This spring I took a class titled Jewish Popular Culture in America. Last fall I had a knee replaced and was doing really well. Unfortunately, on Friday, January 13, my kneecap snapped as I was walking down stairs at home. I wound up in a knee brace for six weeks. Frankly, I didn't know if I'd be able to keep up in class. As it turned out, thanks to Amazon, abebooks.com, and the library, I was able to excel. After all, there wasn't much else to keep me busy. We students were allowed to choose a topic, and I chose to concentrate on Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement. The film was required watching for the class. I'd seen the film before and had read the book. Other than that, I knew nothing--absolutely nothing about Laura Z. Hobson. When I got into the project I found both her and the antisemitism of the times she lived in fascinating. When I had first seen the movie I wondered what she it was about. The antisemitism portrayed in the film was totally foreign to me. What I failed to take into account was how much progress had been made between 1947, when the film was released, and when I first watched it.
I have run into a lot of flack from friends who have read the paper and say, "What do you mean DECLINE in antisemitism? haven't you read what's going on now?" The answer is of course I know antisemitism has experienced a rebirth of sorts, and yes, I am concerned, but my paper ends in the mid-1950s when antisemitism has ceased to be acceptable in most social circles. Whether current trends continue and the postwar to Trump period proves to be a high-water mark of acceptance and mutual respect between Christians and Jews or whether we devolve into Third Reich West remains to be seen, but I'm hopeful.
Finally, the paper is being considered for publication in a scholarly journal, and last month I was asked to do a presentation to the society that may publish it. The presentation had to be no more than fifteen minutes, so I'm leading off with that. The paper, which follows will have to be edited and probably shortened before publication, but I have until November to work on that. When that's done I'll post the revised version.
LAURA Z. HOBSON, GENTLEMAN’S
AGREEMENT, AND THE
POSTWAR DECLINE OF AMERICAN
ANTISEMITISM
CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
I hope to turn my paper into a
publishable article that will discusses the antisemitic rant in Congress that inspired
Laura Z. Hobson to write her best-selling 1947 novel Gentleman’s Agreement, in
which a non-Jewish writer passes as a Jew to learn about antisemitism for a
magazine series. The author, a Jewish woman, may have been reluctant to
identify herself as a Jew to her readers. Gentleman’s Agreement was the
most important of the postwar anti-antisemitic novels and was almost
immediately turned into a feature film that won best picture at the 1948
Oscars. The paper explores the antisemitism of the era as well as the fears of
those Jews who remained stateside during World War II and the expectations of
those who served overseas who believed that their service earned them the right
to become an equal part of American society. It discusses the reluctance of many
Jews in the 1940s to address antisemitism for fear of making it worse. For this
presentation I will explore, with input from Laura Z. Hobson’s son, her
evolving relationship with Judaism.
Gentleman’s Agreement was serialized in Cosmopolitan in 1946, which
called it “The novel all America will discuss.” Before the book was published
Darryl F. Zanuck announced he would make a film of it. The reviews in both
major New York newspapers, which were printed the day the book was published,
were enthusiastically positive. Sales of the book eventually exceeded 1.6
million copies.
Not all reviews
were positive. The Chicago
Star found the
book a novel about antisemitism, “the action of which takes place entirely in
gentile circles” and deemed it interesting “but not too well written.” Along
those same lines, Diana Trilling found the book did not have enough Jewish
characters for a book about Jewish issues. Writing in the March 1947 issue of Commentary,
she noted that Phil Green, Hobson’s protagonist, laments that the only
three books about Jews he had in his library were about “a Jew who was a swine
in the wholesale business, a Jew who was a swine in the movies, and a Jew who
was a swine in bed.” There were indeed no swinish Jews in Gentleman’s Agreement
because in her words, “there are scarcely any Jews at all, just two
supporting characters—a scientist and a fine, personable veteran—and three or
four minor figures who appear in its pages only long enough to demonstrate that
although noisy Jews are no nosier than noisy Irish they are noticed more, or
that Jews themselves are often ashamed of their birth. In Mrs. Hobson’s novel
about Jews their cause is both explained and fought for them by Gentiles… .”
Later in the review she points out that, “There are certainly no religious Jews
in [Hobson’s] section of American society, and there are no Jews to whom
historical or cultural criteria have any meaning. Dave Goldman, the Jewish
veteran and Phil Green’s friend, is as little Jewish as Phil himself, except as
an accident of birth… . Similarly, there are no religious Gentiles. The
Gentiles in Gentleman’s Agreement who, like Phil and his editor, are
without anti-Jewish emotions, are not thereby more Christian; they are simply
the more decent.” Trilling conceded the book is commendable, even if it is
“poor—dull, non-dimensional, without atmosphere.”
Others shared this sentiment. In an
article about anti-antisemitism novels, scholar Rachel Gordan pointed out
several critics considered the novel’s main flaw to be a lack of Jewish
characters. Likewise, Gordan remarked that Phil did “what no Jew in the 1940s
was likely to do: Phil announces, at every opportunity, that he is Jewish.” Similarly,
Gordan commented that some critics found the emotional experiences of actual
Jews were marginalized and “[i]t was the emotional responses of gentiles that
were prioritized… .” She quotes a Saturday Review editor as saying, “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.”
This sentiment was still held by some
years later. Film scholar George Custen remarked fifty years after the film’s
debut, “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.” Gordan continues, “The problematic
quality of Hobson’s story of passing had only become more apparent over time.” I
disagree. Hobson’s target audience was gentiles. From what I’ve learned doing
research for my paper, there was not a Jew in America who was not aware of
antisemitism. They would hardly need a novel to point out the daily indignities
they encountered. I think it was a stroke of genius on Hobson’s part to invent
a gentile character who, along with the gentile readers of her book, could
discover just how much degrading antisemitism was going on under their noses in
America a mere two years after the German death camps were liberated. There
were five million Jews in America at the time, and 1.6 million copies of her book
sold. Her target audience was the source of those book sales. Hobson’s son,
whom I’ll introduce shortly, agrees on this point, quoting a Chicago Tribune
review saying it “permitted the Gentile to see the Jew as a personality
like himself.”
That said, it’s possible Hobson’s
using a gentile protagonist and using her ex-husband’s last name to write a
book that, as Gordan writes, was criticized by some rabbis as showing no marks
of Jewishness, may have contributed to some confusion among her readers as well
as those who saw the film. I’m embarrassed to admit my first assumption after
having seen the film many years after it was released but in pre-internet days
was that she was not Jewish. I believe it is possible that was Hobson’s intent.
Hobson never wrote using a name that
was identifiably Jewish. In her younger days, she added an “e” to her mother’s
maiden name, and wrote as Laura Z. Keane. She then took the name of a man with
whom she was involved and wrote as Laura Mount. Finally, she used the name of her
non-Jewish ex-husband.
Hobson’s 1943 The Trespassers,
like Gentleman’s Agreement, intertwines a romance with a serious issue—assisting
refugees from Nazism, both of which are drawn from her life. The refugee family
escaped Vienna in 1938, after the Austrian Anschluss, and Hobson details the
myriad roadblocks she and the Austrian family, who had escaped as far as
Switzerland, encountered securing passage to America. Early in the book she
describes her protagonist as having a slightly foreign look—the look of a
Magyar or Slav or Central European.
