The Netanyahus
“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
Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2021
One of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of the Year
2022 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction and named one of the notable books of 2021 by The New York Times
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. The New York Times described it as “Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever.”
Read by the author with David Duchovny and Ethan Herschenfeld lending their vocal talents to the audiobook.
Praise