In the year after passage of the new immigration law, fewer than 10,000 European Jews were able to enter on an annual basis. Between 18, approximately two million European Jews entered the country. The most immediate impact of the new law was the restriction of eastern Europeans, particularly Jews, from entering the United States. Immigration researcher, Richard Adler writes:
The novel is published in 1925, just one year after the historic Johnson-Reed Immigration Act which addresses the influx of immigrants. It is my contention that Fitzgerald was simply reflecting the way many Americans felt about Jews during a time when Jewish immigration to the U.S. Specifically, I look at Fitzgerald’s characterization of his Jewish character, Meyer Wolfsheim, and his relationships with Jewish people. The purpose of this article is to examine whether Fitzgerald hated Jews or if he reflected the attitude toward Jews that was predominant at that time in America, or both. The disparity forces us to question whether Fitzgerald had anti-Semitic tendencies, or if he created a character based on his perception of what the public would expect a Jewish character to be like. This begs the question of why Fitzgerald would go to such lengths to create a Jewish character the public would find repugnant instead of one as refined as the man he is based on. Pauly says “Rothstein‘s skills at engineering social mobility so far surpassed those of Gatsby that he would have had no need for him…Rothstein was a man of enormous experience and sophistication… he acquired the dress and demeanor of a man about town and successfully won the confidence of the well-to-do” (225). In fact, it seems Fitzgerald went to some effort to make Wolfsheim appear crude and unrefined, when in truth the model for the character was just the opposite. That Rothstein was a well-spoken man with impeccable manners never makes it into the book. Scott Fitzgerald made it clear that Wolfsheim was based on Rothstein in a letter he wrote saying: “I selected the stuff to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness’… always starting from the small focal point that impressed me-my own meeting with Arnold Rothstein for instance” (Pauly 225).
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About Wolfsheim, Gatsby tells Nick “he’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919” (72), something we know to be true of Rothstein.īut the man with hair luxuriating in each of his nostrils, with the tiny eyes, is not the well groomed Arnold Rothstein known by his associates although F. The character is based on real life gangster, Arnold Rothstein. As Nick is our impartial, Midwestern, and seemingly good natured narrator, we can only infer that his assessment of Wolfsheim as nothing more than an ugly Jew with nose hair, is the assessment that would be made by much of America at the time. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half darkness” (Fitzgerald 69). Nick Carraway introduces us to Meyer Wolfsheim saying “a small flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, we meet one Jewish character. We can also see how the depiction of Jews in books has evolved (or has it?) since The Great Gatsby was published nearly a century ago. These traits can be examined and addressed to get a better understanding of the story and events in American society at the time of authorship and the potential reflection of American anti-Semitism at the time of publication. An examination of the anti-Semitism in The Great Gatsby gives us an opportunity to analyze treatment of Jews in other iconic works of American literature. Now, with maturity and life experience, the characterization of Meyer Wolfsheim as ugly, insincere and menacing strikes me like a slap in the face. Many years later as a graduate student at the University of Akron, I was enrolled in a course in Modern American Fiction in which we read the book. At the time I realized the illustration of Meyer Wolfsheim fell into stereotypical territory, but I didn’t dwell on it. In the late 1970s I was enrolled in a suburban high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Like many Americans I first encountered The Great Gatsby as a student. Scott Fitzgerald’s stereotypical depiction of his one Jewish character, Meyer Wolfsheim. Students examine and often re-examine the novel at different times throughout their lives, yet there are subtleties in the book of meaning and importance which escape the attention of many analytic reviews. The Great Gatsby is included in the Common Core exemplars for literature, it’s rare to find a high school or university in the United States that doesn’t teach it, making it one of the most analyzed novels in modern American literature.