Friday, December 29, 2023

 

 

 

 

FINDING SOLACE IN AN EIGHTY-YEAR-OLD BOOK 

               I’ve mentioned on several occasions that I spend the nights of our presidential elections watching The Best Years of Our Lives, the 1946 film about the challenges World War II servicemen faced when their services were no longer required and they reentered civilian life.

            After Pearl Harbor my father rushed to enlist and was, to his great disappointment, classified as 4-F. (The same thing happened to me during Vietnam except for the rush to enlist and the disappointment.) He went to work for the Army Corps of Engineers in St. Louis and from there he was recruited to work for the Manhattan Project. He married my mother, and the Project hired her as well. After the bombs were dropped, their services were no longer required. They were transferred to St. Louis and, once there, laid off.

When my father died in 2005, he left behind a great deal of paperwork, including a memo dated January 11, 1946, which reads:

“The attached Staff Bulletin is again brought to the attention of all personnel.

“The following is also brought to the attention of all personnel, some of whom have been previously cautioned:

“(1) Too many personal telephone conversations

“(2) Too much visiting within the office-it disturbs others that are working

“(3) A few are absent from their desks too often—and for periods of time that sometimes run into 10 to 20 minutes.”

The Staff Bulletin is about empty bottles and reads:

“It has become necessary to call attention to the fact that employees are not adhering to the rule that empty bottles from vending machines are to be returned to the Canteen. On recent occasions a number of empty bottles have been collected in the wash rooms. It is directed that empty bottles be returned to the Canteen in every case.”

The bulletin is signed by E. H. Shutt, Lt. Col., Corps of Engineers, Executive Officer.

My father must have kept this memo to remind him how quickly one could go from being an important cog in a major program to someone being monitored and criticized for being away from his desk for (gasp!) twenty minutes at a time while waiting to be laid off.

Twelve million service people were in the same situation. One of the main characters in The Best Years of Our Lives was a an Army Air Force bombardier captain and is only able to find a job as a soda jerk in the drug store where he worked before the war. Another character predicts a postwar depression. To me the most significant thing about this film is it was made when it was impossible to know how everything would work out, which is the reason I watch it as election returns are coming in. Most of the time I find comfort in the knowledge that if my parents’ generation could get through the challenges of their times, we can get through the challenges of ours. 


The same is true of John Roy Carlson’s Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America. This book was published in 1943, a time when it was impossible to know the outcome of World War II. John Roy Carlson was the nom de plume of Arthur Derounian, a Christian Armenian-American who infiltrated many Nazi, fascist, and antisemitic organizations between 1938 and 1943. I came across the book at an estate sale and found it helpful for a paper I was writing on, among other things, the postwar decline in American antisemitism. Rachel Maddow gives it a brief mention in her 2023 Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, which covers much of the same territory and which I’ll address briefly at the end of this essay.

As I was reading Under Cover, I couldn’t help but be amazed at how similar our times are to Carlson’s. In his time there were a good number of congressmen who were not just openly fascist, they provided fascist organizations with millions of franked envelopes (postage paid by taxpayers) to mail their propaganda coast to coast and border to border. Many of them knowingly accepted money from Germany. Some in Congress even wrote fascist bile. These people hated democracy. One is quoted as saying, “Democracy, Democracy, Democracy! They throw it in our faces. You hear it on all sides till you get sick of it. What is this Democracy? It is a rotten form of weakness and pacifist attitude that can only mean defeat. I say to hell with Democracy and up with the banner of American nationalism! America for the white, Christian Americans! And it’s about time we stopped this absurd propaganda against Germany.” I would imagine we wouldn’t have to look too far nowadays to find someone who would make the same speech, only substituting Russia for Germany.

Carlson describes how the fascist movement segmented itself into several groups to appeal to various demographics from the mob and rabble rousers to those living on Park Avenue. A surprising number of the people Carlson encounters are old-line Americans, and many are members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. I guess in a way we shouldn’t find this surprising. There are always those who believe their family’s longevity in America somehow confers upon them an innate ability to know what’s best for everyone when in fact they’re angling for what’s best for them and their crowd.

We meet Joe McWilliams, who forms the American Destiny Party and admits to Carlson that the people he’s talking to aren’t his “class of people,” but “you can’t talk politics to these people unless you make it simple by bringing in the Jew every time. It’s the only language they understand—the language of hate. Hitler made it work, and that’s what I’m trying to do here. I want to give the man in the street a Christian New Deal.”

