¹ John Mason Brown, “If You Prick Us,” Saturday Review, December 6, 1947, 71. Similarly, in his reading of Gentleman's Agreement, Matthew Jacobson sees an underlying moral as, “Do unto others (who could pass for you) as you would have others do unto you (if you could pass for them).” Jacobson, Matthew, “Becoming Caucasian: Vicissitudes of Whiteness in American Politics and Culture,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 8, no. 1 (2001): 96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Several of the anti-antisemitism novels feature important gentile characters. Notably, in Jo Sinclair's Wasteland (1946), it is the non-Jewish psychiatrist who helps Jake Braunowitz come to a more sympathetic understanding of his Jewishness.

³ Brown, “If You Prick Us,” 71.

⁴ George Custen, “Over 50 Years, a Landmark Loses Some of Its Luster,” New York Times, November 16, 1997, 20.

⁵ The theme of antisemitism as an American problem appears in other anti-antisemitism literature of the 1940s. In Arthur Miller's Focus, Mr. Finkelstein teaches the non-Jewish protagonist, Mr. Newman, that the country's ideals are at stake in the battle the antisemites are waging. Finkelstein tells Newman about the antisemites in their neighborhood: “They are a gang of devils and they want this country. And if you had any regard for this country you wouldn't tell me such a thing.” Arthur Miller, Focus (New York: Penguin, 1984), 183. This sentiment, that it's not just the Jews who suffer from antisemitism, is echoed in Gentleman's Agreement, when Dave Goldman and Phil Green first talk about the problem of antisemitism, and Dave says, “‘The hell with the Jews, as Jews. . . . It's the whole thing, not the poor, poor Jews.’ He waved toward the windows, as if he were waving to the whole stretch of country beyond.’” Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947), 133. Lila Corwin Berman's discussion of the 1940s as a decade when rabbis made the case for the public utility of Jewishness suggests a Jewish communal parallel to this literary framework of antisemitism as an American problem. Berman, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), chapter 4.

⁶ This idea that responsibility for persecution lay with the persecutors and not the persecuted was central to one of the most comprehensive studies of race in the United States, commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation, the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1944). Myrdal explained that what Americans called the “Negro problem” was, in fact, an American problem, holding the United States back in a constant struggle to save its soul from hypocrisy in the face of its highest ideals of equality. An American Dilemma thus primed American readers, during the 1940s, to come to terms with the fact that racism was the responsibility of the discriminator and not the discriminated. Despite the fact that racism was the most serious problem in the United States, it was not the problem with which the nation grappled during the 1940s. For reasons that Myrdal illuminates, Jews and antisemitism were a more solvable problem for postwar Americans, whose new role as the liberators of concentration camps contributed to their sense of being on the right side of the issue of antisemitism, especially in comparison with their wartime enemies. Thus, World War II and Hitler, ironically, played a large role in improving the situation of Jews in the United States, and in convincing postwar Americans that the position of Jews in America—as members of a respected religion, and not as members of an inferior race—was vastly different from the position of Blacks. Myrdal also noted a contrast in relation to Jews and mobility: “A Jewish economist is not expected to be a specialist on Jewish labor,” Myrdal observed of the possibilities available to Jews, in contrast to African-Americans. “A Jewish sociologist is not assumed to confine himself always to studying the Ghetto. A Jewish singer is not doomed eternally to perform Jewish folk songs. A Jew is not out of place either as a governor of a state or as a planner of world reconstruction. The Jew is discriminated against in America, but there is a quantitative difference between this and the discrimination against the Negro which is so great that it becomes qualitative.” Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 28.

⁷ Miriam Udel, “Stories, Anxiety, Our Children and Ourselves: Coronavirus Is a Teaching Moment about the Comfort and Challenge of Narrative,” New York Daily News, March 17, 2020. https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-coronavirus-your-kids-mo-willems-20200317-owce4qampffwljgzh23asjwocm-story.html?fbclid=IwAR0DVFD4yROQYyq6tRnk2hDkKptuh8tjN6SWYS5DwtIkf96d8LlEF1LQVuU.

⁸ Martha Nussbaum, “Powerlessness and the Politics of Blame,” Jefferson Lecture, July 12, 2017. https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/martha-c-nussbaums-jefferson-lecture-powerlessness-and-politics-blame. This lecture contains material from Martha Nussbaum, The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018).

⁹ See Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love (New York: New York University Press, 2009), in particular, chapter 2, “Telling the World”; Leah Garrett, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015); Josh Lambert, “Fictions of Anti-Semitism,” American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 44–58.

¹⁰ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 172.

¹¹ Deborah Dash Moore, “Jewish GIs and the Creation of the Judeo-Christian Tradition,” Religion and American Culture 8 (Winter 1998): 32–33.

¹² Scholars of other traditions have also heeded Moore's call. Rosemary Corbett's study of Muslim Americans asserting national belonging through community service is a good example. Rosemary Corbett, “For God and Country: Religious Minorities Striving for National Belonging through Community Service,” Journal of Religion and American Culture 26, no. 17 (Summer 2016): 227–59. In providing community service, marginalized Jews and Christians demonstrated loyalty to the United States, Corbett argues, showing that after World War II, Muslims continued this trend and “sought to have their civic contributions recognized, as well, and helped make community service the proving grounds for claims that [the] United States could be an Abrahamic country, rather than just a ‘Judeo-Christian’ one.” Corbett, “For God and Country,” 229.

