Gentleman’s Agreement

Gregory Peck as Phil Green in Gentleman s Agreement, 1947. Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive. 

A decade and a half after the appearance of Black No More, Laura Z. Hobson s Gentleman s Agreement (1947) offered yet another meditation on whiteness and difference. Like Black No More, this novel evokes a... 

On its face, Gentleman s Agreement is unequivocal in its erasure of Jewish racial difference indeed, whatever statement the novel seeks to make about Jewishness, and, finally, about justice, derives entirely from the central idea of interchangeability. Phil Green can experience anti-Semitism firsthand because he can pass as a Jew and he can pass because, at bottom, there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles. (This, in turn, is what is so absurd about anti-Semitism, Hobson will have us conclude. What does it mean that a non-Jew can be the victim of Jew-hatred )... 

Despite the whimsicality of its plot construction, Focus offers a profound analysis of anti-Semitism as an instrument of economic and political power. (In this respect Focus has more in common with Carey McWilliams s Mask for Privilege than with Gentleman s Agreement.) Miller addresses the work of anti-Semitism from the standpoint of political economy through the character of Finkelstein, a Jew in Newman s neighborhood who witnesses Newman s victimization at the hands of the (mistaken) Christian Front. According to Finkelstein, the Jew is not so much the object of anti-Semitism as its mode of operation. The object of Jew-hatred, that is, is an allocation of economic and social resources... 

Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman s Agreement (New York Simon and Schuster, 1947), p. 196. 

North American Review, 152 (1891), p. 128. On white Jews see Louis Binstock, Fire-Words, Common Ground, Winter 1947, pp. 83-84, and Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman s Agreement (New York Simon and Schuster, 1947), pp. 154-155. 

The sponsor will usually be made aware of the deficiencies prior to the action letter, and this allows a more rapid response. If post-approval studies are to be performed as a condition of approval, the agency now has clear authority to require the sponsor to report on those studies under Section 130 of FDAMA. Under the previous law, FDA s authority in this regard was never clear, and post-approval studies had been conducted under a gentleman s agreement without a firm legal basis. 

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