He then tells Carlson that if he’s elected, he doesn’t want to be called president. “I’d run this country like a factory. I would appoint all the key men and have absolute control.” He continues, “Our next step would be to break the people of the voting habit. I want streamlined, modern government. Efficient as a factory, methodical as a machine. Republicans, Socialists and Democrats represent nineteenth century ideas. A new leadership is needed for a new America.” We wouldn’t have to look too far to find folks who would agree with that today including those who support a businessman who’s gone bankrupt six times. So far. And as for making it simple by bringing in the scapegoat du jour to speak the “only language they understand,” the aforementioned bankrupt-prone businessman is now channeling Adolf Hitler by referring to those who disagree with him as “vermin” and Madison Grant when he accuses immigrants of “polluting American blood,” which, given that two of his three wives as well as his mother and both of his father’s parents were immigrants, is a bit rich.  

Later in the book we come across various groups under a Mothers Movement umbrella, which could easily have been a model for today’s Moms for Liberty. The former was not very effective; the latter is increasingly, thankfully, proving to be vulnerable inasmuch of one of the founders of the largely anti-gay group turned out to be, shall we say, open to experimenting? And many of the Moms for Liberty overestimated the interest in potential recruits for banning books, preventing parents from being involved in their children’s sexual health and becoming outraged over drag shows.             

One of the things I learned from the book is these groups did not disband after Pearl Harbor. I’d always imagined Pearl Harbor united the country. I was wrong. Synagogues in the Bronx and Brooklyn were vandalized. Cops were indifferent and some may have even been involved in the vandalism. Posters reading “The Jews started this war. Make them pay for it” were distributed.   

A big factor in the pro-fascist movement Carlson writes about was Father Charles Coughlin’s Christian Front. Coughlin was Catholic, but he affiliated with any right-wing group, and the more antisemitic the better. The Christian Front had millions of followers, many of them violent thugs. It survived the war, although Coughlin was no longer in charge. By then its influence had dwindled. Most returning veterans were not interested in joining pro-fascist groups, having just won a war against fascism. We have our own right-wing fundamentalist groups today. A recent Wall Street Journal article reported many fundamentalists want their ministers to talk less about religion and more about border security, gun rights, and, well, you get the idea. 

 

The article describes a sermon by eastern Tennessee pastor Shahram Hadian, who denounced vaccine mandates, voiced doubts about the results of the 2020 presidential race, and said that Trump’s poll numbers were rising, despite multiple indictments, because a remnant of people still loyal to God were finally waking up. He concluded, “Here we are ramping up for 2024 and another crucial election, if they don’t steal it or try to indict their way out of it, our response must be, we will not comply. Amen!”


As we can see, this country has been here before. I’m not a Marxist, but Marx did say history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. I’m hoping the current trends turn out to be harmless farce, and I have good reason to believe they will. We live in a great country. We have one of the highest living standards in the world. I doubt that many of us are willing to leave our warm comfortable homes, miss whatever we’re watching on Netflix, and go to war with our neighbors over drag shows, parents’ seeking or not seeking treatment for their possibly transgender children, what books are in schools or public libraries, and so on. Sure, as we saw on January 6, 2021, there are a few people who’ll believe anything and follow the direction of the Orange Jesus du jour, but they’re very few. So far attacks by the radical right have generated outrage rather than revolt. Timothy McVeigh’s attack in Oklahoma City resulted in his execution. The January 6 incursion has so far resulted in more than 1,000 people charged, several of whom have been jailed.


And the Instigator-in Chief is facing several indictments. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out. Many of the fascists outed by Carlson and others were tried for treason. As we find out in Rachel Maddow’s Prequel, which I promised to address, the trial went on after the war. It was extremely complex. The judge died, and basically the country was in no mood to rehash wartime misdeeds. In short, the traitors got off. Let’s hope the judges in Donald Trump’s cases take good care of themselves! 

                                      

Rachel Maddow is writing when we know the outcome of World War II. She’s writing a history while Carlson covered the same events while they were happening and as someone who saw first-hand what these groups were like. Prequel is generally excellent, and I highly recommend it. As you might expect, I have a couple of nits to pick. First, when she describes George Detherage, who was truly loathsome, she says he was 6’5” and 205 pounds, “an impressive girth for an American man before high-fructose corn syrup.” In fact, Detherage had a BMI of 24.3, which would be in the normal range. The guy was a fascist traitor, but he was not overweight. Second, when she discusses George Van Horn Moseley, a retired general who was virulently anti-immigrant and antisemitic and who would willingly have joined any (and probably all) fascist anti-government groups had the Army not advised him he would lose his pension if he did so, she says Moseley played a key role in launching the Army’s violent 1932 attacks against American World War I veterans who were protesting in Washington for “bonus payments they had been promised but never paid.” In fact the bonus payments were not scheduled to be paid until 1945. Finally, somehow one of the most repulsive members of Congress of the era, John Rankin, who delivered a virulent antisemitic rant (one of many) that inspired Laura Z. Hobson to write Gentleman’s Agreement, is not mentioned anywhere in Maddow’s book. Rankin, ever the Jew-hater, was still defending the "honor" of Nazi war criminals during the Nuremburg trials. 



Sunday, June 4, 2023

Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, and the Decline of Postwar Antisemitism: A Paper




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