On the Hebrew calendar, Friday was the 100th anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka. David Herman reviews a new exhibit on the Prague-born writer at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, which is “the largest exhibition of Kafka’s manuscripts and drawings ever shown.”

Some of the letters are fascinating. . . . His Hebrew notebook, glossary, and his letter (in Hebrew) to his teacher demonstrate his dedication to learning the language that connected him to his family roots. And there is the note to his friend Max Brod in which he famously instructs him to burn all his unpublished manuscripts.

Kafka’s family was not especially religious, but he was deeply interested in many different aspects of Jewishness: the new Zionist movement, Judaism, and Yiddish theatre. In the winter of 1911–12, a troupe of actors from Lemberg (then the capital of Galicia) visited Prague to perform plays in Yiddish. Kafka attended some twenty of the performances and the experience introduced him to the very different Jewish culture of Eastern Europe, which seemed more alive, part of a living tradition.

The Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon was born just a few years after Kafka in a shtetl not far from Lemberg, and deeply immersed in that living tradition. Jeffrey Saks writes:

Many readers and scholars have woven webs of connections between the two writers, a fact that endlessly agitated Agnon, leading him to state in 1962: “What is said about me and Kafka is a mistake. Before I published my Book of Deeds I knew nothing of Kafka’s stories except for his Metamorphosis, and even now, except for The Trial, . . . I have not taken a Kafka book in hand. . . . Kafka is not of my soul’s root, and whatever is not of my soul’s root I do not absorb.”

Despite Agnon’s warning, Saks weaves a new connection between the two writers: just a day after Kafka’s death, a fire broke out at Agnon’s house in Germany, destroying his collection of (he claimed) 4,000 Hebrew books and several of his own unpublished manuscripts, including a 700-page novel. In other words, Kafka’s wish for his oeuvre was visited on Agnon’s. This is an eerie coincidence worthy of one of the Hebrew writer’s own stories, if not one of Kafka’s.

While the far left and the extreme right have responded with frenzied outrage to Israel’s attacks on Iran, middle-of-the-road, establishment types have expressed similar sentiments, only in more measured tones. These think-tankers and former officials generally believe that Israeli military action, rather than nuclear-armed murderous fanatics, is the worst possible outcome. Garry Kasparov examines this mode of thinking:

Now that the Islamic Republic is severely weakened, the alarmist foreign-policy commentariat is apprising us of the unacceptable risks, raising their well-worn red flags. (Or should I say white flags?) “Escalation!” “Global war!” And the ultimate enemy of the status quo: “regime change!”

Under President Obama, American officials frequently stared down the nastiest offenders in the international rogues’ gallery and insisted that there was “no military solution.” “No military solution” might sound nice to enlightened ears. Unfortunately, it’s a meaningless slogan. Tellingly, Russian officials repeat it all the time too. . . . But Russia does believe there are military solutions to its problems—ask any Ukrainian, Syrian, or Georgian. Yet too many in Washington remain determined to fight armed marauders with flowery words.

If you are worried about innocent people being killed, . . . spare a thought for the millions of Iranians who face imprisonment, torture, or death if they dare deviate from the strict precepts of the Islamic Revolution. Or the hundreds of thousands of Syrians whose murder Iran was an accomplice to. Or the Ukrainian civilians who have found themselves on the receiving end of over 8,000 Iranian-made suicide drones over the past three years. Or the scores of Argentine Jews blown up in a Buenos Aires Jewish community center in 1994 without even the thinnest of martial pretexts.

The Democratic Connecticut senator Chris Murphy was quick and confident in his pronouncement that Israel’s operation in Iran “risks a regional war that will likely be catastrophic for America.” Maybe. But a regional war was already underway before Israel struck last week. Iran was already supporting the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hizballah in Lebanon, and Russia in Ukraine. Israel is simply moving things toward a more decisive conclusion.

Perhaps Murphy and his ilk dread most being proved wrong—which they will be if, in a few weeks’ time, their apocalyptic predictions haven’t come true, and the Middle East, though still troubled, is a safter place.