¹³ Matthew Jacobson provides excellent analysis of the interchangeability of gentile and Jew in Gentleman's Agreement in Matthew Frye Jacobson, “Becoming Caucasian: Vicissitudes of Whiteness in American Politics and Culture,” Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power 8, no. 1 (2001): 83–104.

¹⁴ Richard Wrightman Fox describes twentieth-century liberal Protestantism as “a potent social, political, and intellectual force because it was so accommodating.” Fox writes of the way liberal Protestantism became a natural match for progressive social movements: “The ability of liberal Protestantism to convey a persuasive aura of spiritual coherence and cultural unity, while laying down a broad welcome mat to an array of secular and religious forces, made it an indispensable ideological bulwark for a diverse and disjointed progressive movement.” Richard Wrightman Fox, “The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism, 1875–1925,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 640.

¹⁵ Interestingly, much later in her novel-writing career, Hobson would make an important contribution to gay literature through her 1975 novel Consenting Adult, which she told from the perspective of the straight parents of a gay son. Hobson employed a similar strategy as she had in Gentleman's Agreement: By making the parents the protagonists, she provided heterosexual readers with a model for change. Consenting Adult described the parents’ heroic coming to terms with their son's situation. As she had done in Agreement, in Consenting Adult, Hobson provided a tool for change for the majority culture.

¹⁶ The religious pluralism of Gentleman's Agreement's 1940s New York is very similar to that described in J. Terry Todd's study of the 1939–1940 New York World's Fair, wherein the New York organizers of the Temple of Religion “hoped to present a prescriptive picture of religious harmony, a veritable exhibit of the future of American religious pluralism,” that was made possible by excluding certain traditions. J. Terry Todd, “The Temple of Religion and the Politics of Religious Pluralism: Judeo-Christian America at the 1939–1940 New York World's Fair,” in After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, eds. Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 203.

¹⁷ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 122. The party is one of many examples of Hobson creating a scene that enacts pluralism, in line with Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen's idea of pluralism as “casting prescriptive norms of identity.” Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen, eds. “Introduction,” in After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 2.

¹⁸ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 121–22.

¹⁹ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 121.

²⁰ J. Terry Todd describes 1930s and 1940s New York as a place “where Protestants (well-placed white Protestants, at least), shared power with influential Catholics and Jews—not always on equal footing, to be sure, but in culturally significant ways nonetheless. This new American reality had been dawning since the late nineteenth century in New York and in other major cities, but the pace of change had accelerated in the early twentieth century. Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish elites increasingly met and mingled in Manhattan's marketplaces, if not in their respective social clubs. New York's elites shared a stake in maintaining a stable city, but they sensed tensions that threatened to disrupt civic life and business affairs.” Todd, “The Temple of Religion,” 205.

²¹ See Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Anti-antisemitism fiction was particularly good at showing the way antisemitism seeped into every facet of life, casting a pall over new beginnings for young people. For instance, Gwethalyn Graham's Earth and High Heaven describes the effects of antisemitism on a new love affair between Marc Reiser and Erika Drake. Throughout the novel, Reiser reflects on how antisemitism has colored his experiences, including his starting university. Reiser had left home “full of hope and illusions,” only to return to his parents’ home dejected and somewhat depressed about the reality of attending university as a marginalized Jew on a big campus. Reiser's father suggests he try a small-town university: “Then when you're ready for law school, you'll be older and you'll have had a chance to get used to it gradually.” Gwethalyn Graham, Earth and High Heaven (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1944), 294.

²² Historian Kirsten Fermaglich's study of American Jewish name-changing offers an excellent perspective on the corrosive and unofficial nature of twentieth-century antisemitism. Kirsten Fermaglich, A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America (New York: New York University Press, 2018).

²³ Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial (New York: Schocken Books, 2011), xiv.

²⁴ Harold Ribalow, This Land, These People (New York: The Beechhurst Press, 1950), 4.

²⁵ Ribalow, This Land, These People, 4.

²⁶ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 139–40.

²⁷ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 200.

²⁸ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 201. On antisemitism limiting career and professional options during the 1920s through the 1940s, see Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 158–60. As Dinnerstein's book suggests, 1920 through the early 1940s was likely the worst part of the twentieth century for antisemitic discrimination.

²⁹ Leonard Dinnerstein describes an “avalanche of movies, studies, and critical assessments of antisemitism” that “both aroused and reflected national concern” during the 1940s. Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 153.

³⁰ Two 1947 films about antisemitism caused Saturday Review critic John Mason Brown to praise the films’ daring “to speak publicly for the first time on a subject [of] which movie goers have long spoken privately.” John Mason Brown, “If You Prick Us,” Saturday Review of Literature, 30 (December 6, 1947): 69.

