Picture of Prejudice
The Fox Movie Channel showed “Gentleman’s Agreement” the other night, a preachy drama about anti-Semitism that won the Academy Award 60 years ago, and it brought into focus the realization that I may live to see a black man inaugurated as President of the United States.
What Barack Obama faces from now until November would be unimaginable to the people who made and saw that movie then, including a 23-year-old just back from World War II who had little audacity and even less hope of living in the rich, glossy world it portrayed.
Gregory Peck played a magazine writer who pretends to be Jewish. A decade later, I was an editor on one of those magazines, unknowingly hired by George W. Bush’s grandfather as the first Jew among thousands of employees, working with Laura Z. Hobson, who wrote the novel on which the picture was based.
When it came out, there was an uproar against the director, Elia Kazan, and the producer, Darryl Zanuck, whose names sounded foreign and were presumed to be of Jewish origin. Hobson relished the irony that they weren’t but that she, who was but had married someone with an Anglo-Saxon name, escaped the anger of the offended.
Prejudice is still a nasty, shadowy business that, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, seldom shows its face openly. No one uses phrases like “gentleman’s agreement” or “restricted” these days, but “blue-collar voters” and “Reagan Democrats” serve the same purpose as codes to mask fear and hatred of people who are different.
We haven’t had a Jewish president but, if and when Barack Obama takes the oath of office next January, “Gentleman’s Agreement” will be even more of an anachronism than it is now. But until then, it’s a movie that Hillary Clinton, John McCain and their campaigns might want to think about.
Cross-posted from my blog.
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