[Gentleman's Agreement represents a large undertaking] both in its difficulties and ambitions. It may have its scattered interludes written for the sake of amusement. It may tell in unconventional terms a conventional love story about a boy who meets, loses, and gets a girl. Yet it remains so faithful to its theme that it takes few recesses from it. Anti-Semitism is its plot; ideas are its concern; and instances of prejudice supply its action. This is at once its audacity and significance. Yes, and why it must be welcomed as innovational. (p. 53)

I read Mrs. Hobson's book with mixed emotions. It is a healthy book to have in circulation. My sympathy with its theme is complete. My admiration is also genuine for the way in which Mrs. Hobson scores her truest triumph by demonstrating the racial intolerance which haunts the hearts and minds of nice people who think of themselves as liberals. I grant, too, that Mrs. Hobson can tell a story adroitly in popular terms. I, however, must confess that I regret the slick magazine quality in much of her writing….

What really bothers me in Mrs. Hobson's book … [is that] I am conscious of having been presented with no more than a laundry list of indignities to which Jews are submitted in this country. Although happy to have such dirty linen aired, I wish Mrs. Hobson had also shown us the many sources of rightful pride special to the Jews, no less than the humiliations to which they are exposed by Gentiles who fancy themselves democrats. (p. 54)

I distrust Mrs. Hobson's plot device of having her hero a Gentile who pretends to be a Jew for eight weeks in order to understand the sufferings of the Jewish people. A device is at best a stunt for display, a trick to capture the attention, a deliberately false approach to the truth. However serviceable for storytelling Mrs. Hobson may have found such a contrived situation, it seems to me to condemn her novel to do no more than scratch the surface of her subject. The inner anxieties of persecuted races cannot be explored by tourists. They are known only to those who dwell as natives among such slights, apprehensions, and shameful humiliations.

I find myself disturbed by another aspect of Mrs. Hobson's central character. He is supposed to be a brilliant journalist, thoroughly conversant with the world as it is. Yet he must not have got around as much as his editor thought or Mrs. Hobson would have us believe. The surprise of this alert journalist at his discovery of how real and shocking are the meannesses directed against the Jews even by enlightened people in this country is naïve, to say the least. He must have gone through life with cotton in his ears and blinders on his eyes. If his ignorance is comfortable for him, it can claim its values for us…. It may snatch the blinders off countless unseeing eyes in America, and force millions to listen to what cries for the widest public statement.

It is because it dares to call real abuses by their proper names and to skywrite some of the ugly, underground truths of racial intolerance in this country that Gentleman's Agreement … can claim importance. (pp. 54-5)