The Jewish Question in the New Rhetorics of Kenneth Burke and Chaïm Perelman David A. Frank “I was very anti-Semitic, but I certainly got over it… I got over the damn thing, but it was there for quite a while. 1 —Kenneth Burke “The second form of assimilation is that which enriches and develops, which allows a complete Jew to live also as a complete man.” 2 —Chaïm Perelman “Precisely because it constitutes the ultimate scandal of reason, the Nazi genocide forces us today to consider the Jewish question as the “turning point in history.” 3 —Christian Delacampagne In his remarkable book, Confronting Anti-Semitism: Seeking an End to Hateful Rhetoric, Amos Kiewe calls rhetorical scholars to study the disease of anti-Semitism from a rhetorical perspective, correctly observing they have largely ignored the subject. 4 Kiewe develops in his book a method, drawn from the rhetorical theories of Kenneth Burke, to illuminate the origins and expressions of what Robert Wistrich describes as the “world’s longest hatred;” anti-Judaism and its contemporary mutation, anti-Semitism. 5 Kiewe has, with this book, established a touchstone rhetorical scholars can use to unveil the symbolic inner workings of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. I anticipate that his book will become a standard citation for rhetorical critics. There is an unspoken irony, one that is painful, in Kiewe’s choice of Burke as a theorist: As Janice Fernheimer reveals in this issue, Burke was an anti-Semite, in his own words, “for quite a while.” 6 Yet there is a redemptive counterpoint in Kiewe’s use of Burkean theory to unpack the rhetoric of anti-Semitism. Burke wrote the first serious critique of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1939 under the title “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle” which revealed the rhetorical, religious, and Jungian influences in Hitler’s anti- Judaic and anti-Semitic tract. 7 Hitler’s eliminationist anti-Semitism appalled Burke. Hitler, Burke declared, “fixed me up,” using language from the early 20th century that meant “healed me” by shocking him into deploying the tools of rhetoric he had been 1 Quoted in William Cahill, ""Always Keep Watching for Terms": Visits with Kenneth Burke, 1989-90," KB Journal 7, no. 2 (2011): http://kbjournal.org/cahill accessed 5 January 2016. 2 Chaïm Perelman, “Réflexions sur l’assimilation.” La Tribune juive 12 (27 December 1935): 154. My thanks to Michelle Bolduc for the translations. 3 Christian Delacampagne, A History of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 173. 4 Amos Kiewe, Confronting Anti-Semitism: Seeking an End to Hateful Rhetoric (Leicester, UK: Troubador Pub., 2011), vii. 5 Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (London: Thames Methuen, 1991). 6 Cahill, ""Always Keep Watching for Terms": Visits with Kenneth Burke, 1989-90." 7 Kenneth Burke, "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle," in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).