When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his best friend, the writer and Zionist publicist Max Brod, found a note on his desk asking that his manuscripts be burned. Brod instead ensured that Kafka’s stories were published, thus preserving his friend’s literary legacy. When Brod left Prague for Palestine in 1939—escaping the Nazis by the skin of his teeth—he brought with him a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers. The papers, following Brod’s own death, eventually became the property of Eva Hoffe, who wanted to sell them to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. It was then that the Israeli government stepped in to keep them in the country, leading to a lawsuit that lasted nearly a decade. Reviewing Kafka’s Last Trial, a book by Benjamin Balint on the case, Adam Kirsch writes:

During the trial, German scholars argued that Kafka’s manuscripts should go to Germany, where they would be studied intensively, rather than be neglected in Jerusalem. One obvious counterargument was that it would be obscene for Kafka’s relics to end up in the country that had annihilated his family. Balint quotes an Israeli scholar who cuttingly observed, “The Germans don’t have a very good history of taking care of Kafka’s things. They didn’t take good care of his sisters.” But the case for keeping Kafka in Israel went deeper, and involved a literary as well as a legal judgment. Balint writes that in awarding Kafka’s papers to the National Library of Israel, the judges “affirmed that Kafka was an essentially Jewish writer.” And this is the real question at the center of Kafka’s Last Trial: is he a Jewish writer? What do we gain, or lose, by reading his work through a Jewish lens?

Biographically, Kafka’s Jewishness is obvious. He was born to a Jewish family and lived in a Jewish community beset by serious, sometimes violent anti-Semitism. Though he was raised with little knowledge of Judaism, Kafka developed a profound interest in Jewish culture. Yiddish theater and ḥasidic folktales were important influences on his work, and in the last years of his life he dreamed of moving to Palestine, even studying Hebrew to prepare. (Kafka’s Hebrew workbook was among the items Eva Hoffe inherited.)

But if you didn’t know Kafka was Jewish, you could read his books without ever discovering that fact. The word Jew never appears in his fiction, and his characters have the universality of figures in a parable: Joseph K., [the protagonist of The Trial] could be anyone living in a modern urban society. And yet many Jewish readers—including critics from Walter Benjamin to Harold Bloom—have always understood Kafka’s work as growing out of, and commenting on, the Central European Jewish experience. Kafka belonged to a Jewish generation that was cut off from the traditional Yiddish-speaking life of Eastern Europe, but that was also unable to assimilate fully into German culture, which treated Jews with disdain or hostility. In a letter to Brod, Kafka memorably wrote that the German Jewish writer was “stuck by his little hind legs in his forefathers’ faith, and with his front legs groping for, but never finding, new ground.”

Once you start looking for such figures in Kafka’s fiction, they are everywhere. . . . Above all, Kafka’s obsession with the idea of law, and his bafflement before legal systems whose workings seem incomprehensible, is practically theological, a product of his sense that Jewish law had been irretrievably lost. . . . Yet Kafka’s genius was to see that these Jewish experiences—what Balint calls his “stubborn homelessness and non-belonging”—were also archetypally modern experiences.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.