³¹ See Naomi Cohen, Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), “Overview: 1945–1965,” 123–30. Salo Baron wrote, “Keen observers have indeed noted a marked decline in overt anti-Semitic propaganda in the United States and other lands. According to a well-informed Jewish leader, it no longer pays to be a professional anti-Semite in America.” Salo Baron, “The Year in Retrospect,” American Jewish Year Book 1947–1948, 108. Even the House Un-American Activities Committee, which targeted many Jews, and the Rosenberg trial in the early 1950s did not incite virulent antisemitism, although Jewish defense agency leaders feared they would. Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 164. As Stephen Norwood argues, antisemitism intensified between the 1924 immigration restriction act and 1944, declining in the postwar years. Stephen Norwood, “Marauding Youth and the Christian Front: Antisemitic Violence in Boston and New York during World War II,” Journal of American Jewish History (June 2003): 233–67. The 1948–1949 American Jewish Year Book also noted a “striking literary trend toward increased concern with the problems of anti-Semitism and intermarriage.” Shalom Kahn, “Cultural Activities,” American Jewish Year Book 1948–1949, 180. David Hollinger observes, “Opinion polls showed that antisemitism declined sharply in 1947, having maintained prewar levels throughout the war itself. But this change in public attitudes, especially as it affected higher education, was directly stimulated by a campaign mounted by liberal journalists and politicians against ‘un-American’ discriminatory practices in the context of a victorious war against Hitler.” David Hollinger, Jews, Science, and Secular Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 9.

³² Hollinger, Jews, Science, and Secular Culture, 9.

³³ James Marshall, “The Anti-Semitic Problem in America,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1941.

³⁴ Marshall, “The Anti-Semitic Problem in America.”

³⁵ “Stay Out of Texas, House Roars Out to Lindberg,” Austin Statesman, September 18, 1941, 1. The reckoning with antisemitism that took place in the wake of Lindbergh's Des Moines speech differed from the public uproar after Kristallnacht, in 1938, because it focused on Americans and antisemitism. On the coding of Nazis as evil after Kristallnacht, see Jeffrey Alexander, “The Social Construction of Moral Universals,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002): 14–15. “Willkie Terms Lindbergh's Des Moines Talk Un-American,” The Sun, September 14, 1941, 1; Dewey Assails Lindbergh for Des Moines Talk, Chicago Daily Tribune, September 15, 1941, 9.

³⁶ On America First's response to Lindbergh's speech, see Herman Klurfeld, Winchell, His Life and Times (New York: Praeger, 1976), 90. The America First comments were also reported on in the New York Times: “The Un-American Way” (editorial), New York Times, September 26, 1941, 22.

³⁷ “The Un-American Way,” 22.

³⁸ “The Un-American Way,” 22.

³⁹ “The Un-American Way,” 22.

⁴⁰ The publication of two 1948 articles in the Atlantic Monthly about Jews changing or not changing their last names as a result of antisemitism similarly suggested the public's interest. See An Anonymous Jewish American, “I Changed My Name,” Atlantic Monthly (February 1948); David L. Cohn, “I've Kept My Name,” Atlantic Monthly (April 1948).

⁴¹ Bruce Bliven, “Discrimination—and Its Origin,” New York Times, March 21, 1948, BR3.

⁴² In his multipart expose of antisemitism for the New Republic in 1947, Bruce Bliven argued that “anti-Semitism is only one aspect, and in this country at this time, not even the most important, of the vicious doctrine of racial-religious hostility.” Bliven explains, “I am writing about anti-Semitism because it offers a good ‘case history’ in this general field.” Bruce Bliven, “U.S. Antisemitism Today,” New Republic, December 3, 1947, 16.

⁴³ Judith Weisenfeld describes the connections that actors, directors, and producers of anti-antisemitism films felt about their work on films relating to Jews and antisemitism and approaches to addressing discrimination against African-Americans. Judith Weisenfeld, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African-American Religion in American Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 208–209. Leonard Dinnerstein writes that “the decline in prejudicial remarks aimed at Jews was part of a general lessening in all American bigotry.” Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 152. An example of the way popular culture's embrace of anti-antisemitism segued into its treatment of other minorities is evident in the 1949 film Home of the Brave, based on the 1945 play by Jewish playwright Arthur Laurents. The play had been about antisemitism and featured a Jewish protagonist, but when sold to Hollywood, the Jewish lead, Private First Class Peter Coen, was replaced with a black character because, Laurents was told, “Jews have been done.” In April 1949, the Los Angeles Sentinel, an African-American newspaper, reported that Home of the Brave producer Stanley Kramer had been interested in the play because of its antisemitism theme, but because of other anti-antisemitism films (Gentleman's Agreement and Crossfire), he had been unable to get financial backing for another movie on that topic, and so changed the main character from Jewish to African-American. “Home of the Brave Is First Film to Probe Anti-Negro Bitterness in United States,” Los Angeles Sentinel, April 14, 1949, C5.

⁴⁴ Dinnerstein notes that “no ethnic group had defense agencies as well organized and as well financed as those of the Jews.” Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 153.

⁴⁵ The fact that lynchings of African-Americans in the South continued into the 1940s, and that 120,000 Japanese-Americans had been sent to internment camps in the southern and western United States following Pearl Harbor, was not brought up in the anti-antisemitism literature of the 1940s, but awareness of these American atrocities may have been a source of distress for at least some readers.

⁴⁶ Crossfire was a 1947 film noir drama, directed by Edward Dmytrick, based on the 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole by Richard Brooks (Reuben Sax). It received five Oscar nominations.

⁴⁷ The principle of aiding refugees was written into American law, in the 1948 Displaced Persons Act and in later legislation. This is one example of how anti-antisemitism in the late 1940s became part of postwar America's global moral leadership.

⁴⁸ As Leonard Dinnerstein writes of the postwar decline in antisemitism, “Anti-semitism, of course, did not disappear between 1945 and 1969 but as a less socially acceptable aspect of American life it waned significantly.” Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 150.

