c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Arthur Miller, who died recently at age 89, was one of America’s greatest playwrights along with Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams.

While most attention centers on Miller’s best known dramas: “Death of a Salesman,” “All My Sons,” “After the Fall,” and “The Crucible,” I am especially drawn to two other works in which Miller probes into the irrational sources of anti-Semitism, and the imperative to confront and defeat this social pathology.

Miller, an American Jew born in New York City, initially faced anti-Semitism in his first job as an employee in an auto parts warehouse. He saved enough money to finance his college education at the University of Michigan, and during World War II he worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

In 1945 he published “Focus” a novel about an anti-Semitic Gentile, Lawrence Newman, who is mistakenly taken to be a Jew. Newman never questions his bigotry; his prejudice against Jews is simply a part of his American value system.

Miller’s “everyman” character, the forerunner of his more celebrated Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman,” loses his job because he is a “Jew,” and is beaten up by a group of anti-Semitic thugs. To protect himself, Newman embraces the prevailing hatred of Jews in society, including his wife’s anti-Semitism.

But it doesn’t work. Physical violence and bigotry have made him a “Jew” and Newman allies himself with his Jewish neighbor, Finkelstein, who is also battling anti-Semitism.

For Miller, Jews represent the convenient “outcast” and “stranger” in society. He believes every human being needs to blame someone else for one’s own deficiency: “Each man has his Jew, it is the other.”

Finkelstein asks Newman _ or is it really Miller asking an anti-Semitic America _ “Don’t you see what they’re doing? What the hell can they get out of the Jews … How many times must it happen, how many wars we got to fight before you will understand what they are doing to you …”

At the end of the novel, Newman is indeed, a New Man, standing in solidarity with his Jewish neighbor against the bigots who use anti-Semitism to hide their goal of suppression and control. An excellent film version of “Focus” was released in 2001.

Miller wrote “Incident at Vichy,” in 1964 after attending Nazi war crimes trials in Frankfurt a few years earlier. The drama takes place during World War II when the German occupation in France constantly rounded up people for prison, concentration camp, and frequently mass murder.

In Miller’s play, 10 strangers are arrested together, including a Jewish psychiatrist and an Austrian prince. Another arrestee, a businessman, is convinced the arrests are merely routine, and the “law” will soon release them.

However, the Jews in the group know differently: they know the Germans will kill them. The psychiatrist confronts the Austrian nobleman and rebukes him for not resisting the anti-Semitic Nazi evil when the prince had a chance. For Miller, “non-resistance” is as immoral as compliance with oppression.

Miller’s Jewish doctor tells the Austrian aristocrat who passively went along with the Nazis: “It’s not your guilt I want, it’s your responsibility that might have helped … You might have done something then.” Now it is too late, the Jew and prince are both prisoners of the Nazis.

Miller’s response is a democratic humanism in which humans struggle constantly against authority, never accepting the conventions of the moment, be it popular anti-Semitism in America, murderous Nazism, McCarthyism, or witchcraft trials in Salem, Mass.

In Miller’s personal case, it meant refusing to give names of colleagues suspected of being subversives to the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee in 1956, the same year his alma mater, the University of Michigan, awarded him an honorary doctorate. For his refusal, Miller was cited for contempt of Congress, a charge later dismissed in court.

In 1978, Miller declared that he had become “far more aware of what Jewishness meant to me. I quite honestly hadn’t such a sensation earlier on. It probably was suppressed by the fact that we lived in a country with a lot of anti-Semitism in the ’30s and ’40s … what that does to somebody is to suppress his identity … my father nor mother could speak Yiddish … but … the establishment of a new Jewish state (Israel in 1948) meant a lot to me … ”

Another character in “Incident at Vichy,” succinctly sums up Arthur Miller’s moral view of humanity: “None of us is alone. We’re members of history. Some of us don’t know it, but you’d better learn it for your own preservations.”

KRE/JL END RUDIN

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)