve. “On the other hand, ‘Strange Fruit’ did ring that bell and so did ‘Native Son’ and so did ‘Under Cover.’ The great Jewish book corresponding to ‘Strange Fruit’ has yet to be written. Perhaps you are the one to do it.”Footnote 142 Frustrating as it was at the time, Simon's challenge eventually provided inspiration for Hobson.
The links between antisemitism and other forms of racism and bigotry remained relevant to Hobson. In October of 1944, Hobson's letters to Simon commented on the connections between antisemitism and other forms of discrimination. Hobson was temporarily living on the West Coast, while she wrote for the film studios. Her perspective and understanding of antisemitism had shifted accordingly: “I'm plenty frightened about what antisemitism and antinegroism is growing up into for the country,” she wrote to Simon. Away from New York, where Jews were almost a quarter of the city's population by the early 1940s, and the city's largest ethnic group, Hobson likely experienced antisemitism in a new way.Footnote 143 As a Jewish woman on the West Coast, Hobson felt a heightened sense of her minority status. “Out here it seems more rampant to me than in the circles I knew at home, perhaps because the widespread and almost unargued Anti-Jap feeling here makes so sturdy a base for all other racisms to flourish on.”Footnote 144 She appealed to Simon to take seriously the ways that popular fiction could fight intolerance:
How does one fight such things? Each in his own way—and any serious author who attempts the fight, might just be lucky enough to chip off a bit here and there from this growth, if it's only by opening the thing to table-talk and woman's club discussions, as I'm sure Peg Halsey's book and Gwethalyn Graham's Earth and High Heaven are bound to do. Maybe six other authors are right this minute finishing novels on the same subject—maybe not one will do much by itself, but perhaps all together those authors could become a kind of force for ending the complacency of uncomfortable or scared silence which defaults to the rantings of the bigots, who don't practice that conspiracy of silence at all.Footnote 145
In fact, more than six authors were working on anti-antisemitism novels during the 1940s. In hearing about the success of a few, Hobson had discovered that she was not alone and found new courage to write her own novel, even while her publisher remained skeptical. Here again was the power of midcentury, middlebrow Jewish culture: A group of novelists were writing commercial fiction that normalized Jews and anti-antisemitism, for readers of all walks of life and backgrounds. Together, this fiction helped to create a new reality of anti-antisemitism in the postwar United States.
Conclusion: Rewriting American Religious Pluralism through Anti-Antisemitism Literature
In the past generation, scholars of American religious history have spilled a fair amount of ink showing that the United States of the past century was not nearly as tolerant as our national mythos of religious freedom would suggest.Footnote 146 Anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia are just a few of the hatreds and bigotries puncturing holes in the ideal of American religious freedom. These three examples—hatred directed at Catholics, Jews, and Muslims—reveal a pattern of persecuted religious groups being racialized in the United States. However, the example of twentieth-century American Jews shows how the integration of once-persecuted groups may depend on moving in the opposite direction. Jews, a group typically conceived of as a race during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, were religionized as midcentury Judaism ascended to the unofficial status of one of the three major American religions.
During and immediately after World War II it became expedient to think of Jews as members of a religion—the easier to integrate them and affirm the nation's commitment to religious freedom.Footnote 147 Although the decade of the 1940s was not the first time American Jewish leaders and writers had presented Jews as members of a religion, earlier examples of this Jewish religion discourse had not received the support from the majority, non-Jewish American culture that came in the mid-twentieth century, largely as a result of the delegitimization of racial discourse in the wake of Hitler's atrocities. If racism, as Alexander Saxton and Matthew Jacobson have observed, is a theory of history that denotes “who belongs and who does not, of who deserves what and who is capable of what,” then removing Jews, at least partially, from the discourse of race and racism during the 1940s was one way to integrate them more fully into American society.Footnote 148 This distancing of Jewishness from racial categorization relied on the discourse of religious freedom, which, as Tisa Wenger observes, “had the unintended consequence of redrawing and even solidifying American lines of racial difference.”Footnote 149 Marginalized groups unable to leave behind their racial designations did not fare nearly as well as Jews.
Anti-antisemitism fiction of the 1940s was one of the popular culture arenas where this reconceptualization of Jews and antisemitism occurred. As this essay has shown, Hobson felt part of a movement of writers and readers cultivating anti-antisemitism. The hope was that this 1940s American Jewish book culture of anti-antisemitism might translate into new attitudes and behavior. Although Will Herberg's 1955 book Protestant, Catholic, Jew is frequently cited as the book that symbolized a “turning toward pluralism,” shifting our gaze toward the anti-antisemitism literature of the 1940s shows how this move toward pluralism began a decade earlier in the realm of popular fiction, much of it written by women writers.Footnote 150