She describes her protagonist’s
father as being an American citizen who immigrated from Prague and changed his
name to Marriner for ease of spelling. Her mother, who had been her father’s
English teacher, was from a family whose ancestors had come over from England
in the eighteenth century and were “mixed up of a dozen different bloods,”
including one lonely Sephardic Jew.
This discussion of the protagonist’s
physical features and certainly her family’s genealogy adds nothing to the
story. I also find it significant that the family Hobson’s protagonist is
assisting, as well as the one Hobson assisted in real life, were anti-Nazi, but
they were not Jews. There could be any number of reasons for this ambiguity,
including not wishing The Trespassers to be perceived as special
pleading, but another explanation could be that, given the antisemitism Hobson
was subjected to and witnessed during the first forty-three years of her life,
she was understandably reluctant to reveal her ethnicity.
In Hobson’s 1986 New York Times
obituary Robert D. McFadden wrote, “While
Laura was Jewish, she once told an interviewer: ‘I grew up in an agnostic
broad-minded family. I think of myself as a plain human being who happens to be
an American.’”
While
it appeared to me Hobson was at best ambivalent about her ethnicity, I wanted
to get a more informed opinion on the matter.
I
was able to contact Hobson’s surviving son who gave my draft a cursory review
and was kind enough to respond to my query about his mother’s relationship with
Judaism as follows:
I think it is a misapprehension. The root of the misapprehension
may be differences in approaching the assimilationist trend in Jewish life in
the 1930s and 1940s. Briefly, to Jews like my mother, there was no
contradiction between being fully American and also fully Jewish, though in a biographical
rather than cultural sense. That is, she always identified herself as Jewish,
and my brother (now deceased) and I, as children, were fully aware that we were
Jews. At the same time, she, and we, had basically zero Jewish culture. I think
understanding that people who weren't attuned to Jewish culture did identify
fully as Jewish is important. In terms of public statements, her profile
in Current Biography in 1947 quotes her, from an interview, discussing the reasons why “I can never simply
say, ‘I am an agnostic,’ but must say, ‘I am Jewish.’” At least in that
instance, she seemed entirely comfortable, not uncomfortable, being identified
as Jewish. Spelling out the "Z." as Zametkin, as she regularly did in
her Who's Who entries, also certainly identifies her as a
non-WASP.
Regarding my writing that Hobson
never wrote using an identifiably Jewish name, he wrote:
I do think this is a bit ahistorical. Very few
divorced women, in the 1930s, resumed using their "maiden names" and,
indeed, the name Hobson was hers, not only Thayer Hobson's. Rachel Gordan, when
we were in touch, could never see LZH's continuing to use "Hobson" as
anything other than an attempt to hide her Jewishness, and I think there's a
little of the same sense in your piece.
It was Hobson’s superfluous description
of her protagonist and her protagonist’s family history in The Trespassers
rather than anything Gordan wrote that first caused me to think Hobson might
not have been comfortable with her ethnicity. He certainly has a point about
his mother’s being entitled to use the name Hobson, but even before she married
Thayer Hobson, she wrote using names that were not identifiably Jewish.
In books Hobson wrote the 1960s and
1970s she became more willing to reveal her ethnicity through her protagonists,
although she always emphasized their agnosticism.
I believe that as the country became
less antisemitic, Hobson was more comfortable making her Jewishness evident, but
in the 1940s she was reluctant to reveal it to her readers, which is more a
reflection on American prejudice than on her.
Coming back to Gentleman’s
Agreement, after Phil Green’s series is a success, a publisher who is a
friend of Phil’s boss is interested in turning it into a book. The publisher
advises Phil to get an agent and says it’s better to pick a publisher (him)
rather than risk his agent sending it to “the wrong house.” Phil asks what he
means by the “wrong house.” The publisher elaborates:
“If one of the Jewish houses put
their imprint on it, people might think it was just special pleading, and of
course it’s not.” Phil responds, “Jewish houses? You mean Jewish publishing
houses?” Of course that’s what the publisher means, and Phil responds, “Mr.
Minify and I have never heard of ‘Christian publishing houses’ and ‘Jewish
publishing houses’ except in the Third Reich. Even firms run by men who are
Jewish—we just call them ‘publishing houses.’ In a way, that’s what the whole
series is about.” When the publisher says it’s just a phrase in the book trade,
Minify responds, “'Jewish bankers’ is just a phrase, too, and ‘Jewish newspaper
owners’ and ‘Jewish communists’—just phrases.” The publisher has blown the
deal.
In that same vein Hobson wrote in her 1986 autobiography that Gentleman’s Agreement was selected by the Jewish Book Council for their National Jewish Book Award as the Best Jewish Novel of the Year. Hobson says her novel was not a best Jewish novel or any kind of Jewish novel. It was instead a book about an American problem of special interest to Jewish people, which seems to me to be splitting hairs. Although in retrospect she admits it was a big mistake, she declined the award. Perhaps that is one reason, as Gordan points out, Hobson is not included in the Jewish Publication Society Guide to American Jewish Literature (2009), and perhaps I shouldn’t feel too embarrassed about not knowing whether Hobson was Jewish. Gordan writes the feminist critic Vivian Gornick made the same mistake in a 2008 lecture about post-WW II American Jewish literature at the Radcliffe Institute.
LAURA Z. HOBSON, GENTLEMAN’S
AGREEMENT, AND THE
POSTWAR DECLINE OF AMERICAN ANTISEMITISM
This paper discusses the
antisemitic rant in Congress in which a well-known Jewish columnist who
supported a bill to make voting easier for troops fighting overseas was called
a “little kike” by a congressman who saw no need for troops to vote. This inspired
Laura Z. Hobson to write her best-selling 1947 Gentleman’s Agreement, in
which a gentile becomes a Jew to learn about antisemitism and finds more perhaps
than he bargained for. This was arguably the most important of the postwar
anti-antisemitic novels and became a film that won several Oscars including
best picture. This paper also explores the antisemitism of the era as well as
the fears of those Jews who remained stateside during World War II and the
expectations of those who served overseas who believed that their service
earned them a right to become an equal part of American society. It will
explore the reluctance of many Jews in the 1940s to address antisemitism for
fear of making it worse. It will even ask whether, given the times in which she
lived and the antisemitism she experienced, Hobson herself may have been uneasy
with her ethnicity.
THE SOLDIERS’ VOTE BILL AND THE
INSPIRATION FOR GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT
Fewer than two percent of 5.5
million armed services personnel were able to vote in the 1942 midterm
elections. In order to make it easier for those fighting for such things as the
right to vote, a bill to authorize a “war ballot” to enable troops to vote in the
1944 presidential election was anticipated. While this goal had broad support,
the devil would be in the details. On January 4, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
in a special message to Congress, urged the passage of one of two bills then
being considered by Congress. Republicans and states’ rights Democrats were
opposed; the latter, at least in part, by the fact Black soldiers would be able
to vote unimpeded. Eventually a watered-down bill was passed.1 As a
result, only 85,000 of the 11 million soldiers serving overseas on election day
had the opportunity to vote.2
One of those most vehemently
opposed to making voting easier for soldiers was the notoriously racist and
antisemitic Mississippi Representative John Rankin (1882-1960). Edward S.