⁴⁹ Leonard Dinnerstein describes how, after World War II, “anti-Semitism had not been erased from people's hearts and minds. Anti-Semitism . . . had simply become unfashionable and unpopular, and had therefore gone underground.” Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 165.

⁵⁰ Saul Austerlitz, “When Hollywood Was Scared to Depict Antisemitism, It Made ‘Gentleman's Agreement,’” in Antisemitism in North America: New World, Old Hate (New York: Brill, 2016), 395.

⁵¹ Earlier writers had also tried to make the case for antisemitism as a problem requiring an American solution. To take an earlier example, in his 1939 article “What Can the Jews Do?” for the Virginia Quarterly Review, reprinted in Readers Digest, Jewish writer Lewis Browne concluded: “We are hopelessly outnumbered. So why ask what we Jews are going to do about it? The proper question is: What do you Gentiles have in mind?” Lewis Browne, “What Can the Jews Do?” Readers Digest 34, no. 204 (April 1939): 77.

⁵² Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 268.

⁵³ Howard W. Cosell to Laura Z. Hobson, March 4, 1947. Box 20, GA Correspondence, fan mail 1947. Laura Z. Hobson collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

⁵⁴ “‘It was unbearable,’ remembered Alfred Kazin of seeing the carnage of Belsen at a Piccadilly cinema. ‘People coughed in embarrassment, and in embarrassment many laughed.’” Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Oxford, 1985), x. When American Generals George Patton, Omar Bradley, and Dwight Eisenhower made their first discovery of a Nazi camp, in April 1945, their reactions included shock over what the Nazis had done and total repugnance. Eisenhower famously remarked: “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he was fighting for. Now at least he will know what is fighting against.”

⁵⁵ The August 1945 Harrison Report, which examined the plight of Holocaust survivors in displaced persons camps in postwar Europe, criticized camp conditions, and recommended allowing Jewish displaced persons to emigrate to the United States and Palestine, was one example of how 1945 news from Europe may have helped to change public opinion about European Jews toward a sympathetic response. The Harrison Report made front page news of the New York Times on September 30, 1945, with the headline, “President Orders Eisenhower to End New Abuse of Jews; He acts on Harrison Report, Which Likens Our Treatment to that of the Nazis.”

⁵⁶ “Between 1942 and 1944, the U.S. State Department and the Office of War Information suppressed reports of Germany's genocidal campaign. Both agencies had worried that such stories would be perceived as wartime propaganda or would be focused too narrowly on Jewish victimization and the European fronts.” Lawrence Baron, “The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945–1960,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 64. Lawrence Baron writes, “What began as a trickle of information in 1942 became a torrent in 1945 when Allied troops liberated the remaining survivors in German concentration and death camps.” Baron, “The Holocaust,” 64. Adding to the American inability to fully understand what was happening to European Jews was the fact that news reports prior to 1942 had not always made it clear that Jews were Hitler's primary victims. “The Nazi concentration camp was the most common symbol of the enemy regime, and its archetypal inmate was usually represented as a political oppositionist or member of the resistance.” Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 26.

⁵⁷ Henry Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 211–12; Richard Breitman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 33.

⁵⁸ Robert Abzug writes, “[T]he liberations made horrified believers out of the skeptics and brought a new and hideous sense of reality even to those who never doubted the worst.” Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart, 19. Peter Novick observes that, throughout the war, few Americans were aware of the scale of the European Jewish catastrophe: “That the man in the street was ill-informed about the Holocaust, as about so much, is hardly shocking. But lack of awareness was common among the highly placed and generally knowledgeable as well: only at the very end of the war did ignorance dissipate.” Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 24.

⁵⁹ Historian John McManus writes of the American soldiers who liberated camps in the spring of 1945: “Most had no idea what they were about to see. The average soldier disliked the Nazi regime and, in theory, understood the tyranny Hitler and his followers had imposed upon Europe.” John McManus, Hell before Their Eyes: American Soldiers Liberate the Concentration Campus in Germany, April 1945 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2015), 3. McManus writes that the Americans who saw the camps had a shocking and sickening experience. McManus, Hell before Their Eyes, 3–4.

⁶⁰ Edward R. Murrow, “They Died 900 a Day in ‘the Best’ Nazi Death Camp,” Old Time Radio, April 16, 1945. http://www.otr.com/ra/450415%20CBS%20Edward%20Murrow%20On%20Buchenwald.mp3.

⁶¹ Mark Bradley writes of the journalists’ encounter with the Nazis’ atrocities: “Many journalists reported that the shock of what they were seeing was often difficult to fully capture in words. A Baltimore Sun correspondent wrote, ‘You had heard of such things in Nazi Germany. . . . But now that you were actually confronted with the horror of mass murder, you stared at the bodies and almost doubted your own eyes.’” Mark Bradley, The World Reimagined: America and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 79.

⁶² Bradley, The World Reimagined, 80.

⁶³ Famously, Susan Sontag described the effect of seeing the photographs of the Nazi genocide as a child, in July 1945, as a “negative epiphany.” Sontag wrote, “Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, although it was several years before I understood fully what they were about. . . . When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror, I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.” Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Dell, 1979), 19–20. Carol Zemel writes of the encounter with the photographic images of the Holocaust, “For many viewers, they invoke the limits of human endurance; they call for moral reflection on human nature and the capacity for evil; for some, they offer an opportunity to mourn.” Carol Zemel, “Emblems of Atrocity: Holocaust Liberation Photographs,” in Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, eds. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 203.

