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Franz Kafka
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The Schmooze Who invited that cockroach to the Met Gala?
The event feted Karl Lagerfeld, but it seemed as though Kafka was the guest of honor
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Books In Kafka’s diaries, harsh criticism and sympathetic fascination for his fellow Jews
Newly translated diaries shed light on the author's views on Jewish culture and customs
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Film & TV Was Josef K. only guilty of the crime of being Jewish?
Sixty years after its premiere, Orson Welles' adaptation of Franz Kafka's 'The Trial' remains cinema's most vivid fever dream
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Culture Did Franz Kafka predict the COVID-19 pandemic?
And other questions raised by a new collection of the inscrutable author’s aphorisms
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Yiddish World What does Yiddish scholar Samuel Spinner mean by Jewish primitivism?
Samuel J. Spinner Jewish Primitivism Stanford University Press, 272 pp. According to the Russian־Jewish art critic, Abram Efros (1888-1954), modern Jewish art needs to embody two principles: European modernism and Jewish folk art. In his article, “Aladdin’s Magic Lantern,” Efros wrote that “the face of modernism is turned outwards, while folk art turns inward.” Efros’…
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Culture ‘Loki’ is Kafkaesque in a way we don’t usually see
In the first episode of “Loki,” the titular God of Mischief learns what Kafka proposed long ago: the world is controlled not by deities and strongmen, but by the soft totalitarianism of paper pushers. Trapped in the municipal-looking headquarters of the TVA (Time Variance Authority — any resemblance to DMV seems thuddingly intentional), Loki encounters…
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Culture How Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ Anticipated The Holocaust
Editor’s Note: Franz Kafka was born on this day, July 3, 1883. Anne Roiphe examines the prescience of the author’s “Metamorphosis.” ‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” The famous first line of this haunting tale is hard to forget and painful…
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