Against anti-Semitism, but not against it alone:

Hollywood’s Gregory Peck, who died last week, looked perfect for the role of what is known in Jewish tradition as the Righteous Gentile. In his prime, he’d have been a great Schindler, in Schindler’s List.

In that mode, he is best known as the lawyer defending a black man in To Kill a Mockingbird; but he also starred in 1947’s Gentleman’s Agreement, adapted by Moss Hart from a novel and directed by Elia Kazan. It won three Oscars, including best film.

The plot follows a reporter who explores anti-Semitism by posing as a Jew.

His experience is unpleasant but not awfully intense. The Holocaust is not stressed, it may not even be mentioned. The villainy of anti-Semitism is more asserted than demonstrated — but then that’s the point. In the background lurks Nazi Germany’s rise in the 1930s, which had been not just anti-Semitic, but officially racist — yet which had evoked no massive condemnation in the rest of the West. Serious people decried it, but mainstream opinion had tolerated and often admired it.

Gentleman’s Agreement announced, as only a Hollywood film can, a new official ideology: tolerance or, you might say, intolerance of intolerance.

The movie was about anti-Semitism, but the rest of an inclusive, liberal agenda was implied — even if a comparable Hollywood film on “Negroes” didn’t come until 1958’s The Defiant Ones, about a black convict and white convict shackled together.

A year later, in 1948, Jackie Robinson became the first black player in baseball’s major leagues.

For that generation, rejection of anti-Semitism had become the emblem of their common links with humanity (universal “brotherhood”) and an idealism that included high hopes for the newly born United Nations. Fighting anti-Semitism seemed symbolic of that larger worldview, which helps account for their devotion to it. (I think, at random, of the late Peter Gzowski.)

Looking back, it’s startling how that nexus has unravelled.

Jews and African-Americans or Canadians are often now on opposite sides of social issues. At the Durban conference on racism, the anti-racists were accused of anti-Semitism, and the anti-anti-Semites were charged with racism.

The main allies of Jews in their fight against anti-Semitism are seen to be not those of the past, but rather the Christian right — or the mighty American state. Anti-Semitism remains a factor in the world and a malignity that needs fighting; but there was a time when that fight was entangled in a larger web of battles for justice. Gregory Peck and his film — a bit formulaic, maybe a tad robotic — embodied that moment.

Nationalism for the sake of something:

Pierre Bourgault, who died in Montreal this week at 69, also embodied an earlier version of a struggle still around, in different form, today: Quebec nationalism.

Most obituaries in English stressed what is always called his fiery oratory — though he wrote beautifully, too; he was one of those rare souls graceful in both the oral and written traditions — along with his unremitting commitment to Quebec independence.

What I’d like to insist on is his constant commitment as a social democrat, as well.

There was a time when Quebec’s independence was not sought for its own sake, or to overcome some sense of humiliation, or to finally see that fleur-de-lis flap at the UN. It was sought to allow the people of Quebec the ability to create a more egalitarian society as they saw fit.

Pierre Bourgault never abandoned that stance, not after he led his own, more militant movement into René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois in 1967, nor when he left the PQ in disgust after the 1980 referendum. He abhorred those who undermined public services such as health, education and the environment, in order to turn them over to the rich.

He remained, he said, a “fierce defender” of unions, who were responsible for “all the progress we have known in the world of work for a century.” Unions often gave him headaches, but he considered them crucial to any just, democratic society. “This is not a matter of religion,” he wrote. “It is a matter of dignity.” I don’t know anyone who has put the case for unions better.

I’d like to put in a word for Bourgaultian nationalism (nationalism with social content) in the current version of the world. In this unipolar, globalized reality, nation-states appear ensconced as much or more than ever. Never mind why, they just are.

Must they be as archaic as the Balkans or as impoverished as the former Soviet republics? In the Mideast, for instance, we hear that secular nationalism had its chance and failed: The sole alternatives now are U.S.-dominated, pseudo-democratic satrapies or Islamic republics.

What I don’t see is why it’s not possible to have another go at the kind of nationalism that Pierre Bourgault advocated for Quebec: social, democratic and truly independent. Is there some rule I’m missing?

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.