Anti-Semitism Jumps Off the Screen in Elia Kazan's "Gentleman's Agreement"

One of the most nuanced conversations about post-war American anti-Semitism came in the form of a film. In 1947 Elia Kazan released Gentleman’s Agreement, starring Gregory Peck as a gentile journalist who is assigned to write an article on anti-semitism. After realizing that he will never fully understand this prejudice without experiencing it, Peck adopts the name Greenberg and goes undercover as a Jew in New England’s high society in order to expose the truth of anti-Jewish sentiment lurking not-so-far beneath the surface.

Like School Ties, this film addresses the kind of quiet anti-Semitism of the American upper class, which should have been total anathema to a people who had just returned from war with the Nazis. Soon, he discovers that this covert form of anti-Semitism exists everywhere, even in the hiring policies of the very newspaper that gave him this assignment in the first place—his secretary, he learns, is Jewish, and changed her name in order to get a job. Peck’s relationship begins to fall apart as his own girlfriend—a woman from a wealthy Connecticut family who appears to have shed all trace of prejudice in her own life—becomes more and more uncomfortable by his social experiment, even though she knows he isn’t actually Jewish.

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