Arthur Miller and the Rhetoric of Ethnic Self-Expression

This paper uses some key scholarship on ethnicity, including work by Glazer, Moynihan, Sollors, and Hollinger, as a backdrop for re-examining specific plays by Arthur Miller, especially The Crucible and After the Fall. While looking closely at distinctive expressions of ethnicity related to Miller's Jewish-American status, the paper argues that the playwright should not be thought of as a “pluralist” or “cosmopolitanist” but rather as a “universalist.” Miller deserves distinctive credit for his ability to invoke situations where rhetoric transcends the particularities of ethnicity and sheds light not just on American, or Jewish, or Jewish-American history, but also, for example, on the current situation in the Middle East. The playwright also demonstrates how rigid identification with one side of a conflict can blind us to the omnipresence of evil.