The military victory against the world's most efficient anti-Semites has been won. And yet millions of Americans who take their democracy seriously are asking themselves whether the war which was won on the Rhine and the Elbe will be lost on the Mississippi and the Hudson.

It is this vital question which Laura Z. Hobson tackles with great clarity and missionary persuasiveness in this slick, readable and valuable novel on anti-Semitism [Gentleman's Agreement]….

This decisive theme—in the knowledge of this reviewer—has never been developed in American fiction before. For rushing in where more gifted novelists have feared or neglected to tread, Mrs. Hobson deserves whatever prizes a push-me-pull-you democracy can bestow on one of its more responsible and aroused citizens….

Kathy Lacey—Mrs. Hobson's somewhat too convenient heroine—while able to suggest [that her fiance, Phil Green, do a series of articles on anti-Semitism] …, begins shedding her convictions when her idealistic chickens come home to roost…. Thus Green makes a profound discovery—that in his search for anti-Semitism he need look no further than his "enlightened" fiancée, whose idea it had been to do the articles in the first place.

This sharply observed irony is developed with a wealth of wise and pointed documentation….

Even a happy ending in the best women's-magazine tradition, and sentences like, "Again her heart hammered once against his ribs," don't blunt the sharp, hard point of this welcome, timely, able tract…. Mrs. Hobson's novel is a Stop-Look-Listen-and-Do-Something warning for every American who may be in danger of slipping, no matter how "innocently," into a Gentleman's Agreement.