The Return of the Gentleman’s Agreement
Antisemitism is back. In fact, it never went away.
Imagine a blockbuster produced by Hollywood’s leading screenwriter and director, starring the world’s most celebrated actors, a movie nominated for eight Oscars and winning three. And imagine the subject of that movie is… antisemitism.
Impossible, you’d think, because you’re living in 2024. But seventy-seven years ago, famed director Elia Kazan collaborated with Broadway genius Moss Hart to produce “Gentleman’s Agreement.” With the immortal Gregory Peck in the lead role, and the likes of John Garfield and Jane Wyatt lending support, the plot centers on a debate between two friends, one Jewish, one (Peck) not, over antisemitism. Peck’s character denies that a “gentleman’s agreement” exists between non-Jews in America to deny Jews entry in many seemingly public places. To prove his point, he agrees to adopt a Jewish name—note, not a kippa, not even a Star of David, just a name—for one week. The stately WASP suddenly finds himself barred from hotels, clubs, and rarefied circles. Two years after the murder of six million Jews, the movie informs us, the hatred that killed them is alive and seething in the United States.
“Gentleman’s Agreement,” together with the revelation of the Holocaust’s horrors, rendered antisemitism socially unacceptable in America. Publicly, at least, Jew hatred was déclassé. What followed were seven of the freest, most secure, and prosperous decades for any Jewish community in history. American Jews, many of them first generation, rose to the pinnacle of virtually every cultural, academic, financial, and journalistic field. Jewish humor became American humor and bagels as American as peach cobbler. On the doorposts of houses in once-restricted neighborhoods, mezuzahs proliferated. Jewish identity was shouted, not whispered, and last names remained Goldstein and not de-judaized, as in the case of my mother’s family, to Gould.
Then, it ended. Not suddenly, as it often feels now, but cumulatively over the twenty years. One by one, the barriers against antisemitism in America—breaking that gentleman’s agreement—broke down. Nearly twenty years have passed since former President Jimmy Carter published a book that branded Israel an apartheid state and professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer accused the Jews of blackmailing Congress. Charges of genocide and Jewish supremacy moved from the counterculture fringes to the academic center. Claims of Jewish control of the film industry and the media, once publicly condemned, went unremarked. Mel Gibson, a serial anti-Semite, continued to land starring roles.
Throughout, American Jews wrangled over whether anti-Zionism was a form of antisemitism and Jew hatred a reflection of ignorance rectifiable through education. Some blamed Obama, many more Trump, and disagreed over which was more inimical to Jews, the left or the right. The number of antisemitic incidents meanwhile rose precipitously. And the Jews, like the proverbial frogs that linger in a pot of water while it imperceptibly heats, remained generally passive. Then, on October 7, the water boiled.
Since then, antisemitism has become a constant in American Jewish life. From Dave Chappelle’s antisemitic standup on Saturday Night Live to the steady rendering of Ivy League universities judenrein, the hatred of Jews has become normalized. Abnormal, it now seems, were the halcyon decades since the making of the “Gentleman’s Agreement,” and Jewish history has merely returned to form. To our forebears, the current situation would have been fully recognizable. “The world hates Jews?” they would have asked. “So what else is new?”
Of course, the major difference between this phase of Jewish history and previous ones is the presence of a state and an army reputably capable of defending the Jews from our haters. A second Holocaust, moreover, is unlikely to occur in an age in which nothing—certainly not a mass extermination such as the Nazis perpetrated largely in secret—escapes media coverage. But Israel not only protects the Jews, it immunizes the antisemites calling for its destruction. And just as Jew hatred spurred the world to overlook the Final Solution, so, too, might a world antipathetic to Jews do nothing to prevent terrorists from ultimately rendering the Jewish state uninhabitable or from Iran, with a single weapon, annihilating it entirely.
Antisemitism is back. In fact, it never went away, and we can no longer rely on films such as “Gentlemen’s Agreement” to suppress it. Jewish existence is once again precarious. Nevertheless, as demonstrated throughout our history, the Jews will survive. Rather than denying this resurgent reality, we will acknowledge it and battle it with a fortified Jewish identity, a commitment to unity, and a refusal to die. We will fight—with tanks and jets as with legislation and lawsuits—and fight in the Churchillian sense in Gaza and the Galilee, in newsrooms and courtrooms and capitals.
Am Yisrael chai, the people of Israel live, is more than just an empirical observation. Yes, we live, but Am Yisrael chai is also a moral imperative. We must live. Living is our legacy, our privilege, and our duty. Hatred can neither deny that nor deter us. Am Yisrael chai—imagine what movie that would make.
This article has been updated as of July 4th, 2024.
Count this Christian among those who will always oppose anti-semitism.
The background to “Gentleman’s Agreement” adds to the story. It was produced by one of the few non-Jewish run studios in Hollywood (Daryl Zanuck’s 20th Century) as none of the others wanted to touch the novel on which the movie was based.
John Garfield (né Jacob Julius Garfinkle) plays Gregory Peck’s friend, a proud Jew and WWII combat vet who, in a memorable scene, gets into a fight with an antisemite who belittles the character’s wartime service. Peck’s character is a reporter who goes undercover as Mr. Greene to uncover the extent of social antisemitism and publish an article. There is a scene where the merits of going forward with the investigation is debated that, supposedly, tracked the discussion among (and was a critique of) those movie execs who had declined to produce the movie. Finally, Celeste Holm plays his loyal Jewish secretary (who believes Greene is in fact Jewish) and, towards the film’s end, utters a sentiment that complicates the movie’s general message nicely. She won an Oscar for her role.
It is also of note that around that time a US poll identified the group that presented the greatest danger to world peace was [drumroll] the Jews. It may be the gauzy view of hindsight, but there was plenty of antisemitism during the 50s and 60s, including the John Birch Society, Gerald LK Smith and the like. And, of course, the more “genteel” antisemitism of the social clubs and boardrooms persisted.