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The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family Paperback – June 22, 2021

by Joshua Cohen (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 2,497 ratings
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WINNER OF THE 2022 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

2021 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021

A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2021

A KIRKUS BEST FICTION BOOK OF 2021

"Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever."  —Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Book Review

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.
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    248 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    New York Review Books
  4. Publication date
    June 22, 2021
  5. Dimensions
    5.74 x 0.71 x 8.44 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1681376075
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1681376073
  8. See all details
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  1. And so my childhood was tugged between conflicting exceptionalisms, between the American condition of being able to choose and the Jewish condition of being chosen . . .
    Highlighted by 614 Kindle readers
  2. To this day, the transmogrification of ancient feuds remains the primary process by which immigrants nativize: to renew a conflict is to acculturate.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile as its tightly-wound plot" — The Pulitzer Prize Citation, Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

“Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever.” —Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Book Review

“Riffing freely on a true story, this brilliant and hilarious new book takes a cozily familiar form, the campus novel, and turns it into a slyly oblique fable about history, identity and the conflicted heart of Jewishness, especially in America.” —John Powers, Fresh Air

“With [The Netanyahus] Cohen proves himself not just America’s most perceptive and imaginative Jewish novelist, but one of its best novelists full stop.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“With its tight time frame, loopy narrator, portrait of Jewish-American life against a semi-rural backdrop, and moments of cruel academic satire, The Netanyahus reads like an attempt, as delightful as it sounds, to cross-breed Roth’s The Ghost Writer and Nabokov’s Pale Fire.” —Leo Robson, The Guardian

“With a blend of fiction and nonfiction, Joshua Cohen's dazzlingly smart campus comedy pursues lofty questions of history, religion and politics.” —Shelf Awareness

“[The Netanyahus] is torrentially satisfying.” —Jonny Diamond, Lit Hub

“Clever, funny, dark, deeply moving, full of references to everyone from Nabokov and the Marx Brothers to Jabotinsky and the late Harold Bloom, The Netanyahus is a joy to read.” —David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle

“The Netanyahus. . . is a campus novel that is also a novel of ideas—a conjunction less common than one might expect. Luckily it's also very, very funny.” —Len Gutkin,The Chronicle of Higher Education

“The Netanyahus, like Cohen’s previous novels, is driven by the momentum of its prose. . . . This is a surprising novel, full of quirks and explosive moments.” —Christopher Shrimpton, The Spectator

“No one writing in English today is more gifted than Joshua Cohen. Every page of The Netanyahus—an historical account of a man left out of history, a wickedly funny fable of the return of the repressed—crackles with Cohen’s high style and joyride intelligence.” —Nicole Krauss

“The Netanyahus is constructed with a brilliant comic grace that moves from the sly to the exuberant. Some scenes are funny beyond belief. But even when moments in the book are sharp or melancholy, they keep an undertone of witty and ironic observation. The vision in this book is deeply original, making clear what a superb writer Joshua Cohen is.” —Colm Tóibín

“A domestic sitcom farce, a ferocious academic sendup. And also, in contrast to an entire generation of fastidious timidities (Doctorow, Mailer, et al.), a rousing lecture on Jewish history leading to Zionism. . . . The drive to quarrel with a character is only one of the delights of Cohen’s shrewd, exuberant, exhilarating and merry novel.” —Cynthia Ozick

“Cohen’s writing is vibrant even when ruminating on esoteric details on Jewish identity theories. . . . This blistering portrait is great fun.” —Publishers Weekly

“Cohen’s new book is among his best: a fastidious and very funny book that is one of the most purely pleasurable works of fiction I’ve read in ages.” —Jon Day, Financial Times

“Cohen has performed a literary miracle of sorts, transforming the shadowy, dour figure of Benzion Netanyahu into the protagonist of an uproariously funny book. In its skewering of the small-mindedness of academic culture, The Netanyahus conjures up the hilarity of David Lodge, and in its piercing gaze and over-the-top, transgressive moves, it evokes the late Philip Roth. . . . The reader is likely to explode in laughter.” —David N. Myers, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Brilliant. . . [The Netanyahus] marries some madcap Rothian scene-making with a greater and uncomfortable plumbing of what it means, all these years later, to be Jewish in America.” —Ross Barkan, The Baffler

