Gentleman's Agreement

Widowed now for seven years, Phil Green, who uses his middle name "Schuyler" Green as his pen name for the commentaries he writes primarily on social issues, has just moved from Los Angeles to New York City with his mother and preteen son Tommy to start work in the main office of his company, Smith's Weekly, a national magazine. His editor, John Minify, suggests as his first story a series on antisemitism. He is not enthralled with the topic, which he feels has been covered by all pertinent angles by a multitude of writers, until Tommy asks him about the entire nature of the subject, he who has no idea what it all means and why. Even then, Schuyler is having problems coming up with a suitable angle. But he does come up with what he believes is a new and fresh angle: he will pretend to be Jewish for the period that he is writing the series, he reverting back the more Jewish sounding Phil Green as his name, and as such he will be his own guinea pig. The only people who will know that he is really a gentile is his family, Minify, his wife and who becomes Schuyler's girlfriend, Minify's niece, divorced schoolteacher Kathy Lacy, who came up with the antisemitism story idea to begin with. Through this process, "Phil" will encounter much racism, not only against Jews but other minorities, and from unexpected sources. Although he expected open racism, it is the people who stand by and watch it happen without doing anything about it that ends up bothering him the most. He expected the process to affect his own life, which he could handle, but he may not be able to handle how it affects those around him, most specifically his mother, who is facing some health issues, Tommy and Kathy, the latter with whose relationship is also affected. His long time friend, Dave Goldman, who often shortens it to the less Jewish sounding Dave Gold, may be able to give Phil and those around him a better perspective of what is happening.