#12787. The 1940s as the decade of the anti-antisemitism novel

2022publication date
Proposal available till 15-12-2021
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Abstract:
This article examines the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s as an indication of the decades changing attitudes toward Jews, antisemitism, and religious pluralism, and so contributes to scholarly research on both social protest literature and mid-twentieth-century American religious culture. Recent scholarship has shown that American Jews responded to the Holocaust earlier than had previously been assumed. The anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s were one of the popular culture arenas in which this response to the horrors of Nazi Germany occurred, as fiction proved an ideal genre for imagining and presenting possible solutions to the problem of antisemitism. These solutions often involved a change from a racial to a religious conception of Jews. Laura Z. Hobsons Gentlemans Agreement (1947) was the most culturally significant of this 1940s genre of antiantisemitism novels (a subgenre of social protest literature), in part because of its foregrounding of non-Jewish responses to antisemitism. Archival research into the roots of Hobsons novel reveals that news of other female authors writing popular anti-antisemitism fiction encouraged Hobson, allowing Hobson to feel part of a movement of anti-antisemitism writers that would eventually extend to her readers, as demonstrated by readers letters. Although Will Herbergs Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955) is frequently cited as the midcentury book that heralded a postwar shift toward religious pluralism, the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s reveal signs of this shift a decade earlier. Copyright

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