The Netanyahus: An Allegory of the Jewish Experience

College Commons

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joshua Cohen reimagines a meeting between two giants of 20th century Judaism as debate about the Jewish destiny. 2021 National Jewish Book Award and 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ulti­mate­ly Even Neg­li­gi­ble Episode in the His­to­ry of a Very Famous Family Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers. Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels The Netanyahus, Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short fiction collection Four New Messages,and the non-fiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Called "a major American writer" by the New York Times, "maybe America’s greatest living writer" by the Washington Post, and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.