I don't want to take away from @terulakimban's excellent point centering actual empathy. That is a BIG trend I see when taking about anything Jewish in popular culture (I cannot tell you how many times as a theater person I've heard "Fiddler on the Roof is a story about all of us, tradition vs modernization" NO! IT IS ABOUT A JEWISH COMMUNITY IN VERY ANTISEMITIC RUSSIA AT A TIME WHEN POGROMS WE'RE SO COMMON PLACE 250,000-300,000 JEWS FLED OR WE'RE KICKED OUT over the course of 40 years. The tradition aspect is uniquely Jewish - how do we maintain our identity when we keep getting scattered and settled elsewhere? It lasted this long but HOW do we keep doing it? Can it continue?)
But in the Kafka conversation there is an element I think so many non-Jews just straight up refuse to understand. That is the fact that Jews have our own culture.
The societal gender ideals non-Jews in the West grow up with ... Aren't really in Jewish communities the same way. (Though cultural osmosis means we've picked up a lot along the way).
ALL our masculine role models, the ones we're told to admire, are shepherds. That's important bc shepherds lead the heard from behind, not in front. It speaks to a different leadership mindset. Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Solomon, etc. we're soft spoken, humble, slow to action, intellectually inclined. Even when they have tempers or are warriors, those aspects are critiqued or minimized. (It's why when Jews depict King David, he's playing his harp or herding sheep. When non-Jews depict him, he's fighting Goliath.)
Compared to the very Roman/Western ideal of masculine power might-makes-right, Jewish masculinity is inherently softer.
That's not to say we DON'T value male strength. But it's just one factor and mostly understood that physical prowess has a time and place. It's not the ultimate standard for our masculinity.
Especially when you consider femininity in Jewish communities. Our matriarchs were all outspoken, all defied their husbands/men at key moments without punishment (some were even rewarded by God.) Some were prophets, judges and leaders (Miriam, Judith, Devorah, Hannah) in their own rights. Jewish women certainly do not fit the mold of a Roman/Western quiet, docile, submissive woman.
And don't forget, while there very much is misogyny in Jewish communities, our traditions often challenge it. Men are expected to praise their wives every Friday night in front of the family (Eshet Chail), men are halacically responsible for their wives' physical pleasure, Rabbis have denounced marital rape as a sin far longer than it's been illegal in MOST modern nations and women are excempt from time based religious obligations as they are considered closer to God (though that comes with it own problems).
In short, religious or not, Kafka would have grown up with that different understanding of gender norms and what it means to perform gender. He would have understood gender completely different to how a modern non-Jew in the West would.
To erase his Jewishness from the conversation - to ignore the cultural difference between how you see gender and how he likely would have - is a pretty severe historical distortion. And makes this weird history AU even more problematic.
Its exactly why historians always say "there's evidence of this type of attraction/relationship/behavior but we cannot assign an identity to a dead person who would not have had our cultural understanding." We need to bring that back.
tangentwithtanner