Shapiro elaborates on Rankin’s antisemitism, saying Rankin was a self-proclaimed
savior of “old-line Americans, Anglo-Saxon people who have been here 200
years.” Rankin blamed Jews for the economic plight of rural America, the
triumph of communism in Russia, the starvation of millions of Christian farmers
in the Ukraine, sit-down strikes in the American Midwest, urban crime, and
racial agitation in the South. In 1939 he warned “a certain international
element that has no sympathy for Christianity was spending money by the barrel”
to bring the United States into the war. On June 4, 1941, after one of Rankin’s
more vehement diatribes in which he falsely accused Jews of organizing a rally
to support American intervention in the war, a furious M. Michael Edelstein,
who represented New York’s Lower East Side in Congress responded to Rankin,
charging him with fanning hatred, pointing out that Jews had nothing to do with
the rally, that few bankers were Jewish, and that Jews were being used as scapegoats.
As Edelstein walked back to his seat he had a fatal heart attack.3 Rankin is described as a “racist and a thug”
with power by Edward Humes in his 2006 Over Here: How the G.I. Bill
Transformed the American Dream. Rankin would sabotage the G.I. Bill by
insisting on local control over who was able to use benefits. As a result, of
over 3,000 VA loans issued in Mississippi, a state where 50% of the population
was Black, in the summer of 1947 only two went to Black applicants. Rankin
would burnish his reputation as an antisemite by defending the honor of Nazi
war criminals during the Nuremburg trials and assailing attempts to bring death
camp creators to justce.4
It is probably no coincidence that
Franz Kindler, the sinister SS villain who escapes after the war and forges a
new life as a college professor in a New England town in Orson Welles’ 1946
film, The Stranger, assumes the name Charles Rankin.5
In February 1944, while the
soldiers’ vote bill was being debated, Rep. Rankin, as reported in the February
14, 1944 Time article, “Will Soldiers Vote?” rose to object to the bill,
and registering faux outrage over a statement by columnist Walter Winchell,
launched an ad hominem attack on those who supported the bill:
“Now who is behind this bill? Who is
the chief sponsor of it? The chief publicist is PM, the uptown edition
of the Communist Daily Worker that is being financed by the tax-escaping
fortune of Marshall Field III, and the chief broadcaster for it is Walter Winchell—alias
no telling what,” to which a Republican congressman replied, “Who is he?”
Rankin replied, “The little kike I
was telling you about the other day, who called this body the ‘House of
Reprehensibles.’”
Rankin’s speech went on, and not
only did not one Representative object, at its conclusion, “[T]he House rose
and gave him prolonged applause.”6
When I read this in Gentleman’s Agreement, I thought Hobson must have been taking liberties with Rankin’s speech. After all, the country was at war. Soldiers, many of whom were Jewish, were being denied the opportunity to vote while they were fighting and dying for their country, and the fact, if not the magnitude, of what we now call the Holocaust was known, which is the reason I looked up the original article for verification. In her autobiography, Hobson says this is what inspired her to write the novel.
“THIS WAS HOW THINGS WERE”
Hobson had worked for Time, and
Ralph Ingersoll (1900-1985), with whom Hobson had a long-term relationship, was
the founder of PM, a liberal daily publication.
Laura Zametkin Hobson (1900-86) was
born to Michael Zametkin and Adella Kean Zametkin. Both were writers and
teachers; her father was also one of the founders of The Jewish Daily
Forward as well as a lecturer. Both were agnostic as was Hobson and most of
the characters in Gentleman’s Agreement. Hobson’s experiences with
antisemitism included a Greek language professor at Cornell who could never get
her name right, to whom she finally responded that if she were to learn to
pronounce Greek correctly, could he at least learn to pronounce her name? He
did, but he also, in spite of her stellar grades, denied her entrance into Phi
Beta Kappa. She worked for Time until 1940. While there she encountered
antisemitism in reporting that included Leon Blum, the Prime Minister of
France, being referred to in the magazine as “Jew Blum.” She wrote short
stories and eventually novels. Her first, The Trespassers, was based on the
experiences she encountered navigating the State Department’s “paper wall” in
order to secure visas for those fleeing Hitler. The Trespassers was
published in 1943. Gentleman’s Agreement followed in 1947.
While I had been aware that
antisemitism was rampant in America before World War II, I envisioned it to be
something of a fringe movement. I found a box of Father Charles Coughlin’s Social
Justice at an estate sale once, so I knew how nasty he was. And he wasn’t
alone. In the 1930s more than one hundred antisemitic organizations emerged in
the United States; the largest was the German-American Bund.7 What
surprised me when I read Hobson’s autobiography was that it was such an
everyday event. Imagine a reader reading about the Prime Minister of France in Time
only to see him referred to as “Jew Blum.”
In 1935 Margaret Halsey (1910-1997),
who wrote Some of My Best Friends Are Soldiers, married Henry Simon, the
brother of Richard Simon, who would publish both Halsey’s novel and Gentleman’s
Agreement, writes in her autobiography that, “In marrying Henry I
discovered something that, as a sheltered South Yonkers WASP, I had no
suspicion of—which was that in those days very few New York apartment buildings
would rent to Jews.”8
In her novel, she uses this
experience to respond to the accusation that Jews are “clannish:”
Nobody knows whether Jews are clannish… Not
even the Jews themselves. I have a friend—a Gentile—who lives in one of those
beautiful, elm-shaded, New England villages. Some years ago she wanted me to
rent a house there for the summer. I told her what it would be like, but she
didn’t believe me. She tried to rent a house for me, and she found out.
The village goes back to Revolutionary times.
If one had a criticism to make of it, it would be that the town is almost too
much infatuated with its own Americanism. But my friend discovered that the
village has a motto. It isn’t carved in marble over the town hall. Only the
Jews and the selectmen know it. The motto is ‘Keep the Jews out of the
borough.’
I can’t rent a house in that village. I can’t
buy a house there. I can’t even stay overnight in the town’s only hotel. It
doesn’t take Jews.
My brother has a house in one of the few
small towns in that state where Jews are allowed to buy or rent property. So I
go there in the summer. The selectmen in my friend’s town look at each other
and say, “You see. They’re clannish. You let one in and they all come in.”
That’s how it is.”9
Rachel Gordan writes:
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. 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. 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 the 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.”10
During World War II, 550,000 Jewish
men and women served in the armed forces. While Jews comprised less than 2% of
the nation’s population, 4.23% of Jews served. In fact, Jewish participation in
the war may well have been higher since many
Jewish soldiers opted to be designated as Christian for various reasons
including fitting in with their fellow soldiers and fear of being captured by
Germans.11
The dropping of
the atomic bomb ended the war with Japan in August 1945, much sooner than
anyone had thought possible. Troops were rapidly demobilized and returned to
the United States, where few homes had been built during the four years of war.
There was a severe housing shortage. A marine
captain who served with the Office of Strategic Services in Asia said it was
easier to find a sniper in China than an apartment in New York.12 And,
as Margaret Halsey pointed out in her autobiography, it was even more
challenging for Jews such as Hobson’s character, Dave Goldman, who was looking
for a place in New York to move his family so he could accept a lucrative job
offer.