⁶⁴ Americans had not necessarily been schooled in thinking of Nazi victims as Jews, because photographs of the concentration camp victims “were presented as images of unprecedented suffering without specific contextualization. They seldom appeared in such a way that viewers would know that vast numbers of victims were Jewish, murdered by the Nazis because they were Jews.” Instead, the captions to these photographs described these victims as “political prisoners,” “military prisoners,” and “slave laborers.” Bradley, The World Reimagined, 77. Even the idea that America's restrictive immigration policy made the United States an accessory to Nazi crimes only emerged in the 1960s, according to Baron. Baron, “The Holocaust,” 79.

⁶⁵ Historians sound a very skeptical note on the issue of Americans’ guilt over what had happened to the Jews. Peter Novick argues that “for the overwhelming majority of Americans, throughout the war . . . what we now call the Holocaust was neither a distinct entity nor particularly salient. The murder of European Jewry, insofar as it was understood or acknowledged, was just one among the countless dimensions of a conflict that was consuming the lives of tens of millions around the globe.” Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 29.

⁶⁶ On seeing the concentration camps in 1945 and the meaning that gave to the American contributions to World War II, see McManus, Hell before Their Very Eyes, 142, 146–47. At the June 1945 United Nations Conference in San Francisco, the comments of a U.S. diplomat revealed the kinds of connections Americans were making between Nazi evil and what American democracy needed to protect: “When you look at the atrocity pictures and read the story of what happened under Nazi and Fascist rule, you begin to see in concrete form that not only did you have the barbaric destruction of human life, but also the very deprivation of the most fundamental freedom.” Bradley, The World Reimagined, 84.

⁶⁷ Mrs. Irma M. Gasser to Laura Z. Hobson, March 27, 1947. Box 20, folder GA correspondence. Laura Z. Hobson Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscripts Library.

⁶⁸ Mrs. Irma M. Gasser to Laura Z. Hobson, March 27, 1947. Box 20, folder GA correspondence.

⁶⁹ Laura Z. Hobson to Mrs. Irma M. Gasser, April 10, 1947, Box 20, folder GA correspondence.

⁷⁰ Ibram Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: Penguin, 2019), 61.

⁷¹ Ishaan Tharoor, “What Americans Thought of Jewish Refugees on the Eve of World War II,” Washington Post, November 17, 2015.

⁷² The post–World War II years were certainly not the first time that groups of Americans sought to counteract intolerance. Jessica Cooperman describes a more limited version of tri-faith America during World War I in Making Judaism Safe for America: World War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism (New York: New York University Press, 2018). As Kevin Schultz has shown, the 1920s saw significant ecumenical efforts by clergy to fight intolerance across the country. Kevin Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Even before the end of World War II, groups such as the Council Against Intolerance worked to educate Americans about the threat that prejudice posed to national unity. One example is their 1940 diversity map of the United States, titled, “America—A Nation of One People from Many Countries,” by Emma Bourne. “The Council Against Intolerance commissioned Bourne's work in an effort to remind Americans that the U.S. had always defined itself as a country of varied national origins and religious backgrounds.” Lauren Young, “The Powerful 1940 Map That Depicts America as a Nation of Immigrants,” Atlas Obscura, February 6, 2017. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/map-monday-america-a-nation-of-one-people-from-many-countries. Daniel Okrent has shown that even eugenicists moved quickly to distance themselves from Nazism: “For many, each report of another Nazi law, another Hitler speech, was almost an accusation of complicity.” Daniel Okrent, The Guarded Gate (New York: Scribner, 2019), 374–75.

⁷³ Dinnerstein writes of a postwar change in attitudes: “Many Americans resolved to do something about bigotry in America. Thousands of veterans had lived with intolerance in the armed forces and hoped to reform the prejudiced nation they had left behind.” Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 151.

⁷⁴ Diana Trilling, “Americans without Distinction,” Commentary (March 1947), 290.

⁷⁵ David Hollinger, Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 54. Hollinger describes a group of midcentury books and cultural texts intended to express a universalism that could combat particularisms interpreted as evil.

⁷⁶ Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 77.

⁷⁷ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 52.

⁷⁸ As Amy Hungerford writes, President Eisenhower was described as “a very fervent believer in a very vague religion,” and the attitudes of 1950s Americans toward religion were often associated with a 1952 Eisenhower quotation: “Our government makes no sense, unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is.” As Hungerford (and Mark Silk in his book Spiritual Politics) points out, what Eisenhower actually said was, “In other words, our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.” Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 2. See also Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988). In 1955, Will Herberg explained this Eisenhower quotation as referring to the conviction, shared by many Americans of his time, that “at bottom the ‘three great faiths’ were really ‘saying the same thing’ in affirming the ‘spiritual ideals’ and ‘moral values’ of the American Way of Life.” Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 84. Herberg also explains the 1950s “Faith in faith” phenomenon as an American belief in the value of religion, or a “cult of faith.” Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, 84, 89; Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1, 1–21.

⁷⁹ Orsi describes good religion as the “rational, word-centered, nonritualistic, middle-class, unemotional, compatible with democracy and the liberal state” that has been taught and endorsed in academic institutions. Robert Orsi, “On Not Talking to the Press,” Religious Studies News 19, no. 3 (2004): 15. In her discussion of Orsi's framework, Fessenden adds that good religion is associated with freedom and enlightenment and is part of the progressive narrative of democracy. Traci Fessenden, Culture and Redemption (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 2–3.

