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background players and those in the scene where people are selling valuables to arrange passage
to Lisbon are probably Jews. And if they are it’s the only place we see them.

One might argue that Rick or Laszlo who are both bucking the Nazi status quo, could be
Jewish. Closer examination of the film lead us to the conclusion they are not. At first Rick is a
mysterious character who is only described as American. We do not know how or why he came
to be in Casablanca. There is enough, however, in the story to allow us to discount Rick as a
Jewish character. While the people of Casablanca know little about him. The Nazis know a great
deal. Major Strasser presents a detailed dossier on Rick Blaine and makes no mention of
Jewishness. This would have been a perfect place to identify him as Jewish in the story. Victor
Laszlo, is the more likely choice, having spent time in a concentration camp. Still there is enough
evidence to do so. Laszlo’s time in the camp, it was a result of his involvement with the
resistance. Neither of these characters is ever identified as Jewish when doing so would be
logical. Thus, even if they were Jewish, we as an audience don’t know it and can’t assume it.
Despite the time frame of Casablanca and its storyline, escaping the Nazis, there are no Jewish
characters of note. We are left to see them as characters in the background, characters who have
no impact on us.

In a movie about anti-Semitism there must certainly be a strong Jewish character fighting
to rid the society of this hatred of Jews. The Gentlemen’s Agreement is a movie about a writer,
Philip Green, who goes ‘undercover” as a Jew to find out about and expose anti-Semitism. What
he finds, in addition to anti-Semitism, is that he seems to be the only one bothered by it. The
Jewish characters in the movie include a successful industrialist, his secretary, who is hiding her
Judaism and his closest friend, Dave, who has accepted that anti-Semitism exists and once
confronted with it learned to cope. The secretary has just hidden her Judaism by changing her