COMING
HOME
At a prewar rally at Des Moines,
Iowa, Charles A. Lindbergh had warned, “[t]he Jewish groups in this country
should be opposing [war] in every possible way, for they will be among the
first to feel its consequences.” It appears that many Jews were afraid that
when the war ended, they would be blamed, and things could get violent. In the
1947 Dore Schary film Crossfire, Samuels, the Jewish victim played
by Sam Levene, tells a troubled soldier, “I think it’s suddenly not having a
lot of enemies to hate any more. Maybe it’s because for four years now we’ve
been focusing on one little peanut. The win the war peanut. That was all. Get
it over. Eat that peanut. All at once, no peanut. Now we start looking at each
other again. We don’t know what we’re supposed to do. We don’t know what’s
supposed to happen. We’re too used to fighting. But we just don’t know what to
fight. You can feel the tension in the air—a whole lot of fight and hate that
doesn’t know where to go.”13 Crossfire was a Warner Brothers
B-movie hurriedly adapted from Richard Brooks’ 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole in
which the victim was gay. In a 1984 introduction to an edition of his 1945 Focus,
Arthur Miller writes, “It is no longer possible to decide whether it was my
own Hitler-begotten sensitivity or the anti-Semitism itself that so often made
me wonder whether, when peace came, we were to be launched into a raw politics
of race and religion, and not in the South but in New York.” Focus is
the story of Lawrence Newman, who, like so many in his time, had successfully
hidden his ethnicity and lived peacefully among his neighbors in Brooklyn and
worked amicably among his peers. He is undone by his failing vision and his
need for glasses. Even his mother comments he now looks Jewish. His neighbors turn
against him, and his employer sidelines him and keeps him out of sight. Things
turn brutal when Finklestein, a Jewish man, moves in and opens a candy shop in
his neighborhood. The war has not ended yet, but a group calling itself the
Christian Front, possibly a rebirth or continuation of Father Coughlin’s cult,
has decided that after the war ends, they will be going after Jews. The local
leader of the front is Newman’s neighbor. Newman decides he will fight the
Front with Finklestein.14 In 1947 the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC), of which John Rankin was a member, decided to take a look at
social message films. As a result several films that had been planned, including
one based on Focus, were dropped.15 A film was eventually
made in 2001. Miller worked at the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard during the war where
he witnessed an “acute level of hostility to Jews.”
The experience of Jews who served
overseas was different. As Deborah Dash Moore writes, many experienced
antisemitism in basic training, especially from those who had no prior
encounters with Jews. Once Jews proved themselves, however, often they were
accepted as one of the guys. Sometimes, though, accepting Jews as equals took
some convincing. Moore writes that Paul Steinfeld had to awaken a known
antisemite for guard duty and was met with a string of antisemitic profanities
to which he responded physically. Mission accomplished. Another, an orthodox
Jew, went through the war performing his daily prayers with his tefillin.
His bunkmates got used to it, joking that he was taking his religious blood
pressure. The only criticism came from a Jewish Corporal, who was overruled.16
Moore writes that it became common practice for Jewish soldiers to volunteer to
fill in for Christians during Christian holidays, most notably Christmas, and
for Christians to reciprocate.17
The armed forces had paved the way
to an extent for the acceptance of Jewish soldiers as equals with the
development of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, although even this met with some
resistance. Moore writes that Congressman John Flanagan of West Virginia
“insisted on the House floor that he did not want ‘any Ginsberg’ to lead his
son in battle.”18 John Rankin was not the only vocal antisemite in
Congress. Nevertheless, the campaign for the new tradition proceeded. Jewish
chaplains joined Catholic and Protestant chaplains, most famously in the case
of the U.S.S. Dorchester, which sank in 1943, claiming the lives of four
chaplains, including one rabbi, who had given up their life jackets and, in the
case of the rabbi, his eyeglasses.19 Popular songs, including When
Those Little Yellow Bellies Meet the Cohens and the Kellys, emphasized on
all fronts that Jews were fighting alongside everyone else.20 Moore
writes that shortly after the war ended, Harry Essrig, who had served mostly in
Europe as a chaplain for the Ninth Air Force, credited “the status and prestige
which was accorded our faith in the armed forces” for changing Jewish
self-perceptions and encouraging Jews to feel equal to other Americans.21
As the war continued and the death
camps were liberated, the ghastly results of virulent antisemitism became
clear. The irrefutable evidence of gas chambers and crematoria, along with the
thousands of unburied dead and those walking skeletons that survived to be
liberated shocked the world.
Prior to World War II, Jews in the
United States had primarily lived among themselves in urban areas. Moore writes
that close to half of American Jews, more than two million, lived in New York.22
Basic training sent them to parts of the country they’d never seen, and where
the locals in turn had seen few Jews.
The fear that Jews would come home
to a country that refused to accept them and might even be violent toward them
were overblown. In her novel, Hobson, speaking through Phil’s editor, cites a Fortune
survey that showed “only” nine percent of the country admits any prejudice, and
that, “[t]he biggest incidence of antisemitism comes from the top-income
bracket now.” When his niece expresses surprise and asks about the “real
bigots,” meaning the followers of Gerald L. K. Smith and the like, the editor
continues, that, no, “[i]t’s the very people who set the styles for the country
in clothes and cars and salads—and mores… . The middle-aged stuffy ones in the
bracket more than the young ones.” In other words, mine not Hobson’s, it was
the people who had not served in the war and who had no contact with Jews that
were most antisemitic.23
Regarding the progress that had
been made in the United States since World War II, In 1984 Arthur Miller wrote,
“When one is tempted to say that everything in the world has gotten worse, here
is one shining exception.”24
Hobson, writing for the
twenty-fifth anniversary issue of Perspectives, a magazine published by
the United States Commission on Civil Rights in 1982, acknowledges the progress
made against antisemitism and says that if she were writing Gentleman’s
Agreement at that time,
…I
would not be writing about a young student wondering whether he could get into
a good medical school because he’s Jewish; I would not be writing about a
landlord or real estate broker asking a direct question like, “Are you of the
Hebrew persuasion? …
No,
I couldn’t write about those scenes now in 1982. But what if Phil were black or
Puerto Rican or Mexican-American and trying to rent or buy a house in certain
neighborhoods? What about his getting into those good medical schools or
renting an apartment or finding a job if he was known to be gay and refusing to
remain a closet gay?
Alas,
if I were writing that book this very minute, and merely changed the word Jew
to black or Puerto Rican or gay or Mexican-American, I could leave most of the
scenes intact, marked for the printer, stet except for corrections.
And…
what about the discrimination and prejudice—and unacknowledged, of course, as most
prejudice is—what about if you’re a woman? …It is hard for me to believe that
there exist today men and women warped enough in their conception of justice to
make them fight against making our constitution guarantee equal rights to
women, not just voting rights, but equal rights to all areas of working and
living.
But
equal rights to everybody cannot be denied, even by the warped. They will
eventually come for all people whose skin is different from the majority’s, or
whose political beliefs are different from the majority’s.