⁸⁰ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 51–52.

⁸¹ Trilling, “Americans without Distinction,” 291–92.

⁸² Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 242.

⁸³ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 154.

⁸⁴ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 34. In his 1955 book Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Herberg wrote, “Not to be—that is, not to identify oneself and be identified as—either a Protestant, a Catholic, or a Jew is somehow not to be an American. . . . Americanness today entails religious identification as Protestant, Catholic, or Jew in a way and to a degree quite unprecedented in our history. To be a Protestant, a Catholic, or a Jew are today the alternative ways of being an American.” Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, 274. This teaching readers to think about Jews as one of three equal religious paths is also apparent in other anti-antisemitism novel—Gwethalyn Graham's Earth and High Heaven (1944), for example, in which the Jewish protagonist recalls his childhood in which “he was never singled out because he was Jewish. Protestants, Catholics, and Marc Reiser skated together in winter, playing baseball and went fishing in the spring, fished, swam, and played more baseball in the summer, and switched to football, rabbit hunting, hiking, and corn roasts in the autumn.” Graham, Earth and High Heaven, 293.

⁸⁵ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 34.

⁸⁶ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 34.

⁸⁷ In the 1940s, Hobson was not a Zionist. Although she received an advance from a Jerusalem publishing house, Gentleman's Agreement was not published in Hebrew, and Hobson believed she knew why: In the novel, the secular, Jewish scientist Professor Lieberman, who befriends Phil, explains views similar to Hobson's, when he says to Phil about the possibility of a Jewish state, “I can't talk to a positive Zionist any more than to a confirmed Communist—there is no language.” And later, Professor Lieberman says, “Don't let them pull the crisis over your eyes. You say you oppose all nationalism—then how can you fall for a religious nationalism? A rejoining of church and state after all these centuries? A kind of voluntary segregation?”

⁸⁸ Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 34.

⁸⁹ This dramatic shift is evident even within the 1940s: At the beginning of the decade, before the United States entered the war, isolationist Americans, with encouragement from Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh, tended to view Jews as members of a threatening race. Fermaglich, A Rosenberg by Any Other Name, 47. This midcentury process of Jewish integration into the American mainstream shows parallels to the Jewish Emancipation process in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, even though the former was not a legal process of making Jews citizens. Wendy Brown writes that “to be brought into the nation, Jews had to be made to fit, and for that they needed to be transformed, cleaned up, and normalized, even as they were still marked as Jews. These triple forces of recognition, remaking, and marking—of emancipation, assimilation, and subjection; of decorporatization as Jews.” Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 53.

⁹⁰ On the pressures on twentieth-century Jews to comply with expectations to fit into American conceptions of religion, see Laura Levitt, “Impossible Assimilations, American Liberalism and Jewish Difference: Revisiting Jewish Secularism,” American Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2007): 807–32.

⁹¹ On the postwar dismissal of Weidman and Schulberg, see J. L. Teller, “Everybody's Wasteland,” The Jewish Exponent, February 22, 1946, 5; the movie review of I Can Get It for You Wholesale: Edward Barry, “One Handkerchief Formula Is Put to Good Use in Film: I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 28, 1951, A4; a de-Judaized review: Bosley Crowther, “Fox Film, ‘I Can Get It for You Wholesale, Opens at Roxy,” New York Times, April 5, 1951, 34.

⁹² David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History across Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 7. Wendy Brown writes of the emancipation process for French Jews that, in order to be brought into the nation, “Jews had to be made to fit, and for that they needed to be transformed, cleaned up, and normalized, even as they were still marked as Jews.” Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 53.

⁹³ Neither did other authors of anti-antisemitism literature. Gwethalyn Graham, for instance, includes a Yom Kippur scene at the end of Earth and High Heaven, in which the Jewish character, Marc Reiser, wonders, “What is a Jew? . . . He realized that his sense of identity with the men and women around him was more of race, of race suffering and race achievement, than of religion, for his religious convictions involved only a very simple belief in one God, one God for everyone regardless of sect and regardless of the form or worship.” A little later, Marc realizes, “Yet even the word ‘race’ was misleading, for even supposing there had been such a thing as a specifically Jewish race” (Graham, Earth and High Heaven, 289). In other anti-antisemitism novels, such as Saul Bellow's The Victim and Arthur Miller's Focus, the racial aspect of Jewishness remains more persistent throughout the story. In Jo Sinclair's Wasteland, both religious and racial conceptions of Jewishness are evident. In Wasteland, “Jewish blood” becomes a way to talk about Jewish race.

⁹⁴ The character of Professor Lieberman is portrayed as a secular Jew whose Jewishness is a matter of race and ethnicity. Lieberman's appearance is described as Jewish: “[T]he face of a Jew in a Nazi cartoon, the beaked nose, the blue jowls. And the curling black hair” (Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, 122).

⁹⁵ Jacobson, “Becoming Caucasian,” 93.

⁹⁶ On the persistence of racial understandings of Jewishness, see Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4, chapter 8.

