Author(s): Joshua Cohen

Fiction | Staff Reviews

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 non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics—“An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family” that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.

STAFF REVIEW

'The Netanyahus' is a taut and hilarious recounting of one Jewish historian's encounter with the Netanyahu family.

Set in the 1960's, the book gives a candid glimpse at the difficult space occupied by Jewish American's at the time, whilst also remaining laugh-out-loud funny. I loved Cohen's farcical sense of humour, his exacting word-play, as well as his informed and complex recounting of the origins of Revisionist Zionism. 

For those who enjoy Nabakov, Elif Batuman and laughing at all the absurdities of an academic life.

—Luke from Brunswick Street Bookstore