In a depressing article the other day about academic anti-“Zionism,” one of the Jewish newspapers I read published a photograph of a restaurant reservation form from the twentieth century which asks, “Are there any Hebrews in your party?” and then requires applicants to certify their answer with an affidavit beginning, “I hereby swear.”* That view from a newly rereadable past inspired me to hit up Archive.org for Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement, a 1947 bestseller about American social antisemitism whose movie version featured the novelty of actual names actually named, such as those of the Jew-free New York suburb of Darien, Connecticut, and the flamboyantly antisemitic Mississippi congressman John E. Rankin, a swaggering caricature of a racist prick who once started a fistfight on the House floor. Otherwise, though, the movie isn’t very interesting (it stars Gregory Peck) (this is not a non sequitur), so yesterday I took out my e-loan and started reading. Archive’s copy of the book was brown with age and bore the markings of an owner’s penmanshipped name in browned ink and a “Withdrawn” stamp from a Catholic college library.

https://archive.org/details/gentlemansagreem0000unse_v8n0/mode/2up

But the prose was immortally bestseller. It went clunk clunk at me for about sixty pages, and then I shut the book. At the instant the cover closed over her, Laura was still clunking away at our divorced hero’s awakening interest in our heroine, without yet a Jew in view. Lots of historical business with Scotch-or-rye and crisply clicking cigarette lighters, though.

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* https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/cold-war-against-jews