⁹⁷ In Gwethalyn Graham's Earth and High Heaven (1944), the Protestant character Erika Drake falls in love with Marc Reiser, a Jewish lawyer, and struggles with how to think about his Jewishness. She realizes that in forming impressions of Jews, she had grown accustomed to starting with racial stereotypes. As Marc describes his brother, Dr. David Reiser, as “quite a good surgeon,” Erika realizes that she has been trying “to visualize David Reiser through a miasma of vague impressions associated with the word ‘Jewish’ even though his religion or his race or whatever it was that the adjective actually meant, happened to be entirely irrelevant.”⁹⁷ Earth and High Heaven displayed the confusion around defining Jewishness, but the racial thinking about Jews does not completely disappear. As Erika questions Marc about his Jewish background and the religiousness of his family, Marc's reply presents Jewishness in a way that that shows its resemblance to other religious identities—it constitutes one sliver of his identity. Marc explains his Jewish background to Erika as “more middle-class and small-town Ontario than particularly Jewish.”⁹⁷

⁹⁸ Alice W. Campbell, “Influence and Controversy. The Races of Mankind and The Brotherhood of Man,” Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries Social Welfare History Project, 2018. http://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/wwii-1950s/influence-controversy-races-mankind-brotherhood-man/.

⁹⁹ Campbell, “Influence and Controversy.” Viewed as “communistic” by Congress, the pamphlet was banned from the U.S. Army, which tried to order copies for servicemen. However, in 1945, the United Auto Workers hired the United Productions of America to adapt The Races of Mankind for the screen and it was made into a film, The Brotherhood of Man, as a training film to help with race relations in their integrated factories. “Brotherhood of Man (1945),” IMDb, 2021. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162213/. The film premiered at the Museum of Modern Art and was also criticized by anticommunists because of the involvement of leftists, such as Ring Lardner Jr. “Brotherhood of Man (1945),” National Film Preservation Foundation Association. https://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/brotherhood-of-man-1947.

¹⁰⁰ Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1943), 11.

¹⁰¹ Gwethalyn Graham's use of science in her anti-antisemitism novel bears some similarities. In Graham's Earth and High Heaven, Marc Reiser's brother, David, is an even more secular Jew and a doctor, whose good relationship with a local priest is explained as a result of David's primary identity as a scientist. “He put out a few feelers when he first came,” David Reiser says of the priest, “on the off chance of converting me, but I told him that my attitude toward religion in general, Judaism, Catholicism, or any other, was chiefly scientific, and after that he gave up. On the spiritual side, we have a strictly live and let live attitude toward each other.” Graham, Earth and High Heaven, 308. That David's identity is more scientific than religious is what allows him to have a good relationship with the priest.

¹⁰² Benedict and Weltfish, The Races of Mankind, 31.

¹⁰³ Zoe Trodd, American Protest Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), xix.

¹⁰⁴ Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 141. Tompkins writes, “Rhetoric makes history by shaping reality to the dictates of its political design; it makes history by convincing the people of the world that its description of the world is the true one.”

¹⁰⁵ Lester B. Granger, “New Books On Our Bookshelf,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 23, no. 1 (January–March 1945), 46.

¹⁰⁶ James Reid Parker, “Gentleman's Agreement,” Survey Graphic,” May 1947, 313.

¹⁰⁷ Parker, “Gentleman's Agreement,” 313. Janice Radway's study, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) is especially insightful on this gendered dynamic of middlebrow fiction reading. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, “Mrs. Hobson Deluged with Mail on Her Novel on Anti-Semitism,” New York Herald Tribune, March 9, 1947; Amazed to see it in a Hearst magazine: Ruth Follman to Miss Hobson, March 9, 1946, Box 20; Islip: Mrs. Dana Kopper to Mrs. Hobson, March 15, 1947; Mrs. Liebeskind to Miss Hobson, March 31, 1947, Laura Z. Hobson Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York.

¹⁰⁸ Rosemary Carr Benet, “Drawing Room ‘Abie's Irish Rose,’” Saturday Review, October 7, 1944, 9.

¹⁰⁹ Laura Z. Hobson to Richard Simon, September 24, 1944, Laura Z. Hobson collection, Columbia University Rare Books.

¹¹⁰ L. M. Birkhead to Laura Z. Hobson, February 21, 1947. Box 20, GA Correspondence, fan mail 1947.

¹¹¹ L. M. Birkhead to Laura Z. Hobson, February 21, 1947. Box 20, GA Correspondence, fan mail 1947.

¹¹² L. M. Birkhead to Laura Z. Hobson, February 21, 1947. Box 20, GA Correspondence, fan mail 1947.

¹¹³ Robert Mazer to Laura Z. Hobson, March 19, 1947. Box 20, GA Correspondence, fan mail 1947.

¹¹⁴ Laura Z. Hobson to Robert N. Mazer, April 12, 1947. Box 20, GA Correspondence, fan mail 1947.

¹¹⁵ Joshua Loth Liebman, “Gentleman's Agreement,” Addresses Broadcast by Stations WBZ and WBZA Sunday Morning, February 1 and February 15, 1948, from Temple Israel, Boston. Published and distributed by the Brotherhood of Temple Israel. Widener Library, Judaica collection.

¹¹⁶ Liebman, “Gentleman's Agreement,” Addresses Broadcast.

¹¹⁷ Faye Emerson Roosevelt to Laura Z. Hobson, March 7, 1947. Box 20, GA Correspondence, fan mail 1947.

¹¹⁸ Laura Z. Hobson to Mrs. Roosevelt, March 20, 1947. Box 20, GA Correspondence, fan mail 1947.