“[In The Netanyahus] it is Bellow whose aura blinks out from Cohen’s rich historical and philosophical digressions and the novel’s mélange of acid comedy and earnest ruminations on race and campus politics.” —Joshua Leifer, Dissent Magazine

“[The Netanyahus is] the most perfectly realized of [Joshua Cohen’s] novels, it’s the most heartfelt one, the most cleverly constructed. It’s also a sardonic comedy—laughter in the dark.” —Jan Wilm, The Believer

“The Netanyahus is brisk, brilliant, brazen; one reads it quickly, immersed in its language; its dexterous descriptive prowess, its observations on then-modern culture viewed with enlightened hindsight.” —Greg Cwik, Brooklyn Rail

About the Author

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels 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 nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. 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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ New York Review Books (June 22, 2021)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 248 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1681376075
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1681376073
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.74 x 0.71 x 8.44 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 2,497 ratings

About the author

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Joshua Cohen

Joshua Cohen

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Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He has written novels (Book of Numbers), short fiction (Four New Messages), and nonfiction for The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, London Review of Books, N+1, and others. He lives in New York City.

Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
2,497 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

NJ
5.0 out of 5 stars Witty and literary
Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2021
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The Netanyahus is an ageless masterpiece at multiple levels. The language, to start with, showcases a literary genius at work. The reviewer felt that his vocabulary was shamefully inadequate all through, but frequent runs to the dictionary did not make the prose any less joyful. The descriptions, statement structures, and dialogues will keep any collector of quotable quotes busy with their highlighters and the non-collectors mesmerized.

Rivaling the language is the book's wit. Superficially, the jokes are based on time-worn subterfuges involving eccentric personalities, clumsy actions, and embarrassing outcomes. However, the intelligent undercurrents move the story forward in powerful ways and create easy avenues for rather intricate and serious discussions on various political and historical matters.

And the book is about the Jews in various communities, including within their own - as individuals carrying interpretations of the collective history. Like in real life, the book's Jews come in all varieties. What binds them is more than just religion (or even "race," as the book expounds on) but the sufferings of their ilk for millennia. The story shows the difference between what the outsiders simply see as one whole is a set of individuals with divisions as pronounced as their common denominators.

Above all, it is about the Israeli leader in his formative years and his family in a fictionalized, humourous setting. Through his parents, particularly his father, the author shines the light on the possible genesis of his current orthodox views. Although never overtly, the author finds rather innovative ways to discuss relevant episodes of the near- and far-pasts to build the case.

There is a lot to enjoy and learn, even more to ponder on in this intelligent work.
8 people found this helpful
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David Shulman
4.0 out of 5 stars A snarky and Humorous Look at the Netanyahus
Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2021
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Joshua Cohen has written a snarky and humorous book of speculative fiction about Benzion Netanyahu’s job interview at the fictional Corbin College in western New York during the winter of 1959-60. One of the buildings at the college is called Fredonia Hall. True there a town in New York called Fredonia, but I believe the real reference to Fredonia, the mythical country in the 1933 Marx Brothers movie “Duck Soup.” The book is patterned after his real-life visit to Cornell where he was hosted by Harold Bloom. Netanyahu brings his whole family with him including is wife and three kids, one of whom is his son Binyamin.

Much of the book has to do with his host, economic historian Ruben Blum, his family, and his identity as the only Jewish faculty member. Because he is Jewish, he is chosen to host Netanyahu who is an expert on inquisition Spain, a subject Blum knows little. Blum comes from the family of an East European garment cutter, while his wife Edith comes from a German-Jewish family of a small factory owner. The conflicts are obvious and their teen aged daughter pines for a nose job. Here we have all kinds of identity issues rapped up into one family.

