Book Review: The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

November 19, 2024

About:

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen is a fictionalized version of an actual event, the visit of Benzion Netanyahu (father of Israel’s Prime Minister and his brother, Yoni, a national hero) to a college campus. Mr. Cohen is a published author and award winner. This book won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

  • 248 pages
  • Publisher ‏ : New York Review Books
  • Language ‏ : English
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : 1681376075

Book Review: The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
My rating for The Netanyahus5
Buy The Netanyahus from Amazon.com*
More books by Joshua Cohen*

Thoughts:

This book has a lot going for it, it’s funny, philosophical, infuriating, and pretentious, but it was difficult to put down. Along with the narrative, it’s also a mediation on Jewish identity by a Jewish professor who is not “a historian of the Jews”.

Professor Blum is the narrator of The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen, telling the story after retiring from the fiction Corbin University. Blum finds out that microaggressions, masked as jokes, towards him and his family in upstate New York, after leaving The Bronx, are humiliating. Something difficult to understand unless, of course, you’re in the crosshairs.

Blum, who discovers that the more he tries to assimilate, the more his Jewishness shines, finds that Professor Benzion Netanyahu’s thesis on the Spanish Inquisition is a pivot from other historians. According to him, the Catholics couldn’t care less about converting Jews or expelling those who wouldn’t, but because Jews are doomed to suffer. Blum realizes that while this is not an academic line of thinking, Netanyahu truly believes this, and cannot stop reflecting on the idea.

What it means to be Jewish in America is what at the heart of this book. Using a compelling story, a meditation on religion, and a refresher on Zionism the book tackles heavy subjects in a readable, relatable manner with a lot of humor sprinkled throughout.

Synopsis:

Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian working at New York’s Corbin College is voluntold to join a committee to review the application of Benzion Netanyahu, an exiled Jewish scholar of the Spanish Inquisition.

Professor Blum, the only Jew in town, is surprised when Professor Netanyahu shows up to the interview with his entire family. The three boys, Jonathan (Yoni. future hero of the raid on Entebbe), Benjamin (Bib, future politician), and Ido (future radiologist and author) are a wild bunch, and his wife Tzila is at her wit’s end from the drive, the boys, and her husband.

Buy The Netanyahus from Amazon.com*
More books by Joshua Cohen*

Zohar — Man of la Book
Dis­claimer: I bought this book
*Ama­zon links point to an affil­i­ate account, the money is usually spent on books

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Summary
Review Date
Reviewed Item
The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen
Author Rating
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Wrap Up

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen

Book Review: The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

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