¹¹⁹ Laura Z. Hobson to Miss Wess. April 10, 1947. Box 20, GA Correspondence, fan mail 1947.

¹²⁰ September 10, 1944, letter to Richard Simon from Laura Z. Hobson, Box 21, Scrapbook, Columbia University Rare Books.

¹²¹ Miller, Focus, vi.

¹²² Kirsten Fermaglich's work on name-changing suggests that shame was a common reaction to antisemitism on the part of Jews during the 1920s and 1930s, writing that the fact that “[l]arge numbers of men and women with Jewish-sounding names used the vague terminology of ‘foreign’ or ‘difficult to pronounce,’ while Catholic men were much more willing to describe prejudice, suggests that Jews were uncomfortable talking about antisemitism and may have even been ashamed of their experience with discrimination.” Fermaglich, A Rosenberg by Any Other Name, 30.

¹²³ The American Jewish Committee's study of Gentleman's Agreement and Crossfire was one attempt to study this effectiveness. But even in late 1948, the film industry journal Boxoffice reported the uncertainty about the advisability of films about antisemitism: “American Jewry has been sharply divided in its opinion concerning the wisdom of Hollywood-made pictures designed to combat anti-Semitism through preachments for tolerance.” Ivan Spear, “Spearheads,” Boxoffice, October–December 1948, 50.

¹²⁴ Stuart Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 58.

¹²⁵ Sarah Imhoff, “Hoover's Judeo-Christians: Jews, Religion, and Communism,” The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security before and after 9/11 (Berkeley: UCLA Press, 2017), 125.

¹²⁶ Dinitia Smith, “Margaret Halsey, 86, a Writer Who Lampooned the English,” New York Times, February 7, 1997.

¹²⁷ In her 1977 autobiography, No Laughing Matter: The Autobiography of a Wasp, Halsey remembered the Stage Door Canteen as “the entertainment industry's best-known contribution to the national emergency. Housed in a cramped, low-ceilinged basement on West 44th Street, just off Times Square, it was only for enlisted men. Officers were not admitted.” Halsey, No Laughing Matter, 110. The 1943 film Stage Door Canteen added glamour to the canteen's image.

¹²⁸ Lester B. Granger, “New Books on Our Bookshelf,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 23 (January-March 1945): 46.

¹²⁹ Laura Z. Hobson to Richard Simon, September 24, 1944, Laura Z. Hobson collection, Columbia University Rare Books.

¹³⁰ Rachel Gordan, “The Precursor to ‘Gentleman's Agreement,’” Moment, November 11, 2014. https://momentmag.com/precursor-gentlemans-agreement/.

¹³¹ Letter from Laura Z. Hobson to Dick Simon, September 24, 1944. Laura Z. Hobson collection, Columbia University.

¹³² Halsey, No Laughing Matter, 113.

¹³³ Halsey, Some of My Best Friends Are Soldiers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), 67.

¹³⁴ William Du Bois, “Searing Novel of the South,” New York Times, March 5, 1944, 1.

¹³⁵ “Hub Head Cop Blackens City in Book Ban,” The Billboard 56, no. 14 (April 1, 1944): 3; Judith Louise Stephens, Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 222; Elizabeth Diefendorf, The New York Public Library's Books of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 58.

¹³⁶ On Strange Fruit as a model to publisher Richard Simon, see September 26, 1944, letter from Richard Simon to Laura Z. Hobson, Box 21, Scrapbook, Columbia University Rare Books.

¹³⁷ American associations between women and morality were rooted in nineteenth-century, postindustrialization separate spheres for men and women. This was an association demonstrated by Harriet Beecher Stowe, who located herself within a Protestant tradition of rebellion against authority, independence, and critical voices for reform. David S. Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

¹³⁸ Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011).

¹³⁹ Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword, xi. On the influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin, see also Bernstein, Racial Innocence.

¹⁴⁰ March 7, 1947, letter from Dorothy Fletcher to Laura Z. Hobson, Box 20, folder 5.

¹⁴¹ September 26, 1944, letter from Richard Simon to Laura Z. Hobson, Box 21, Scrapbook. Columbia University Rare Books.

¹⁴² September 26, 1944, letter from Richard Simon to Laura Z. Hobson, Box 21, Scrapbook. Columbia University Rare Books.

¹⁴³ Jeffrey S. Gurock, Jewish in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City (New York: New York University Press, 2012), xii.

¹⁴⁴ October 18, 1944, letter from Laura Z. Hobson to Richard Simon, Box 21, Scrapbook.

¹⁴⁵ October 18, 1944, letter from Laura Z. Hobson to Richard Simon, Box 21, Scrapbook.

¹⁴⁶ Wenger, Tisa, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sehat, David, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; and Hutchison, William, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar are three of the studies of the past twenty years that have taken on the topic of American religious freedom broadly. However, studies of Catholics, Jews, and Muslims in America have also.

¹⁴⁷ Tisa Wenger, Religious Freedom, chapter 4. The post–World War II era was not the first time that Jews were categorized as an American religion; although this era did witness the most powerful case for this classification, the World War I era also witnessed a more limited case for Judaism as an American religion. See Cooperman, Jessica, Making Judaism Safe for America: World War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism (New York: New York University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁸ Jacobson, Matthew, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 6Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁹ Tisa Wenger, American Religious Freedom, 186–87.

¹⁵⁰ Marty, Martin, The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 5Google Scholar.