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Gentleman's Agreement, by Laura Z. Hobson
- Abstract
It is interesting that Mrs. Hobson’s novel about anti-Semitism should be published, and evidently very happily, by the same house that a few years ago voluntarily suppressed a book by Jerome Weidman on the ground that its unattractive Jewish characters would increase anti-Jewish feeling in this country. In the course of Mrs. Hobson’s story, as a matter of fact, the Weidman kind of thing is spoken of; we are given to understand that Mrs. Hobson too disapproves of calling attention to unpleasant Jewish examples. The hero of Gentleman’s Agreement has been assigned to do a series of articles on anti-Semitism for a magazine of mass circulation; in search of a fresh “angle” for the series—for an angle, and a fresh one, the subject of course demands—he browses through his library and comes across three books each of which has a “dishonest, scheming, or repulsive” Jew as its main character. “Did it never occur to one of them,” Phil Green thinks angrily of their authors, “to write about a fine guy who was Jewish? Did each one feel some savage necessity to pick a Jew who was a swine in the wholesale business, a Jew who was a swine in the movies, a Jew who was a swine in bed?”
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