The Netanyahus
by Joshua Cohen
Summary
In the winter of 1959, Ruben Blum is the only Jewish member of the history faculty at a small college in upstate New York. He is a historian of American taxation, which is to say not a historian of the Jews, and precisely because of this he is put on the committee reviewing an application from an obscure Israeli scholar of the Spanish Inquisition named Benzion Netanyahu.
Netanyahu arrives for the interview. He also brings his wife, three sons and no warning, and the family proceeds to destroy the Blums' house, their car, their Thanksgiving and a good deal of Ruben's settled sense of what being an American Jew involves. One of the boys is Benjamin.
The novel is a campus comedy with a lecture in the middle of it, and the lecture, Netanyahu's argument that Jewish history is a chronicle of catastrophe requiring a state and a rifle, is the serious business of the book. Blum, who has spent his career explaining that he is an American who happens to be Jewish, has no answer to it.
Around this runs an equally good domestic comedy. Ruben's wife Edith and his teenage daughter Judy, who wants a nose job and has costed it, are both funnier than he is, and his parents and in laws arrive to argue about all of it over dinner.
It is short, extremely funny in the American Jewish comic tradition that runs from Roth through Stanley Elkin, and it wears its scholarship lightly. Best for readers who enjoy academic satire, or who want to understand where a particular strain of Israeli political thought came from, delivered as farce.
Historical Context & Significance
The Netanyahus won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The board called it a mordant and linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile as its tightly wound plot.
Its origin is unusual and openly acknowledged in the book itself. Joshua Cohen based it on an anecdote told to him by the critic Harold Bloom, who as a young academic at Cornell had been made to host Benzion Netanyahu and family during a job interview. Bloom died in 2019.
Benzion Netanyahu was a real historian of the Inquisition and a hardline Revisionist Zionist, and his son Benjamin became prime minister of Israel, which gives the farce a weight it would not otherwise carry.