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
Franz Kafka
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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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Fast Forward Kafka’s Handwritten Intro To Novel Fetches Nearly $175K
(JTA) — A handwritten manuscript penned by author Franz Kafka fetched nearly $175,000 at an auction in Germany. The text sold Saturday in Hamburg to a private collector is an introduction to a novel that Kafka, a Jewish writer from Prague whose work is widely considered one of the most influential literary oeuvres of the…
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The Schmooze ‘Grace And Frankie,’ ‘The Stowaway’ And More To Read, Watch And Do This Weekend
It’s frigid out; the flu is frightful; the government might shut down; hey, at least books still exist. So too, thankfully, does solidarity: This weekend, thousands are predicted to take to the streets in a first-anniversary replica of last year’s Women’s March. In the moments over the next few days when you’re not shivering, sneezing…
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Culture How Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ Anticipated The Holocaust
This Month Anne Reads: Metamorphosis: By Franz Kafka ‘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 to remember. From the beginning the end is clear. Gregor Samsa will be…
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