Yes,
I still hope. Despite all the recent setbacks we talk about so glumly—and so
realistically—I am still a believer in decency and change. Like the ebb and
flow of the tides, every setback seems to engender a new surge forward. But I
confess I am impatient for that return tide of strength in the wide-sweeping
ocean of civil rights.25
Vivian Gornick writes in her
introduction to the 1987 edition of Jo Sinclair’s 1946 Wasteland:
For
those of us in America who had gone into the Second World War as children of
intimidated inner-city Jews, 1945 signified an astonishing change in the
atmosphere. The end of the war brought frozen food and nuclear fission,
laundromats and anti-Communists, Levittown and the breakup of the college quota
system. We were about to enter the new world as our parents had never imagined
entering it. That was the big difference between us and them. We could imagine
ourselves out there.26
Some not only imagined, but took
action. Moore says Jewish servicemen in Miami dressed in their uniforms and
went from restricted hotel to restricted hotel to say, “We’re Jews. You should
not discriminate. We served.”27
After the war some Jewish service
people supported a Jewish homeland in Israel. Some smuggled arms to Palestine
and helped refugees immigrate to Israel, where one-third of all Israeli
citizens in 1948 would be Holocaust survivors. Some joined the Israeli armed
services.28
Jonathan D. Sarna says, “In the
1950s Judaism really became an American religion. You can’t talk about a
Christian country any more—you have a Judeo-Christian country.” Going forward,
many Jewish ex-GIs would become part of the civil rights movement.29
At the end of the war, the U.S. had
five million Jews, which was the largest Jewish community in the world.30
THE
NOVEL
As I mentioned above, Hobson got
her inspiration for the novel from John Rankin’s unchallenged antisemitic rant
in Congress. Hobson was an agnostic Jew and moved in social circles that
included gentiles, many of whom expressed similar outrage at Rankin’s rant. As
she writes in her autobiography, some could not have been more alarmed about
what was happening in our own country while we were so busily fighting the
Nazis and even said, “a country never knows what’s happening to it.” This
caused Hobson to wonder just how antisemitic was this country—not just the
known bigots, “but the other people, people who’d never call anybody a kike,
people who said they loathed prejudice?” Hobson had experience with such
people. Often she was the only Jew—or one of a few—at a dinner table and
someone would, after making an antisemitic remark or telling an antisemitic
story, say, “Some of my best friends are Jews,” to which Hobson would respond,
“Some of my best friends are, too—including my mother and my father.”
She began work on the novel in 1944
when the country was still at war, and her main concern was whether a book
written about antisemitism while the country was at war would be perceived as
unpatriotic. She wrote letters to many of her friends about the timing of the
novel. She did not ask whether a novel about antisemitism was a good idea. Not
one person questioned the timing of the novel. As for whether the book was a
good idea, amazingly, with one exception, all her gentile friends advised her
to go for it. The exception was Dorothy Thompson, whose dispatches from Germany
in the 1930s got her expelled from that country and whose conversations with
her friends inspired her then-husband, Sinclair Lewis to write his 1935 It
Can’t Happen Here. Thompson wrote, “anti-antisemitism campaigns are very
dubious means to overcome intolerance. They are (or may be, so it seems to me,)
advertising campaigns for antisemitism.” She concluded that a novel would be
fascinating if it were not a political tract, but “it would take a Dostoevsky
to write it.” I would imagine implying Hobson was not a good enough writer to
pull it off was like waving a red flag in front of a bull!
What surprised Hobson—and me, to be
honest--was the reaction of her Jewish friends, including her friend and
potential publisher, Richard Simon, who wrote her a four-page single spaced
letter outlining the grief she could experience and implied that Simon and
Schuster might decline to publish the novel.31 This was not an idle
threat. Simon and Schuster had published Margaret Halsey’s Some of My Best
Friends Are Soldiers in 1944, and even though it was promoted by both First
Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter Winchell in their newspaper columns, as
Halsey writes in her autobiography, “Dick Simon characteristically abandoned
both the book and me” when NBC canceled a radio dramatization of the book at
the last minute as “too controversial.”32 Responses from Hobson’s
other Jewish friends were similar. It seems that to Jews at that time
antisemitism was the hate that dare not speak its name. As we know, Hobson
persisted. The war ended before Hobson completed her book, so her concern about
timing was now moot. In the end Richard Simon decided to publish the book.
THE
RECEPTION
Volume one of Hobson’s autobiography
ends with the day her novel came out. It had been serialized in Cosmopolitan
in 1946, which called it “The novel all America will discuss.”
Nevertheless, Simon and Schuster’s first printing was 17,500 copies. As it
turned out, the first printing was on paper that had remained from wartime,
when the type and weight of paper was regulated by the War Production Board.
Those books were placed in a warehouse to be pulped, and a new printing was
ordered. Before the book was published Darryl F. Zanuck announced he would make
a film of it. The evening before publication day Hobson says she was at an
all-night newsstand to get the reviews in both major New York newspapers, which
were enthusiastically positive. The next morning she was at Simon and Schuster
where orders were coming in so fast even Richard Simon was taking them. He told
her he was so desperate for books he was going to have to use the ones he had
planned to pulp. By noon, when the book ends, Simon and Schuster had orders for
ten thousand copies.33 Sales would eventually exceed 1.6 million.34
Incidentally, I suspect my copy of the book, which I bought at an estate sale,
is one of the ones initially destined to be pulped.
In Miami, Florida, the Jewish
Defense League was so taken with the novel they offered it for $1.75, which was
ten cents less than Hobson’s publisher charged her for copies of her book.35
Not all reviews
were positive. The Chicago
Star found the
book a novel about antisemitism, “the action of which takes place entirely in
gentile circles” and deemed it interesting “but not too well written.”36
Diana Trilling, writing in the March
1947 issue of Commentary, notes that Phil Green laments that the only
three books about Jews he had in his library were about “a Jew who was a swine
in the wholesale business, a Jew who was a swine in the movies, and a Jew who
was a swine in bed.” When I read this in Hobson’s book, I recognized the book
about movies was Budd Schulberg’s 1941 What Makes Sammy Run. Thanks to
Rachel Gordan, I now know the book about the wholesaler is Jerome Wiedman’s
1937 I Can Get It for You Wholesale. I’m still at a loss as to which
book is about the swine in bed. At any rate, Trilling notes there are no
swinish Jews in Gentleman’s Agreement. “Indeed there are scarcely any
Jews at all, just two supporting characters—a scientist and a fine, personable
veteran—and three or four minor figures who appear in its pages only long
enough to demonstrate that although noisy Jews are no nosier than noisy Irish
they are noticed more, or that Jews themselves are often ashamed of their
birth. In Mrs. Hobson’s novel about Jews their cause is both explained and
fought for them by Gentiles… .” Later in the review she points out that, “There
are certainly no religious Jews in [Hobson’s] section of American society, and
there are no Jews to whom historical or cultural criteria have any meaning.
Dave Goldman, the Jewish veteran and Phil Green’s friend, is as little Jewish
as Phil himself, except as an accident of birth… . Similarly, there are no
religious Gentiles. The Gentiles in Gentleman’s Agreement who, like Phil
and his editor, are without anti-Jewish emotions, are not thereby more
Christian; they are simply the more decent.” Trilling eventually concedes the
book is commendable, although it is “poor—dull, non-dimensional, without
atmosphere.” Trilling finds the novel sterile and attributes that to “the
nature of Mrs. Hobson’s liberalistic view of life,” and then she veers off into
a critique of cultural pluralism that would not be out of place in some circles
today.37 I’ll grant that Trilling has good points about religious
Jews not being addressed, but Hobson’s world did not include religious Jews,
and, as Gordan points out, “there are no examples of very religious Jewish protagonists
in the anti-antisemitism literature of the 1940s.”38 I’ve read the
five she listed in her article, and indeed, the only religious Jews are the
immigrant parents in Earth and High Heaven and Wasteland and
Finklestein in Focus.
