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Ida Nasatir book review

Gentlemen's Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson

April 24, 1947—Book review—Gentlemen's Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson—Southwestern Jewish Press, page 6: Laura Hobson, a Jewess, married to a Gentile, has written a bestseller. Though her theme is anti-Semitism, it is also a first rate novel about people. Mrs. Hobson's father was M. Zametkin, old-time East side agitator. Her mother was a doctor who ran a Yiddish column in the "Day." Letters to the authoress prove Gentiles are being reformed by the novel; realizing that they haven't done enough to fight hatred.  Schuyler Green, the leading figure of this book, is a crusading writer for Smith's Magazine. Smith's, one soon gathers, combines the best features of Mr. Luce's "Life," Mr. Hibbs' "Post," and Henry Wallace's "New Republic." Though liberal, it boasts a circulation of 3,000,000. In short it is an ideal medium for a series of articles on anti-Semitism, and Green, after he has reluctantly taken over the assignment, leaps into harness with all his heart and soul. Even as Steinbeck, he camped in the California jungles with the Okies when he did That series; when he wrote of the miners' battle for a living wage, he went deep down into the bowels of the earth for color and truth, so now, he temporarily masquerades as a Jew. He calls his series "I Was A Jew For Two Months." Mrs. Hobson has him do more than merely use his title as a whip to crack at hate peddlers. She knows all about the mean little Jew-haters, the neurotic crackpots, the Christian Frontiers and the diseased ambitions of men in public life who use anti-Semitism as poison bait for votes; she does not minimize their destructive effect. But she knows too that while those are demon's most visible and grotesque deformities, a MAJORITY of us do NOT recognize them as deformities. She goes closer and deeper. She looks behind the demon's ears and down its throat, and tells what she sees. She makes it all a part of Schuyler (he later calls himself Phil) Green's series of articles. In the course of being a Jew, Green has run the familiar gamut. He discovers a great deal about the innate savagery of his fellow-man and a great deal about himself as well.  He experiences the emotional and mental shocks so well known to the Jews; he comes to distrust and dislike the "lip-service" liberals, he encounters all the timeworn tensions; the hostility of fellow workers in his office, the snarls, the injustice, the queasy lies directed at him, as a Jew. There's more in the same vein, and Mrs. Hobson manages it all with brilliance and dispatch.  Gentlemen's Agreement is honest; it should be required reading for every thoughtful citizen in this parlous century.  Mrs. Hobson herself is not a Zionist, she does not believe in Palestine, or that it will offer any solution; she thinks Jews are just a religious sect. But we can't expect a woman to be perfect.