The Netanyahus overwhelm the Blums wreaking havoc with their home and breaking their color TV, an anachronism here because in 1960 there were very few assistant professors who owned a color TV. Color television did not become a mass consumer product until 1964. In another anachronism he has Blum’s former employer CUNY, which was not formed until 1961. Further, Ruben condescends to call the Netanyahu family the “Yahus.”

The book is serious when it discusses Netanyahu’s thesis that antisemitism in inquisition Spain was racialized. It did not matter whether or not a Jew converted to Catholicism, it was their blood that kept them from being true Christians. Hitler would adopt a similar view 450 years later and to me that was reinforced when I visited an exhibition on converso Spain at the New Mexico Museum. Thus, if Judaism was racialized the only solution for Jews was to have a state of their own.

I sense that Cohen really does not understand the Revisionist Zionist philosophy of Benzion Netanyahu. I did learn that Netanyahu was Jabotinsky’s, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, man in the United States until he died in 1940. Several years ago, I reviewed Hillel Halkin’s biography of Jabotinsky. There I learned that Jabotinsky and Netanyahu by implication understood that 1) there would be an inherent conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, 2) Nazism was going to destroy European Jewry and 3) the Labor-Zionist socialist model was not going to work in Israel. Simply put Jabotinsky and Netanyahu were clear-eyed realists. I wish Cohen grasped that fact.

Nevertheless, when you get beyond the issues I have raised, I believe the reader will learn much from the issues concerning the role of Jews in America, especially in a very non-Jewish community and will enjoy the comedic touches throughout the book.
51 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

P. Bawa
5.0 out of 5 stars I thought I was reading pure fiction
Reviewed in Canada on February 25, 2024
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The book is hilarious. As I read more and more, the book became funnier. I loved the last page, the letter "Dear Joshua Cohen". Essentially it condemned tribalism-- belonging to Jewish, Arab, Indian, Irish, ... or any other ghettoized group. We are all human and need to take care of this planet.
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Valladolid
1.0 out of 5 stars Boring
Reviewed in Spain on April 28, 2022
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I found it hard to go on reading, not much happening.
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Mr. Richard L. Gordon
5.0 out of 5 stars Comic and deeply sardonic
Reviewed in Germany on July 22, 2021
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Joshua Cohen has written a hilariously biting novel of the college world in the US of the 1950s, a fictional recreation of the brief tenure of Binjamin Natanyahu's father Ben-Zion of a position in History at a very minor college in up-state New York, as reminisced by the late Harold Bloom (The Anxiety of Influence'), here transmogrified into the over-confiding 'Ruben Blum'. The true theme, though, is the ambiguity of the Zionist dream.
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Silvery surfer
5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2021
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A thoroughly funny read but also very erudite and informative . Its encouraged me to buy other books by Joshua Cohen .
3 people found this helpful
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Kate Parrick
5.0 out of 5 stars The ⭐️ Didn’t read the whole book
Reviewed in Australia on November 18, 2022
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This is a magnificent novel from a writer who happily makes huge demands of his readers. The Pulitzer Committee knows what it’s about. This novel is a cracking yarn, exquisitely paced. It is a novel of ideas all the way, but also of character - there is not a poorly wrought character in it, even the single liners are whole and fascinating. Cohen is a brilliant comic writer; it is laugh aloud funny. It is also engages a very serious, significant and even sinister notion, and that is the degrees and forms of anti-Semitism, from a thinly disguised Cornell in the 50s to the political establishment of a home state for Jewish people. It is all superbly written. The author’s command and use of language is unparalleled among US writers.
Beware the low star reviewers here, the ones for whom it all went over their heads. The entire basis for plot and setting decisions is outlined in the long author’s note at the end, which is nearly as fascinating as the novel! Lots of people will read this novel, or peruse it more likely, because it won the Pulitzer and they think that makes them ‘in the know’. They then turn their incomprehension into criticisms. Don’t be like them. Give this novel the time and attention it deserves. Important and entertaining, a great mix.
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