Gordan points out several critics
considered the main flaw in the novel to be “it featured the experiences of a
gentile and not a Jew.” In addition, Gordan points out that Phil did “what no
Jew in the 1940s was likely to do: Phil announces, at every opportunity, that he
is Jewish.” Gordan writes that some critics found the emotional experiences of
actual Jews were marginalized and “[i]t was the emotional responses of gentiles
that were prioritized… .” Gordan quotes a Saturday Review editor as
saying, “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.”
Gordan then writes that 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.” Gordan continues, “The problematic quality of
Hobson’s story of passing had only become more apparent over time.”39
I vehemently disagree. Hobson’s target audience was gentiles. From what I’ve
learned doing research for this paper, there was not a Jew in America who was
not aware of antisemitism. They would hardly need a novel to point out the
daily indignities they encountered. I think it was a stroke of genius on
Hobson’s part to invent a gentile character who, along with the gentile readers
of her book, could discover just how much degrading antisemitism was going on
under their noses in America a mere two years after the German death camps were
liberated. Given that, as I’ve mentioned above, there were five million Jews in
America at the time, and there were 1.6 million copies of her book sold, it’s
obvious her target audience was the source of those book sales.
That said, it’s possible Hobson’s
using a gentile protagonist and using her ex-husband’s last name to write a
book that, as Gordan writes, was criticized by some rabbis as showing no marks
of Jewishness, may have contributed to some confusion among her readers as well
as those who saw the film. I’m embarrassed to admit my first assumption after
having seen the film many years after it was released was that she was not
Jewish. I believe it is entirely possible that was Hobson’s intent.
Hobson never wrote using a name that
was identifiably Jewish. In her younger days, she added an “e” to her mother’s
maiden name, and wrote as Laura Z. Keane. She then took the name of a man with
whom she had a long-term relationship and wrote as Laura Mount. Finally, she
used the name of her non-Jewish ex-husband.
Hobson’s 1943 The Trespassers,
like Gentleman’s Agreement, intertwines a romance with a serious
issue—this time assisting refugees from Nazism, both of which are drawn from
her life. The refugee family escaped Vienna in 1938, after the Austrian
Anschluss, and Hobson details the myriad roadblocks she and the Austrian
family, who had escaped as far as Switzerland, encountered securing passage to
America. Early in the book she describes her protagonist as follows:
For all her regular features and gray eyes, she carried in her face somewhere a slightly foreign look, the look Magyar or Slav or Central European. It was there in the deep socketing of the wide-set eyes, in the high cheekbones; it was in the rather large mouth and the quick mobility of her expression.
She then describes her protagonist’s father as:
He was an American citizen and had been since 1893 or so, yet he still spoke with a faint accent that betrayed his foreign birth. He had been born in Prague; originally his name was Marthyunar. He had come to America in 1888, a boy still in his teens, had come because he believed so in America and loved the idea of being free to develop as he wanted, instead of being shoved into the army, doomed later to live the struggling restaurant-keeping life his parents had always lived.
We learn he changed his name to
Marriner for ease of spelling, went to night school at the Pratt institute,
became a chemist, and married the teacher who taught him English, whose family
story is as follows:
Before the nineteenth century her mother’s family had come over from England. Even then they were all mixed up of a dozen different bloods. There had been some Irish ancestors, and two Welshmen, and one Spanish Jew, and heaven knew what besides. Her father’s family had been mostly thrifty Scotch in Europe and once here had become even thriftier New Englanders. Since then each family had intertwined with other bloods, so that the mixture grew rich with such ingredients as Pennsylvania Dutch and New Orleans French and a great deal of plain Middle West or New England American.
There’s only one lonely Sephardic
Jew in the bunch.40 This discussion of the protagonist’s physical
features and certainly her family’s genealogy adds absolutely nothing to the story.
I also find it significant that the family Hobson’s protagonist is assisting,
as well as the one Hobson assisted in real life, were anti-Nazi, but they were
not Jews. There could be any number of reasons for this ambiguity, including
not wishing The Trespassers to be perceived as special pleading, but another
explanation could be that, given the antisemitism Hobson was subjected to and
witnessed during the first forty-three years of her life, she was
understandably reluctant to reveal her ethnicity.
In Hobson’s 1986 New York Times obituary Robert D. McFadden wrote, “While Laura was Jewish, she once told an interviewer: ‘I grew up in an agnostic broad-minded family. I think of myself as a plain human being who happens to be an American.’”41
While
it appeared to me Hobson was at best ambivalent about her ethnicity, I wanted
to get a more informed opinion on the matter.
I
was able to contact Hobson’s surviving son, who gave my draft a cursory review
and was kind enough to respond to my query about his mother’s relationship with
Judaism as follows:
I think it is a misapprehension. It's one I think also shared by
Rachel Gordan, whom you rely on a bit, and one we never ironed out when Gordan
consulted me fairly extensively about 10 years ago in earlier stages of her
work. I think the root of the misapprehension may be differences in approaching
the assimilationist trend in Jewish life in the 1930s and 1940s. Briefly, to
Jews like my mother, there was no contradiction between being fully American
and also fully Jewish, though in a biographical rather than cultural sense.
That is, she always identified herself as Jewish, and my brother (now deceased)
and I, as children, were fully aware that we were Jews. When asked about the
"Z.," as we frequently were, our answer parroted my mom's, "It's
for my grandparents, who were Russian and Jewish." At the same time, she,
and we, had basically zero Jewish culture. I think understanding that people
who weren't attuned to Jewish culture did identify fully as Jewish is
important. (It was also important to my grandparents, who, to my regret, both
died before I was born. Both of them, emigrating separately from non-Yiddish
speaking areas of the Russian empire, learned Yiddish to function in the Jewish
labor movement in New York and did so for their whole lives.) You're aware
yourself of my mother's responses to people telling anti-Semitic jokes. I'm
sure she dresses this up some, as her stories tended to do, but I'm also sure
she said something like the "including my father and mother" remark,
and frequently. In terms of public statements, her profile in Current
Biography in 1947 quotes her, from an interview, discussing
the reasons why “I can never simply say, ‘I am an agnostic,’ but must say, ‘I
am Jewish.’” At least in that instance, she seemed entirely comfortable, not
uncomfortable, being identified as Jewish. Spelling out the "Z." as
Zametkin, as she regularly did in her Who's Who entries, also
certainly identifies her as a non-WASP.
