The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

Such arrangements derived from a previously unpublicized section of the homesteading plan called the Good Neighbor Project, designed to introduce a steadily increasing number of non-Jewish residents into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods and in this way “enrich” the “Americanness” of everyone involved. What one heard at home, however—and sometimes even at school from our teachers—was that the underlying goal of the Good Neighbor Project, like that of Just Folks, was to weaken the solidarity of the Jewish social structure as well as to diminish whatever electoral strength a Jewish community might have in local and congressional elections. If the displacing of Jewish families and their replacement by the conscripting of Gentile families followed the timetable of the agency’s master plan, a Christian majority might well be dominant in at least half of America’s twenty most heavily populated Jewish neighborhoods as early as the start of Lindbergh’s second term and a resolution of America’s Jewish Question close at hand, by one means or another.