- Confronting Anti-Semitism: Seeking an End to Hateful Rhetoric by Amos Kiewe
In his discussion of the four master tropes in A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke bookends metaphor and irony. Whereas metaphor invites us to see comparison where we would otherwise see difference, irony reifies contrast where we might otherwise see similarity. This positioning of the two tropes certainly relies on irony in its own right, which Burke observes when noting that criticism itself is inherently inventive and creative.
Amos Kiewe’s Confronting Anti-Semitism: Seeking an End to Hateful Rhetoric is a study indebted to Burke’s positioning of irony. By grounding, and largely restricting, this study to the religious foundation of anti-Semitism, Kiewe both invokes and suggests diffuse possibilities for irony’s place as a master trope. I should note that this isn’t Kiewe’s stated aim, though. Although this critique works with a predominantly Burkean vocabulary, its Burkean invocation is rooted more in familiar concepts of scapegoating, guilt, the pentad, and dramatis.
Though the book is torn between two central purposes, they often work well with each other. The title “seeks” an end to hateful rhetoric, but only the last chapter takes up this pursuit. The book largely comprises historical and contemporary case studies of religious, or religious-based, rhetoric of different sorts including Saint John Chrysostom’s fourth-century homilies as well as critical reads of twentieth- and twenty-first-century touch points such as The Protocols of the Wise Elders of Zion and the 2001 United Nations–sponsored Durban conference on racism, xenophobia, and “related intolerances.” This approach [End Page 757] of case study and close reading is acknowledged early as “the task of this volume” (9–10), and it rightly serves its contribution to our rhetorical understanding. It does indeed open the reader’s eye to “why Christian theology cannot completely shed its polemic in exchange for accurate historicity” (203).
The book begins by emphasizing the scholarly need for a “systematic rhetorical approach to anti-Semitism” (8). By positioning anti-Semitism as a “process of managing a community’s complex and often frustrating set of challenges and constraints through simplicity” (12), the book breaks down the power of facile hate. Kiewe rightly calls out Hannah Arendt’s ironic dismissal of the scapegoat in The Origins of Totalitarianism, for example, when addressing her positioning of philosemites’ need “to cleanse themselves of a stigma which they had mysteriously and wickedly loved” (26). Kiewe notes significantly that the rhetoric of hate is easier and thus more prominent, distilled, and easily perpetuated than the rhetoric of respect. Hate promotes hierarchy, while respect acknowledges and allows the more difficult prospect of equality (190).
Kiewe observes that precursor studies often focus on the scapegoat at the expense of guilt, the “motivational starting point” for scapegoating (17). He reminds us that scapegoating is an external projection of one’s internal guilt onto another, which points to the interdependency of the two concepts. Despite this, guilt in the book is often studied in terms of the projection, not the starting point. Put differently, the book often examines how the Jew’s guilt is understood by others rather than studying the guilt of those agents who scapegoat. The book’s conclusion, for example, stresses a Christian or Muslim need to ask a simple question: “Is the guilt of the Jew necessary for the survival of Christianity (or Islam)?” (205). Though raising the question may be productive in its own right, I wish the book offered more in terms of how this approach can help fulfill its stated goal to seek an end to the rhetoric of hate.
The shifting positioning of guilt and scapegoating points to other types of irony. Kiewe notes early on the familiar observation that anti-Semitism’s power rests in its mutability, that even oppositional messages can be interpreted to confirm anti-Semitic sentiment. In the final chapter, though, he invokes these “multiple and contradictory charges leveled against Jews” and “wishes that anti-Semites would make up their mind and decide...