Regarding my writing that Hobson
never wrote using an identifiably Jewish name, he wrote:
On the matter of my mother's writing name, you question her never using an identifiably Jewish writing name, and specifically her "us[ing] the name of her non-Jewish ex-husband." I do think this is a bit ahistorical. Very few divorced women, in the 1930s, resumed using their "maiden names" and, indeed, the name Hobson was hers, not only Thayer Hobson's. Gordan, when we were in touch, could never see LZH's continuing to use "Hobson" as anything other than an attempt to hide her Jewishness, and I think there's a little of the same sense in your piece.42
It was actually Hobson’s superfluous
description of her protagonist and her protagonist’s family history in The
Trespassers rather than anything Gordan wrote that first caused me to think
Hobson might not have been comfortable with her ethnicity. He certainly has a
point about his mother’s being entitled to use the name Hobson, but even before
she married Thayer Hobson, she wrote using names that were not identifiably
Jewish. I won’t say Hobson was trying to hide her Jewishness, but she certainly
didn’t emphasize it.
For those willing to wade through a
romance gone terribly wrong--hell may have no fury like a woman scorned, but a
novelist has the means to even the score--The Trespassers is an
excellent way to learn how difficult the State Department’s paper wall could
make immigration. In this case, the process took sixteen months and only came to
fruition when Hobson’s protagonist, who was in Europe on business, flew to
Zurich to “encourage” the American embassy staff to move things along. Hobson’s
protagonist and the family she helped were at sea when Germany invaded Poland.
Hobson received a $5,000 advance for
The Trespassers. It sold fewer than 20,000 copies and did not earn her
anything beyond the advance.
Coming back to Gentleman’s
Agreement, after Phil Green’s series is a success, a publisher who is a
friend of Phil’s boss is interested in turning it into a book. The publisher
advises Phil to get an agent and advises Phil that it’s better to pick a
publisher (him) rather than risk his agent sending it to “the wrong house.”
Phil asks what he means by the “wrong house.” The publisher elaborates:
“If one of the Jewish houses put
their imprint on it, people might think it was just special pleading, and of
course it’s not.” Phil responds, “Jewish houses? You mean Jewish publishing
houses?” Of course that’s what the publisher means, and Phil responds, “Mr.
Minify and I have never heard of ‘Christian publishing houses’ and ‘Jewish
publishing houses’ except in the Third Reich. Even firms run by men who are
Jewish—we just call them ‘publishing houses.’ In a way, that’s what the whole
series is about.” When the publisher says it’s just a phrase in the book trade,
Minify responds, “'Jewish bankers’ is just a phrase, too, and ‘Jewish newspaper
owners’ and ‘Jewish communists’—just phrases.” The publisher has blown the
deal.43
In her autobiography, Hobson writes
that her book was selected by the Jewish Book Council for their National Jewish
Book Award as the Best Jewish Novel of the Year. Hobson says her novel was not
a best Jewish novel or any kind of Jewish novel. It was instead a book about an
American problem of special interest to Jewish people, which seems to me to be
splitting hairs. Although in retrospect she admits it was a big mistake, she
declined the award. Perhaps that is one reason, as Gordan points out, Hobson is
not included in the Jewish Publication Society Guide to American Jewish
Literature (2009), and perhaps I shouldn’t feel too embarrassed about not
knowing whether Hobson was Jewish. Gordan writes Vivian Gornick made the same
mistake in a 2008 lecture about post-WWII American Jewish literature at the
Radcliffe Institute.44
THE
FILM
Although in her autobiography
Hobson writes that everything she tells us is true, and indeed she’s not afraid
to reveal that one of her relationships was with a man who whose liability was
“not so much his being married as his not being very tall,” I can’t help but
believe there’s a certain degree of false naivete when she expresses surprise
at finding out there was a lot of interest in making a film of her novel. According
to Gordan, Hobson was well aware that Sam Goldwyn had paid $100,000 for the
screen rights to Canadian author Gwenthalyn Graham’s 1944 Earth and High
Heaven about a romance between a Jewish attorney and a socialite in Montreal
that had reached number one on The New York Times list of best sellers
and remained on the list for thirty-seven weeks. Indeed, Gordan quotes a letter
Hobson wrote in which Hobson says, “the fact that it is bought for the movies
by Sam Goldwyn for 100 grand knocks me over.”45 I was not able to
pin down the year Goldwyn bought the rights, but it must have been either 1944
or 1945. The film was never made, which Goldman attributes to the scrutiny the
HUAC was beginning to give to message movies. Goldman quotes our old friend
John Rankin as saying, “They want to spread their un-American propaganda, as
well as their loathsome, lying, immoral, anti-Christian filth before the
eyes of your children in every community in America.”46 (italics
mine) Ah, yes. “The children” are always convenient tools for censoring ideas,
books, and today even drag shows. They’ve got to be carefully taught, after
all.
At any rate, Hobson tells us she
didn’t know what to ask for the film rights--$5,000 maybe? Fortunately, she had
a good agent.
Darryl F. Zanuck, a Protestant
originally from Nebraska and the only head of a major studio who was not
Jewish, read the galleys of the book while on vacation and immediately offered
$75,000. The reaction to the news that Zanuck was to make a film of the novel
was met with some resistance among other movie moguls, and their reaction made
it into the film in a scene in which John
Minify announces to his staff that Smith’s Weekly Magazine will be
publishing a series on antisemitism and that Phil Green, who has just been
hired by the magazine, will write the series. Minify’s friend, Irving Weismann,
an industrialist and stockholder in the magazine, says, “Do you mind my saying
as an old friend I think this is a very bad idea, John? It’s the worst, most
harmful thing you can do now. You’ll only stir it up more. Let it alone. We’ll
handle it our own way. We’ve been fighting it for years. We know from
experience the less talk there is about it the better.”47
I learned from Hobson’s
autobiography that it makes a difference if the opening credits say the film is
“based on” or says, as did the opening credits in this film, “Laura Hobson’s Gentleman’s
Agreement.” The latter approach protects the author from “wanton change,
invention, or concoction.” Nevertheless, Hobson decided to go to California to
meet Zanuck and Moss Hart, who would write the screenplay. Hart had experience
as a theater and film writer, but this was his first time adapting someone
else’s work, so he was more than happy to have her assistance.48
Goldman writes that Hobson was not paid for her work on the script.48
Hobson, however, wrote that Zanuck offered to pay her, but she did not want to
be on his payroll so that she “could feel free of constraint about the movie.”49
The film is true to the intent of
Hobson’s novel. Sadly, in my opinion, the character of Belle, Phil Green’s
sister who had married a man who had done very well, moved in high society in
Detroit, was quite antisemitic herself, and who could have demonstrated that “some
of one’s best relatives are bigots,” was jettisoned as were premarital
relations between Kathy and Phil and extramarital relations between Dave and
Anne Dettrey, most likely because of the Hays Code. Humorously, a conversation
about “a boycott against Christmas” that would feel at home among today’s “war
on Christmas” folks takes place—“Fact. All the networks and their Jew owners
have ganged up—last two weeks all they’ve carried is White Christmas so
they wouldn’t have to play Silent Night, Adeste Fidelis and things like
that.”50 Also, the rant by John Rankin that inspired the novel was
reduced to Phil’s facetiously asking his mother how he should start a letter to
Dave—one of his proposed questions was, “How do you feel about Rankin calling
people kikes?” Admittedly, John Rankin was not only still in Congress but on
the HUAC, but that condensation would probably have been barely noticeable in
1947 and would certainly go over the heads of nearly everyone watching the film
today. The last ninety or so pages of the book are compressed into the scene
near the end of the film when Kathy meets Dave at the restaurant and resolves
to rent her cottage in Aryan Darien (apologies to Patrick Dennis) to Dave. According
to Hobson, Hart could not decide how to bridge the gap between the breakup and
reconciliation between Phil and Kathy. In the book, there’s a lot of
introspection on both sides, and introspection doesn’t work well on film.
