Kindle
$11.99
Available instantly
Audible Logo Audiobook
$0.00
with membership trial
Paperback
$12.00
Buy used:
$12.00
$3.99 delivery May 28 - June 3. Details
Or fastest delivery May 22 - 28. Details
Used: Good | Details
Sold by madluckbooks
Condition: Used: Good
Comment: Minimal signs of wear.
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Joshua Cohen
+ Follow
More books from this author
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

The Netanyahus Paperback – May 5, 2021

by Joshua Cohen (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 2,499 ratings
See all formats and editions
Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian ― but not an historian of the Jews - is coopted 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.
Read more Read less
Previous page
  1. Print length
    240 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Fitzcarraldo Editions
  4. Publication date
    May 5, 2021
  5. Dimensions
    7.76 x 0.94 x 5.04 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1913097609
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1913097608
  8. See all details
Next page
The Amazon Book Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Popular Highlights in this book
What are popular highlights?
Previous page
  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.
    Highlighted by 466 Kindle readers
Next page

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fitzcarraldo Editions (May 5, 2021)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1913097609
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1913097608
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.76 x 0.94 x 5.04 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 2,499 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Joshua Cohen

Joshua Cohen

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

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
2,499 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
Verified Purchase
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
Helpful
 Report
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
Verified Purchase
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
Helpful
 Report

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
Verified Purchase
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.
Report
Valladolid
1.0 out of 5 stars Boring
Reviewed in Spain on April 28, 2022
Verified Purchase
I found it hard to go on reading, not much happening.
Report
Mr. Richard L. Gordon
5.0 out of 5 stars Comic and deeply sardonic
Reviewed in Germany on July 22, 2021
Verified Purchase
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.
Report
Silvery surfer
5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2021
Verified Purchase
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
 Report
Kate Parrick
5.0 out of 5 stars The ⭐️ Didn’t read the whole book
Reviewed in Australia on November 18, 2022
Verified Purchase
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.
One person found this helpful
 Report