Hobson moved to a desert cottage and came up with the basis for that scene. She
wrote that she liked it so well she wished it were in one of her books, so she
put it at the end of the second volume of her autobiography. Sadly, she didn’t
live to see the book in print. Her autobiography, which was largely complete
when she died, was posthumously proofed by Prof. Hobson, who emphasizes his
only addition was the Afterword, which is itself worth reading, and captions
for the photos.
JOHN
RANKIN’S REVENGE
As I mentioned above, Hollywood
came under the scrutiny of the HUAC in the late 1940s. Of concern to the
committee were message films, including Gentleman’s Agreement. Several
people involved with the film were called to testify, including Ann Revere, who
played Phil’s mother, John Garfield, who played Dave Goldman, and Elia Kazan,
who directed the film. Ann Revere refused to name names and was banished from
the film industry for what would turn out to be twenty years; John Garfield,
who was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle, and whose daughter reminds us courageously
took the role of Dave Goldman at a time in the film industry when Jewish actors
were avoiding any role that would identify them as Jews, was called to testify
and told the committee that he would reveal anything about himself they wanted
to know, but he would not discuss anyone else. He was blacklisted, and in 1952 he
died of a massive heart attack at the age of 39. Elia Kazan infamously caved
before the committee.51
EPILOGUE
John
Rankin was removed from the HUAC in January 1949. It appears he lost his place
on the committee not because he was racist and antisemitic, but because he had supported
Strom Thurmond’s 1948 Dixiecrat challenge to Harry Truman.52 In 1952
Mississippi lost a seat in Congress as a result of the 1950 census. Rankin’s
district was combined with that of Thomas Abernethy, who, according to the Jewish
Telegraph Agency, shared a voting record on civil rights “exactly the same
as Rankin’s,” but Abernethy was “not generally known to openly express bias
against Jews.” In the race between the two incumbents, Abernethy won.53
In
1948 the Supreme Court decided in Shelley v. Kraemer that racially
restrictive housing covenants could not be legally enforced.
In 1955 a proposal that the Constitution be amended to declare, “The Nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Saviour (sic) and Ruler of nations through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God” went nowhere,54 confirming Jonathan D. Sarna’s claim that by the 1950s the United States had become a Judeo-Christian country.
1. Martin, Boyd A. “The Service Vote in the Elections of 1944.” The American Political ScienceReview. Aug. 1945, Vol. 39, No. 4. pp 726-30.
2. Humes, Edward. Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream. Harcourt, Inc. 2006. p. 28
3. Shapiro Edward S. “World War II and American Jewish Identity.” Modern Judaism. Oxford University Press. Vol. 10 No. 1, Feb. 1990. p. 65-8.
4. Humes. Over Here. pp 27, 222-7
5. Baron, Lawence. “The First Wave of American ‘Holocaust’ Films 1945-1959.” The American Historical Review. Vol. 115. No. 1. February 2010. p. 95.
6. “Will Soldiers Vote?” Time. February 14, 1944
7. GI Jews: Jewish Americans in World War II. Turquois Films in association with Thirteen Productions for WNET. 2018. DVD.
8. Halsey, Margaret. No Laughing Matter: The Autobiography of a WASP. J.P. Lippincott Company. 1977. p. 78.
9. Halsey, Margaret. Some of My Best Friends Are Soldiers: A Kind of Novel. Simon and Schuster. 1944. pp. 136-7.
10. Gordan, Rachel. “The 1940s as the Decade of the Anti-Antisemitism Novel.” Religion and American Culture. Vol. 31. Issue 1. Winter 2021. Cambridge University Press. pp. 37-38
11. Stack, Liam. “Many Jewish World War II Soldiers Had Christian Burials. That’s Changing.” New York Times. May 24, 2022.
12. Goulden, Joseph G. The Best Years: 1945-1950. Athenum. 1976.
13. Crossfire. Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Warner Brothers. 1947.
14. Miller, Arthur. Focus. Penguin Books. 2001. Intro.
15. Goldman, Eric A. The American Jewish Story through Cinema. University of Texas Press. 2013. p. 74.
16. Moore, Deborah Dash. GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2004. pp. 157-60, 132-3.
17. Moore Deborah Dash. “Jewish GIs and the Creation of the Judeo-Christian Tradition.” Religion and American Culture. Vol. 8 Issue 1. Winter 1998. p. 39.
18. Ibid. p. 37.
19. Moore. GI Jews. pp. 118-23.
20. Shapiro Edward S. “World War II and American Jewish Identity.” Modern Judaism. Oxford University Press. Vol. 10 No. 1, Feb. 1990. p. 71.
21. Moore. “Jewish GIs.” p. 33.
22. Moore. GI Jews. p. 11.
23. Hobson, Laura Z. Gentleman’s Agreement. Simon and Schuster. 1947. p. 229.
24. Miller. Focus. 1984 intro
24. Hobson, Laura Z: A Life—Years of Fulfillment. Donald I. Fine, Inc. 1986. pp. 313-4.
26. Sinclair, Jo. Wasteland. The Jewish Publication Society. 1987. Intro.
27. GI Jews. DVD.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Hobson, Laura Z. Laura Z: A Life. Arbor House. 1983. pp. 354-5.
32. Halsey. No Laughing Matter. p. 119
33. Hobson. A Life. pp. 396-402
34. Goldman. Cinema. p. 59
35. “Anti-Semites at Work.” Southern Jewish Weekly. May 9, 1947.
36. Chicago Star. April 5, 1947.
37. Trilling, Diana. “Americans without Distinction: Gentleman’s Agreement, by Laura Z. Hobson.” Commentary. March 1947.
38. Gordan. “Decade” p. 46.
39. Ibid. pp. 33-4
40. Hobson, Laura Z. The Trespassers. Avon Books. 1968. Pp. 22, 26-7.
41. McFadden, Robert. D. “Laura Z. Hobson, Author, Dies at 85.” New York Times. March 2, 1986. Section 1, p. 40.
42. **********. “Re: Question about Laura Z. Hobson.” Received by Larry Roth, April 8, 2023.
43. Hobson. Gentleman’s Agreement. pp. 253-5.
44. Gordan, Rachel. “Laura Z. Hobson and the Making of Gentleman’s Agreement.” Studies in American Jewish Literature. Vol. 43, No. 2. 2015 p. 242.
45. Gordan. “Decade.” p. 56
46. Goldman. Cinema. p. 73-4.
47. Ibid. P. 64.
48. Ibid. p. 71
49. Hobson. Fulfillment. p. 39
50. Hobson. Gentleman’s Agreement. p. 157.
51. Simone, Daniel. Gentleman’s Agreement--Anti-Semitism Documentary. Hollywood Backstory. IMDbPro. 2001.
52. “THE CONGRESS: Rankin’s Revenge.” Time. Feb. 28, 1949.
53. “Rep. Rankin Loses
Seat in Congress; Was Strongly Anti-jewish (sic).” Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Aug. 28, 1952.
54. “Movement for ‘christian’ (sic) Amendment of Constitution Revived.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 20, 1955
